{"id":546,"date":"2012-04-26T16:07:55","date_gmt":"2012-04-26T22:07:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=546"},"modified":"2012-04-26T16:16:51","modified_gmt":"2012-04-26T22:16:51","slug":"ed-lin-one-red-bastard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/ed-lin-one-red-bastard\/","title":{"rendered":"Ed Lin: One Red Bastard"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/form>\n

\u201c\u2026You have to suck at it for years until one day your experience pays off and you reach a point where you know what you\u2019re doing.\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s like everything else, then, isn\u2019t it?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>I was a big fan of the first book Minotaur published by Ed Lin, Snakes Can\u2019t Run<\/em>, and I enjoyed this one maybe even a little bit more.\u00a0 Lin\u2019s central character, Robert Chow, is a Chinese American Cop in New York City\u2019s Chinatown circa 1976 (Carter and Ford are battling it out for the presidency).\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Robert has a good backstory\u2014he\u2019s a Vietnam Vet, he was a drunk but is now sober, and he is now feeling his way through his job, hoping for a detective\u2019s gold shield as well as trying to figure out\u00a0 his relationship with his girlfriend, Lonnie.<\/p>\n

Lin\u2019s deceptively simple prose is actually very vivid.\u00a0 Here\u2019s his description of Lonnie\u2019s dad, when encountered by Robert for the first time:\u00a0 \u201cI was a little taken aback to find that Lonnie and Paul\u2019s dad was a fairly small guy, barely five feet tall.\u00a0 In my imagination, he was a hulking linebacker brandishing a belt.\u00a0 In reality he was a thin man in his late-fifties and his hair had thinned out to black streaks smeared over the top of his head like skid marks.\u201d\u00a0 Reading that brief description, you won\u2019t forget this man.\u00a0 All of the sidebar characters are this well delineated, making reading this actually very short book a very rich experience.\u00a0 This distinctive prose is only part of Lin\u2019s charm, though.<\/p>\n

Lin is very interested in this novel in the different strands of the Chinese Communist party\u2014the kick-off for the plot concerns the advance man for Mao\u2019s daughter, Mr. Chen, who is murdered while he\u2019s in town.\u00a0 Robert becomes obsessed with Mr. Chen\u2019s death because his girlfriend is the prime suspect: she was the last one to see him alive, after she\u2019d interviewed him for her wire service.\u00a0 Lonnie is being followed everywhere by detectives from Manhattan South and it\u2019s driving Robert crazy.<\/p>\n

The total setting for the novel is a very full one\u2014the police department and the inner workings of the communists in New York, as well as the many ties Robert has to his community and family.\u00a0 Lin is very interested in the way systems work\u2014how does the police department work?\u00a0 How do community and political ties work?\u00a0 What ties are the most important, or are they interwoven?\u00a0 Robert\u2019s obligations of family and duty often butt up against each other, just as they do in everyone\u2019s life.<\/p>\n

Such concerns are seamlessly integrated into an absorbing story\u2014as Robert follows the clues that lead him to Mr. Chen\u2019s killer, some of his actions seem questionable after the fact.\u00a0 Lin\u2019s gentle moral prodding about the way the police department works will get you thinking.\u00a0 It gets Robert thinking as well.\u00a0 It\u2019s part of what makes him such an interesting character, one you want to follow further.<\/p>\n

The sly humor that\u2019s a backdrop to the whole story doesn\u2019t hurt, either.\u00a0 Some of the observations about the Chinese culture are so wryly and beautifully observed that they stick with you.\u00a0 Since the books are set in 1976, it truly is like entering another world.\u00a0 The time remove just adds another layer of \u201cotherness,\u201d but since it\u2019s the recent past, your own memories may step in as you read, adding to the total experience.\u00a0 Lin is an original, gifted writer with an offbeat slant that lets you look at the world maybe a shade differently.\u00a0 Any writer that can achieve that is well worth a look, in my opinion, and it\u2019s the main reason I enjoy reading.\u00a0 So remember this name:\u00a0 Ed Lin.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201c\u2026You have to suck at it for years until one day your experience pays off and you reach a point where you know what you\u2019re doing.\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s like everything else, then, isn\u2019t it?\u201d I was a big fan of the first book Minotaur published by Ed Lin, Snakes Can\u2019t Run, and I enjoyed this one … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[8],"class_list":["post-546","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-police"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=546"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":553,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546\/revisions\/553"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=546"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=546"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=546"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}