 And now it gives me great pleasure to introduce Lois Ann Yamanaka, who just flew in from Honolulu. Lois Ann is the recipient of two Pushkart prizes, the Elliott Cades Award for Literature and the Asian American Studies National Book Award, and many other honors as well. Kirkus' reviews call Yamanaka further evidence that a literary renaissance is brewing out in Hawaii. She is one of the most important writers in helping to bring about a renaissance among Asian American writers in the United States. In her highly acclaimed novels, Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers, and most recently, Blues Hanging, Lois Ann Yamanaka gives us a multi-textured picture of the lives of Hawaiian sugar plantation contract workers and their families told in their own rich and lyrical pigeon English voices. Please join me in welcoming this evening, Lois Ann Yamanaka. We're delighted to have you with us, Lois Ann. Good evening, everyone. When Janine Cuevas called me and asked me to talk about what the Pacific Curriama Pacific Rim Book Prize could mean for writers, publishers, and readers as we begin to better understand and empathize with people of different cultures around the Pacific Rim, as well as the issues and concerns we need to face together, all of this in seven minutes. The small OK I emitted from my throat almost made me choke. But I'm very happy to be here with you and my friends and my family tonight. So I'm going to get straight to the point. It is my hope that the Curriama Pacific Rim Book Prize continues to honor the languages indigenous and immigrant peoples, our lives, our faces, our histories, our traditions, and our complicated sensibilities by continuing to recognize and ensure that our fast-growing body of work has a mighty place in American and world literature. For too long, many of us from the rim, from Pacific cultures, have been systematically and institutionally duped into believing that we had no literary value or voice. My friend, the writer Darryl H.Y. Lum, further contends that, until we see ourselves as the stuff of literature, a character in a story, a persona in a poem, a child on an island, worthy of text and word, until we see ourselves in literature, we do not exist. Growing up, I never read poems or stories with island children as protagonists who spoke or felt the way I did. No one in our readers or primers looked like my mother or grandmother. No one in the scholastic scope plays that we read resembled my father or my uncles. No one lived in houses with aluminum roofs or bathed the dogs in the wash basin outside. No one planted obaque anteriums from seeds under the lychee tree or ate dried opel straight from the aku drying box full of fat flies. No one spoke pigeon. I have come a long and hard way to my belief that cultural identity and linguistic identity are skin and flesh to my body. But because I never heard my voice or saw my face in literature, I did not exist. Throughout my schooling and into the university setting, I never wrote about it, I never read about it, I never spoke in the language so utterly connected to emotional revelation because for me, I was invisible to my learning. But the growing body of poems and stories from the Pacific and from Hawaii, sometimes written in our island Creole, is the evidence of the integrity of language and the many cultures that populate these languages. And I've come a long and hard way to know as fiction writer Lisa Asagi once said that it is impossible to ban the sound of one's memory. For many years in Hawaii, we kept our stories and poems in the islands after all. Nobody but locals understood or appreciated pigeon. And we chose instead to let outsiders tell the world and us about us. Many writers from Hawaii now tell their own stories the way generations have lived these experiences to show us about us, to be the stuff of literature. In doing so, we join other writers from the Pacific Rim in writing about the specifics of our cultures. And in doing so, we all touch upon the universal. In our details of home and family, relatives and gathering foods, we prepare and eat relationships to friends and neighbors. We bind ourselves to what it means to be human. I want to say what Paul Oster said, that the world enters us through our eyes, but we cannot make sense of it until it descends into our mouths. There are an innumerable array of real voices from the Pacific Rim. These, from these voices come stories the way they need to be told by peoples who inhabit these places, the way that they have experienced the world through their eyes. I'd like to say that it is my hope that we make informed opinions before generalizations and this prize is a testament to that. To read the books before throwing around grand literary political catchphrases like cultural imperialism and cultural appropriation. Book by book, I think we need to form our opinions. And the bottom line is we need to read. I'm saying that we've got enough against us, incredibly complicated, sometimes racist and horrendous histories, all of us. Awards like the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize begin to help us work toward crashing the massive glass ceiling the publishing industry has over works by people whose places and stories are touched by these waters. It has always been my contention that language is power, language is music and all of us can only gain from hearing the symphony of voices, one song distinct and resonant as the next. I am an Asian-American writer of Japanese ancestry from the islands called Hawaii. The world enters through my eyes but I cannot make sense of it until it descends into my mouth. From this voice comes stories the way they need to be told by this body, the way that this body has experienced the world through these eyes. It is my hope that the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize continues to honor our voices and our stories. Thank you. Loisanne, thank you so much. And we all share that hope for the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize in the future. Before introducing Ellen Brown, I also wanted to thank someone, recognize a very special person who isn't here but who is in Japan tonight and that is Sumiko Tsutsumi who is the chair of the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Foundation Board and the daughter of Reverend Kiriyama. And we miss her this year. She brought her constant support, her gentle presence and her quiet elegance to the ceremony last year. And I would like to express publicly our great gratitude to Sumiko for everything that she's done. We're delighted to have back for a second year, oops, excuse me, to have back for a second year, Ellen Brown. Ellen is the winner of the first Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize for his novel, Audrey Hepburn's Neck, which I hope all of you either have read or will read. Alan is a writer, he's a journalist, he's a freelance writer for travel and leisure magazine, a commentator for the BBC. He spent seven years in Japan where he was, among other things, a Fulbright journalist and where he can receive the idea for Audrey Hepburn's Neck. He's currently working very closely with film director Wayne Wong on the screenplay for the forthcoming production of Audrey Hepburn's Neck as a movie. We look very much forward to that. And he is also working on a second novel entitled So Shoot Me, which is set here in Noe Valley. Alan, thank you so much for coming back from the East Coast and joining us for the second award ceremony. Alan Brown. That was a nice plug, wasn't it? Thank you, Barbara. Before I came up on stage, Chalmers Johnson pulled me aside and reminded me what he whispered in my ear last year when I came on stage, which was keep it short. So I'm going to keep it short. I wanna thank everyone here. It's a pleasure being back at the library, which is not to speak badly of New York's branch libraries, but I feel very much at home at this library and I've done a lot of research here on my next book. I received a letter from Barbara and Peter about two months ago asking me if I'd come and speak about my experiences as the winner of the last Kiriyama Book Prize, and I interpreted that to mean that they wanted me to talk about what the prize meant to me as a writer. Lois-Anne just spoke a lot about the prize. Barbara spoke a lot about the prize in a more general way, but I wanted to talk about it and tell you a couple of things about being a writer and what receiving a prize like this means to a writer. I write in a closet, literally in a closet. I have a converted clothes closet with no outside window and that's where I work. And most of the time when writers get together, people think that we talk about writing, but what we really talk about is money. We do. Writers don't receive a paycheck. Nobody asks us to write our books. And most of the time what we talk about are rents, our apartments, our converted clothes closets. We talk about strategies for making it each week and each month and each year. Every writer in the audience here and up on stage knows what I'm talking about because if we share nothing else, we share this. We share the fact that no one's waiting for our books, no one's asking for them, and each time we sit down to write, it's a real act of faith or in some cases and sometimes foolishness because we never know if anyone is ever going to read what we write. So if nothing else, what we share is this constant struggle to financially survive and to stay the course without a lot of support. So to me it's something of a miracle that out of nowhere it seemed about a year ago the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize, and not incidentally a very generous check, appeared and it handed me as a writer two very great gifts. One was a year in which to write, which is something that's kind of an indescribable thing for a writer, and also the assurance that other people valued what I was writing. I mean, you can look around in here tonight and you probably wouldn't know it, but literature and art are not very much valued in this country anymore. The United States Congress has been trying for three years to destroy the national endowment for the arts. Publishers are paying millions and millions of dollars to celebrities while wiping literary authors off their lists. And so I think everyone here in the audience, not just the writers, should be very grateful for the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Foundation and to the University of San Francisco Center for the Pacific Rim for bringing us together tonight to honor this year's writers. I think it's a great act of generosity and an act of faith in literature. I wanted to bring up one other thing because Lois Ann brought it up, but two weeks ago we were on a panel together at the Northwest Book Festival in Seattle. It was a panel of Pacific Rim writers. And an Asian-American member of the audience stood up and accused me of being, and I quote, a cultural imperialist and a cultural appropriator. He hadn't, it turned out, even read my book and in fact knew nothing about it. And my only crime to him was that I was a Caucasian-American and then I dared to write about the Japanese. Lois Ann, I'm very happy to report, roundly defended me. But Lois Ann herself has been attacked for crossing racial lines in her writing. There are people out there today who believe that one should not write outside of one's own experience or outside of one's own life and certainly should not cross cultural, racial, and in some cases sexual lines. And I wanted to tell you this because the judges for the Pacific Rim Book Prize clearly understand the folly of this position and have made it their mandate to judge the writing and not the writer. And in doing so, speak out again such exclusionary and insular politics. You know, I was reading an article, you've all been reading probably about Bill Lon Lee, Bill Lon Lee, the Chinese-American who was nominated for assistant attorney general for civil rights but whose nomination is being challenged by Republican senators. And a colleague of Lee's said on his behalf, he is about as fluent as you can get in as many cultures as you can imagine. And I thought, well, what a great compliment to give somebody and how cultural fluency is something we all need to strive for in today's world. It's no accident that some of the most powerful fiction and nonfiction is being written today by men and women who in fact have physically and artistically transcended their native cultures. Eudora Welty once said that it is through art that one country can nearly always speak reliably to another. So for those who would argue that any of the authors here who have written across cultural borders, and almost all of us have, are guilty of exploitation or couldn't possibly understand the experiences of someone of another race, the judges of the Pacific Rim Book Prize are sending out a strong message and that is this. The only way we can possibly understand people whose lives and histories are so far from our own is to write our way into their lives. Thank you. Good evening, my name is Peter Coglan and with Barbara Bundy, I am administrator of the Kitty Armah Pacific Rim Book Prize and president of the Kitty Armah Pacific Rim Foundation. I'd just like to say Alan and Lois Ann spoke from the heart and I'd like to say from the heart thanks to them for expressing vividly as writers what falteringly intensively USF with Barbara and with the backing of USF and ourselves from the Kitty Armah Foundation moved towards a few years to go to hear from them the sort of response this is a worthwhile project where not everyone thought that was the case some years ago is enormously heartening and we want to continue learning as we go making mistakes no doubt to carry that forward. Barbara mentioned understanding as one of the main focuses and aims of this whole Kitty Armah Pacific Rim Book Prize. Understanding it is. I suspect disconcerted since words at the heart of this understanding for us and what they create and the way Lois Ann and Alan describe what words do in their evocative fashion in London not long ago I was with a friend of mine a university of philosophy at the University of London and as I was getting out of his door I noticed a big placard in the back of his door it said it was a quotation from Antoine Saint-Exupéry's Little Prince and it said what the fox said to the little prince words are the source of misunderstanding and as I looked at that and thought that our whole business here is with words and what they can do I was disturbed but then I remembered an incident that Jeanine Quevas who works with us on the prize as our very able assistant told me when we were fashioning our description of what we wanted to do that's in the program and we described that what we wanted to do was to spotlight with the prize ideas and not only ideas but also experiences attitudes and stories ideals and vision that will contribute to the common good around the Pacific Rim that word vision. I'd written vision and then as we always do because we share very closely Barbara and I it went back to Barbara for her word vision that's just one vision it's imposing it's imperialistic so she crossed it out and put visions. It then went to a first draft to printer came back to me back in London I saw this vision and I said no we don't want people talking about religious visions and I thought to me we're not gonna try and encourage all sort of people talking about what they might think of their visions or not we'll cross it out we're gonna have vision. This went back about four or five times until eventually we recognize that what we want is a vision of visions to encourage all those views and ideas and ideals around the Pacific that will please God in an area that has known as the founder of the foundation say you Kiriyama said experience enormous devastation in this century and to attempt to offer ways which understanding can come closer that is certainly what we want to do and to celebrate it's what we're trying to do without being megalomantic about it and making some tiny contribution in this vast Pacific a little drop in the ocean to celebrate the community of authors and publishers and booksellers and all those connected with the whole business of books and the communication that means to celebrate that in some way encourage it. The heart of this for us in our prize are our judges one of the most delicate and demanding and difficult qualities is to find that panel of judges and last year we were very fortunate to have five judges who took us to what I believe was an excellent shortlist and an excellent winner and I see that one of the people who was with us last year Connie Ong Jade Snow Wong is with us in the audience who bore the strain of that last year and I did it myself with Barbara and Charmers Johnson and Yoriko Kishimoto and this year too I think the shortlist personally I wasn't a judge this year it's a relief for me is an enormously good shortlist it expresses variety it expresses variety of background parts of the Pacific different voices in the way Lois-Anne was talking about and in a way that crosses all sorts of divides in the way that Alan was talking about I think it's a tremendous shortlist and I pray that as we go on a continuity and change the principle we've adopted for the judges continuity but gradually changing as the years go on to continue that and coming through not only with a final winner but celebrating the other books and all those even many good books that couldn't be on the actual six book shortlist it's our judges and I'd like to introduce you briefly to those judges this year who have borne the burden of reading 197 books now I've got to tell you a secret I did say last year that all of us really should for the integrity of the prize read every book but I remember one marvellous book of 700 pages on the ecology of Calimantan that came in and as I got to the second page and going down what the ecology I got to admit I did not read every single word of the ecology of Calimantan a marvellous book as it was it was fairly obvious that it wasn't really our prize for that year but an excellent book and I'd love to find other ways of celebrating that and many others but we do attempt to read as far as we can every book that's part of the integrity of the prize well Barbara Bundy Dr Barbara Bundy the executive director of the Central Pacific Rim at the University of San Francisco and co-administrator with me of the prize volunteered to spend part of her mini sabbatical three months on the Russian River reading 197 books and I think that was an enormous sacrifice and Barbara I want to thank you for that you're looking all right in spite of that you don't look as though you're failing away sign that would you and really I'm enormously grateful Barbara herself you can see the bios and this wonderful program that Janine produced she herself has a very long background not in academia itself but also in literature she was a professor of German and Russian literature for many years and holds a doctorate precisely in that area she was professor of comparative literature humanities she was also taught on the faculties the University of California Berkeley and Santa Cruz but gradually administration drew her in she became president CEO of Dominican College over in San Rafael and now is the founder and also the executive director of that center that from the foundation we work very closely together in every aspect of this prize and it's been a tremendously positive and fruitful collaboration we're going to leave on the 16th of November around different parts of Asia carrying the word of the prize as Barbara also does her work for the university and all its work with the MA program and the chair that's been established there in the center of the Pacific Rim of the university the same time trying to make the prize felt and we're going to be looking out for people who could be potentially good judges from other parts we have financial constraints we just can't bring everyone from everywhere but I really would want to reach out to different parts of the Pacific and see men and women of different backgrounds who will have the balance, the knowledge and enthusiasm and the breadth that we need to really maintain the credibility of this prize the judges are central Patrick Hatcher, the tall gentleman there with the blue shirt was also a judge this year Patrick was the author of a seminal work the suicide of an elite American internationalists in Vietnam he had a distinguished career in the US military but he actually is a man who's lived several careers because after leaving the military he took on, he has a PhD in history he took on a second career in academia as a professor of military science and a lecturer in political science at the University of California, Berkeley he was named Instructor of the Year in 1988 he's a very good communicator we find when we want sound bites Patrick is our man actually he's also just producing a book that's going to come out in December and I must plug this or Patrick will be after me it's a book coming out in December it's his third book and it's called North American Civilization at War it's a study of the World War II looking at the battles of the sky, sand, sea, shore and snow we wanted it on display here as the other books are outside but it hasn't actually yet come out Patrick just recently took a Library of Congress group up the Yangtzee and if you see Simon Winchester's book on the Yangtzee on the list you can imagine that Patrick found this useful as he described to this Library of Congress tour from the very book this is what Simon says at this point Simon says about that it was good and he also you might have seen him those of you who watch the History Channel of the cable television he did the love stories of history a fascinating series of programs he did the love story between Josephine and Napoleon he also did a program on Wellington the man and Napoleon the man that wasn't quite a love story he is really a man of many parts next to him on his left is Rod McLeod Rod also has a very distinguished background in Korea he is be careful now he's a trial lawyer and a very efficient litigator he knows the Pacific well he's actually born in the Philippines even though almost all his life has actually been in the United States and brought up in the States and he also served in the as a captain in the Medical Service Corps of the US Army and the Peace Corps in Nepal and he continues to go out into the Pacific on many briefs for his firm Abrobek Flagan Harrison here in San Francisco I noticed I attended all the meetings of the judges that he approached the books very much with the with the approach of a lawyer I mean not denigrating the other judges but if anyone else had quite your grasp of every book everyone was a sort of brief and he defended his corner very well and he and Patrick have very unwisely agreed to come back on the panel of judges next year and I'm very grateful then next to Patrick is Gail Sukiyama Gail as says here is well known in San Francisco already as a writer she currently lectures in the Creative Writing Department at San Francisco State University and she's very much involved in non-profit art and education programs school-aged children but I think Gail would echo Alan's words about a writer because her vocation as a writer is what's been pulling her more and more to books but she's aware that she has to make a living at the same time and there's a tension between that and the book you'll find outside afterwards Samurai's Garden is one of the excellent book which Gail wrote and another books come out in March it'll be her third and then she's signed on for two more books after that but she has also agreed to be on the panel of judges next year and to be our chair of judges next year taking over from Dr. Chalmers Johnson Gail Sukiyama will actually be our chair next year for Gail and Patrick were on two radio programs over the last two days one or two of you might or three of you might have heard this because one of them was actually joined the Russia or it was the National Public Radio I'm sure many people have heard it National Public Radio the KPFA this morning and they were talking about the prize and what it meant and the books on the shortlist the authors here and publishers will be happy to hear about that on two programs which went out and Patrick commented this morning that since last year's prize winner the book by Alan Brown Audrey Hepburn's neck that's Audrey Hepburn's neck not Alan's since the book has been made into a movie the judges have agreed that a condition for this year's winner should be that the book be made a movie and that each judge be given a part in the movie I sat through the judges meeting this afternoon with a thoughts game in my mind now would it be as Pacific Islanders Donald De Noon's book and Chalmers Johnson and Patrick taking the parts of Pacific Islanders or would it be more Chinese opera you know these two characters singing in Chinese and dancing the dragon dance on stage I really had an entertaining idea of what part in what movie there will be that brings me to the dragon king himself and that is Dr. Chalmers Johnson Chalmers Johnson needs no introduction from me he is known right across the Pacific I spent a lot of time in Japan and he's very well known there and depending on who you talk to he's either looked on as a saint or the other thing he is a man who for many years has been active he also has written several books on China but best known for his work in relation to Japan he taught at the Berkeley and San Diego campuses of the University of California for 30 years and held endowed chairs in Asian politics of both of them a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Chalmers has been honored with fellowships from the Ford Foundation the Social Science Research Council and the Guggenheim Foundation his most recent book Japan Who Governs the Rise of Divinimental State is just one of a whole series of books and articles which have poured out and continue to pour out he is a present president of the Japan Policy Research Institute down at San Diego but he travels constantly around the Pacific and you'll hear him in all sorts of programs on radio and television and on the newspapers I and with Barbara wanted to introduce the judges above all for this reason I wanted to take the opportunity to thank most sincerely Chalmers Johnson for having been chair of our panel of judges for these first two years he brought to that task an enormous knowledge enormous experience and we're enormously grateful that he took the time to do that it has helped us take off in this launch fledgling prize Chalmers' work in that has been absolutely crucial and I really want to thank him and all the other judges for what they've done and particularly as I say Chalmers in this first two years as our chair Chalmers, to you, thank you Peter, thank you very much indeed it is a pleasure that it's been so well-launched and that I'll be turning it over to Gail the Kyriama Prize has been said is the first major literary prize to be awarded to books concerned with Asia and the Pacific it is fitting that it should be sponsored by the Kyriama Pacific Rim Foundation of Kyoto and by the Center for the Pacific Rim of the University of San Francisco both organizations are responsible for serious educational initiatives in response to the huge shift in the balance of power that is underway toward Asia and the Pacific as Asia evolves into the most dynamic and rapidly growing part of the world and as both China and Japan come on stage as quite different but equally formidable superpowers USF and the Kyriama Foundation have offered real leadership and understanding and adjusting to these developments in addition to its support for the Kyriama Book Prize the Kyriama Foundation has also endowed a professorial chair in Asian studies at USF this is by far the most serious thing a supporter of higher education can do for a university equally to the point USF Center for the Pacific Rim has created an innovative liberal arts curriculum devoted to the countries of East Asia and to Trans-Pacific international relations the splendid program led by Barbara Bundy differs from the overly militarized approach to the region that was all too common during the Cold War it emphasizes observation and understanding over preconception and ideology I think I speak for all the judges to say that we are proud to be associated with USF in awarding the second Kyriama Prize we look forward to the continuing influence of the prize in the years ahead needless to say the purpose of the prize is to try to mobilize attention to important books on East Asia and to offer a degree of polity control for readers and authors alike in writing about a new area of intellectual interest let me remind you once again of the official criteria that the Kyriama Foundation set for the winter I quote the book that in the opinion of the judges best contributes to greater understanding among the nations and peoples of the Pacific Rim this past summer each of the judges who are all been introduced read about did they actually read them 185 books out of the 200 plus entries that were submitted for the prize from publishers around the Pacific Rim and in Europe some of these were disqualified because they had been published before or after the time limits of this year's prize or because the author was dead or this is not an editorial remark or because they were post-marked after the deadline 185 books were enough this number of entries was almost 50 books more than last year and an extraordinary display of interest in the prize quoted no doubt by its generosity some $30,000 that is to be shared equally between authors or authors and the publisher one of the reasons for this sharing feature is to ensure that the winner's publisher will promote and translate the winning book and see that it gets distributed around the Pacific Rim we want our winning book to be read we also want to signal to English language publishers that their traditional Eurocentric orientation is not necessarily where the markets of the future are located it is interesting for example that this year's Booker Prize in England went to an Indian novelist Arun Datiroy for her novel The God of Small Things the last books arrived in the hands of the judges in mid-August our first shortlist meeting was held in San Francisco on Friday, September 5th needless to say those books that arrived well before the deadline received the most careful readings which is a word to the wise publisher at our shortlist meeting which had to be prolonged into Saturday morning, September 6th we chose six books from which today we've chosen the winner you already know these six and I'm going to say a word or two about each of them in a moment but first I'd like to exercise my privilege as chair of the panel of judges to mention one book that most judges liked but that did not make it onto the finalist I do this in part because there are authors and publishers of the audience who are not among the finalists in a typically snotty piece in the New York Times on the awarding of the 1997 Nobel Prize for Literature to Dario Faux of Italy the paper listed all the unknowns who since 1901 have received the prize and the many famous writers who were overlooked the famous but ignored included Ibsen Tolstoy, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Virginia Wolfe whereas among the mediocrities we find Werner von Haydnstam, Henrik Pontopydam and Pearl Buck who won the prize in 1938. For decades the establishment has turned up its nose at the only American woman ever to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, namely Pearl Buck. This year the Kiriyama judges all read and admired Peter Kahn's Pearl S. Buck, a cultural biography published in 1996 by Cambridge University Press of New York. It attempts that most difficult of a biographer's task the rehabilitation of an overlooked exemplary figure and does so by detailing the other things that Pearl Buck did in her life in addition to writing Good Earth. Kahn does not shrink from analyzing Buck's literary style. As he notes she preferred episodic plots to complex structures and had little interest in psychological analysis. In addition to all that she was not a felicitous stylist and she even displayed a taste for formulaic phrases. Needless to say none of this endeared her to that vast cultural heartland stretching from the East River to the Hudson. The, I mean of course I mean I said we have a New Yorker here with us even a fact. Peter Kahn has written one of the finest biographies any of us has read and we were deeply impressed that in this day of deconstructionist double talk an active professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania was still able to communicate with a general public in clear and elegant English. His book would have been on the short list except that after the short list beating it was revealed that the book had been published before the deadline and the Cambridge University press not only should not have it submitted it it knew that. The book was therefore disqualified. Let me now turn to our six finalists and the winner we've chosen this afternoon. I want to go over with you our six finalists and ask the authors and their publishers publishers representatives to stand and be recognized after I've mentioned their book. After that Alan Brown will announce this year's winner I'll go through the short list books alphabetically by the author's name. My comments are of course my own but I've tried to reflect the views of all the judges. The first book on our short list of six is Lang Cao's powerful novel monkey bridge published by Viking. The book centers on a Vietnamese mother and daughter who were airlifted out of Saigon in 1975 just days before the Americans lost what the Vietnamese call the American war. In a sense this is a typical tale of the cultural dislocation experienced by all immigrants and the generational clash between a mother whose mind is still in Vietnam and a daughter who is growing up as an American. But Cao's gift for nuance and detail lifts this novel above the ordinary. She reminds us of many things including the ability of refugees without papers to reinvent their pasts. For example a bar girl from Saigon becomes a Confucian teacher after she arrives in Northern Virginia and how culturally ignorant we Americans were and remain about our former allies. Her powerful ending is sensational and if anyone from Hollywood is here that we recommend that you option this book. For a first novel it's a major debut. The author is a professor at the Brooklyn Law School and his work on two more novels. Could I ask Ms. Cao's publisher's representative to stand since she couldn't be here. Is somebody here from Viking? Ah, good. The second book on our short list is Bruce Cummings's Korea's Place in the Sun, a Modern History published by WW Norton and Company. Even as we sit here the Pentagon has cynically stationed some 37,000 young Americans on Korea's DMZ so that if the Koreans of a war should reignite it is certain that some of these Americans would be among the first casualties. The use of U.S. troops as a tripwire is intended to ensure that the U.S. Congress would once again intervene as it did in 1950 in a situation it truly does not understand. I just as an aside, I myself am a veteran of the Korean War and I assure you that at the time none of us understood it very well. Meanwhile Russia and China, the erstwhile supporters of North Korea have long since given up aiding their client and today have very friendly relations with the regime we are defending in South Korea. Bruce Cummings is this country's widely recognized leading authority on the Korean War. In this volume he offers us what historical background on Korea we need while dwelling on the postwar enrichment of South Korea and the evolution of North Korea into what is today an East Asian version of Albania and authoritarian regime whose people are starving. He explains why the South which is today twice as populous as the North is some 22 times richer but why also the North for all of its poverty and isolation still enjoys great political legitimacy. Even though the author calls it a history this is a lively presentation of views that are normally anathema to the American establishment. The author also includes an utterly fascinating chapter on Americans of Korean ancestry. This is a powerfully revealing book by a non-mainstream American author. May I ask Professor Cummings please to stand up. Our third shortlisted book is the Cambridge history of the Pacific Islanders edited by David De Nune of the Australian National University in Canberra and his colleagues elsewhere in Australia and at the University of Hawaii and Auckland University. For those of you in the audience who are academics the choice of a Cambridge history will seem unusual. These famous volumes are usually the place where distinguished but aged professors publish their parchment like lecture notes whenever their specialties are chosen for the Cambridge imprematur. The startling thing about this Cambridge history about the Cambridge history of the Pacific Islands is its freshness and truly insightful treatment of a very complex subject. In these postmodern times the chapter on how European imperialists and missionaries divided up the Pacific into Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia is as good an introduction to contemporary academic methodology as one could find. The chapter on atomic testing in the Pacific also brings home to the West that during the Cold War the Soviet Union tested nuclear weapons within its own territories. While the United States, Britain and France almost continuously from 1946 to 1996 tested their weapons on islands whose peoples were politically subordinated to the nuclear powers. And the chapter on the movement of the Hawaiians to gain their independence in the United States may well foreshadow one of the great political struggles of the next century. This is truly a brilliant and creative reference book and may I ask Professor Dunoon and the representatives of Cambridge University Press of Australia please to stand up. Our fourth shortlisted title is Chinese Opera, Images and Stories by Xiaowang Nai with the assistance of Peter Lofric. In this year's collection of books submitted for the Kiryama Prize there were several beautiful books of photographs. One of these, just to mention one that's thought on the list, John Orteners where every breath is a prayer, a photographic pilgrimage into the spiritual heart of Asia published by Stuart, Taborian Zhang in New York. Orteners' section on the religion of Bali is by itself one of the most haunting tributes that I've ever seen to these mysterious people. This book would be on the shortlist if Xiaowang and Lofric were not in the running. This is because Chinese Opera is not only one of the most beautiful books recently published anywhere but also an indispensable guide to one of the great art forms of the world, an art form that is in mortal peril as China accelerates its economic modernization. The photographs all in color against black backdrops are by Xiaow, a Hong Kong photographer who started taking pictures of Cantonese opera in 1981. Here he publishes 193 stunning photos of actors in full costume acting out many famous characters. Peter Lofric, who teaches Chinese performing arts in Toronto, provides historical background, some details on the gestures of the singers of who it indicates a horse, white facial paint signifies duplicity, things of this sort and plot summaries of more than 50 different operas. Many of you will be aware of Chinese opera through Lillian Li's Farewell My Concubine and Chiang Kai-Ga's film of the same name or through the singing and grace of the doomed third wife in Jiang Yimou's film Raise the Red Lantern. During the Cultural Revolution, the Maoist regime and particularly Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, virtually destroyed Chinese opera for political reasons. If it ever revives, it will certainly be due in part to the loving treatment that Xiaow and Lofric have bestowed on it with this exquisite book. Could I ask the authors and their press representatives please to stand up? Our fifth and three is Japan, a reinterpretation by Patrick Smith. This book is a major effort by a leading American journalist to inform the public about something it really needs to know. Let me try to summarize without oversimplifying too much Smith's message. Halfway through the American occupation of Japan after World War II, MacArthur and company on the orders of Washington, including George Kennan in the State Department, gave up on their initial project to democratize Japan and shifted instead to the economic rehabilitation of the country. Their purpose was its integration into the American Cold War system. The United States released Japanese work criminals from jail, restored the Zaibatsu cartels, and started in Obusuke Kishi, Japan's wartime minister of munitions on his way to the prime minister's ship during the late Eisenhower years. This reversal of the promise of democracy, which the Japanese call the reverse course, led in 1960 to the most violent riots in post-war Japan against the country's alliance with the United States. John Kennedy was so appalled that he sent Harvard professor, Edwin Ryshauer to Tokyo as ambassador to try to fix things. Ryshauer performed brilliantly. He reinterpreted Japanese history to turn Japan into a homegrown democracy that had been temporarily betrayed by militarists from 1931 to 1945. Ryshauer, in effect, fabricated an intellectual cover for the American alliance with a now democratic Japan. The main problem with this American Cold War success is that the Americans started to believe their own propaganda. They end up today in a post-Cold War alliance with a Japan they are militarily defending, while economically going into debt too, and a Japan that is itself deeply confused about its own identity. Needless to say, this is a powerful thesis as Smith presents it with great sympathy and insight. Could I ask Patrick Smith and their representative of Pantheon, please stand up. Our sixth book is Simon Winchester's The River at the Center of the World, A Journey Up the Yangtze and Back in Chinese Time. Winchester is a master of that literary genre, the travel book, in which the reportage of the traveler is used to inform the reader about huge blocks of history, culture, literature, the mores of business and daily life, and the feel of a place. His work is reminiscent of the books of Jan Morris, with whom he has collaborated in the past. On this trip, Winchester travels the length of the Yangtze River from its mouth near Shanghai to its headwaters in Tibet. His companion on this journey is an extraordinary Manchurian woman whom Winchester has given the name Lily in order to disguise her true identity and thereby protect her from the Chinese authorities. She was even more interested in Winchester in his travels up the most important river in her own country, and she plays a major role in many of his excursions. For example, in Nanjing, Winchester investigates the depredations in Jiang Kai-shek's capital after it fell to the Japanese in December, 1937. Lily's Chinese political instincts and her Manchurian-rooted dislike of the Japanese saved Winchester from many gaffes since he brought with him a pre-war Japanese guidebook to Nanjing produced by the government railways. As one of his informants says to Winchester, Nanjing is a little like your Irish city Belfast. Looks new on the surface, but below is very different. You can feel it when you stay here long. The people here are all trapped by their city's past and very bad past it has had. This book is filled with unforgettable descriptions of China from the Three Gorges Dam, now under construction to Tibet under occupation by the Chinese People's Liberation Army. Once you start this book, you will not be able to put it down. I'd like to ask Simon Winchester or his representative please to stand, but I believe Simon is not here. It's now time to announce our winner among these important books, Alan Brown, the author of Audrey Hepburn's Neck and our winner last year will, if you would join me here at the podium, I'm going to play Glenn Close to his Jody Foster and hand him the envelope. Okay. Japan, a reinterpretation by Patrick Smith. Congratulations. We have here, besides what we promised later, which is the check that Alan mentioned last year, there is actually also, which Alan received, it is a beautiful stubborn piece called partnership, which we chose the Center of the Pacific Women USF and ourselves because it's based on the idea of a Chinese, Japanese, Korean bridge broadly and symbolizes partnership and links across the Pacific. And so it's also to give to Patrick, we'd love to give it frankly to each and every one of you, especially those who come all the way from Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, and we thank you most sincerely for coming but can only go to one person. I apologize for that. So it's to Patrick and to Patrick just say a few words. Thank you so much. Pleasure. Thank you very much. That comes off by the way, thank you. No matter how much you anticipate an eventuality such as this, there's no way to really be ready for it. I brought with me tonight Alan Brown's novel chiefly because I want him to sign it. But there's a passage in it I'd like to read, very brief, it's toward the end of the book. As any of you who have read the novel know, it's a novel of discovery and self-discovery. And in this passage toward the end, an American woman says to the main character of Japanese, I can't imagine what it's like for you, discovering your own history, so exciting yet strange. Spoken by an American to a Japanese, but I as an American identify with it very closely, not only because it's a moving passage, but because it is very strange to discover our own history, particularly for me as a journalist, often we don't have the opportunity to go back into the past and understand as thoroughly as we might the events upon which we're reporting. It's a very strange moment to be writing and publishing in America, not only because of the sort of knots the industry seems to be tying itself in right now, but because I think we live in a time when we might well have looked back over the last half century and reassessed ourselves. Instead, we have turned further it seems to me into a version of history that is at least partly fiction and partly mythology. It makes writing difficult, especially for writing, trying to write serious nonfiction. I mentioned this not to say something attractively contentious, but because it's against this background that I am so very grateful for the recognition this book has been accorded this evening. I could thank many, many people. Of course, I would like to start with the center and the Kiriyama Foundation, the jury members. Many, many people who are not here this evening, a few who are who either steered me in the right direction or turned me back from the wrong direction, but I don't wanna mention any names. I think those people know who they are. I want to mention only one and let it stand out in stark relief, and that is my wife Caroline who's here this evening. If she were not with me over the last five years, I doubt I would be standing here tonight. Thank you very much. Thank you so much and thank you again, all of you who've come from Toronto, from Hong Kong, from Melbourne, from Canberra, from Sydney, closer at home across the States and should a huge place anyway, but thank you very much, all of you who've come. We'd love to in some way give a award to each of you, and we hope that being on the short list will in part be that, and we're gonna continue to advertise and make that short list known as far as we can as we advertise the winner and so as to give recognition to each and every one of those books chosen out of 197, and we hope that in some way that will give recognition. Very briefly, you've been extremely patient. The thanks in the program to many people. I just want to mention briefly, once again, the library and in particular Laura Lent, who is the exhibitions and programming manager here and has worked very closely with us. Laura, thank you so much. And one person, very briefly moving now, standing at the back with that little child, whose name is Jeanine Cuevas. She is the assistant, the administrator of the prize and she has been absolutely central to everything that's going on. Her son though, whose name was Dashel, name after Dashel Hammett, is actually the guy who runs the whole thing. Jeanine, thank you so much for this and everything else. Outside, you'll find a few refreshments, an opportunity to chat, talk, meet the authors, publish the representatives and publishers and one another and the judges and so on. You'll also find almost all the books. You'll find all the books on the short list plus Gail Tsukiyama's book, Alan Brown's book and Lois Ann Yamanaka book by her and I imagine they'd be willing to sign a copy if you purchase them. Noel Softmum and Clean, Well-Lighted Place has lined the whole thing up out there and thank you very much for that. Thank you all for coming and thank you for your encouragement. The fact that you're here encourages us to go on to try and give recognition to this great family and community of authors, publishers and people in the whole area of trying to get the word across even if words are a source of misunderstanding here in the Pacific. Thank you so much.