SYNOPSES

Love Me Black or Love Me White is about the love of a white girl and an African student from Kenya. The setting is late 1960’s Soviet-occupied Hungary. What do the girl’s parents, friends and people around them say? What are the official and unofficial reactions of the Communist regime? Will they marry? Will their love survive? Their journey continues 30 years later in the United States.

Wives Are Best When Thrashed is set in Egypt where the author as a tourist learns about the life of the local female guide in an unexpected way during a trip to the Libyan Desert. Complete strangers to each other in the morning and divided by different cultures and religions, they develop a bond of sisterhood by evening.

Violations plays in the former Soviet Union, where the author had worked a year as an interpreter for a Hungarian company. The reader is privy to life and human relations in the 70's through the eyes of a Hungarian woman who is brutally raped in her hotel room by one of the Soviet guests. In a regime built on denial, the victim has no chance to prove it was not consensual. The story culminates 13 years later in Switzerland.

Father Theo is set in Hawaii, where the writer mentions her rape in the Soviet Union to a priest, whereupon he, as a reversed confession, tells about his rape as a child by his uncle, and also how it haunted his entire life. The story takes a turn when the priest has to give the last rites to his rapist.

The Old Hindu takes place in Singapore. The old man is a gardener whose heartbreaking existence tells a lot about the value of human life in Asia. Old age with its harsh reality is a dead end for his youthful dreams, and senility is seen as a blessing, an equalizing sedative in this treadmill of endless suffering.

Palm Branch and Typhoon, set in Hong Kong in 1992 during a raging typhoon, before the takeover by Communist China, describes the fears of the locals concerning their future. The story is populated by characters as diverse as nuns, bank employees from Red China, university professors, and a millionaire couple. The ironic ending finds the author in a different kind of storm right outside the safety of her Chicago home when she has a flashback of the Hong Kong typhoon; but instead of hail, the “hurricane” in Chicago is a hail of bullets coming from next door.
Clean, Cleaner, Cleanest, An Interview on Hirasaki is an imaginary report with the pilot who dropped the first atomic bomb on a Japanese city. The pilot praises the surgical cleanliness and impersonal precision of high-tech bombing juxtaposed against the bloody immediacy of ancient battles. The author tries to get into the mind of the pilot: Who would he have been in that other life? In that other war?