Alvah's Books

Siren’s Feast: An Edible Odyssey
by Nancy Mehagian
Cielo Press, 2008
340 pages
$22.00

Reviewed by Alice Folkart

In the Siren’s Feast, an Edible Odyssey, Nancy Mehagian serves up a plethora of delicious and exotic dishes from the fabulous spiritual, social, sensual, artistic and intellectual banquet of her young adulthood. She has landed on her feet now, more than twenty years later, and can lead us along the trail she followed through the 60′s, hungry for visions, and convinced that there was more to life than appears on the surface.

Mehagian describes her child self as ‘different.’ A first-generation Armenian-American girl with attitude, a wild mop of curly, dark hair and a body plumped up with her mother’s wonderful cooking, she is not the ideal, skinny blond of Phoenix, Arizona in the 50′s and 60′s. She gravitates to others who are different, misfits, ‘baby beatniks.’ She makes quick work of college, doing well, but dropping out, convincing her parents to send her to study in Italy, but taking off instead for Tangier with a boy friend. There, she experiences the first of several spiritual awakenings with her first Acid trip.

Her life had changed. As she puts it, “I never made the Dean’s List again.”

But, in eschewing ivy halls, she gains admittance to the University of Universal Curiosity, where learning seems to be in direct proportion to how many new experiences, people, places, feelings, ideas, dreams, tastes, and sounds she could cram into every day. Her fearlessness, and the tides of the great hippie invasion of Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, India and Nepal took her on an incredible, often edible, journey.

To a sound track of Crosby, Stills and Nash; Dr. John, Taj Mahal (an important man in her life then), and whatever music was ‘happening,’ Nancy moved from romance to romance, friend to friend and country to country breathlessly, joyously. Free Love and Turning On were the name of the game, and she seemed to travel a magical path. At many potentially dangerous junctures, she instinctively, some might say impulsively, ‘leaped,’ and survived. Change is the constant in her story. In India, she accomplishes an arduous pilgrimage despite no preparation, inadequate clothing and scant funds. On the Spanish island of Ibiza, without a dime in her pocket, but eager to show the world how to stop eating meat, she opens a successful vegetarian restaurant. On the eve of being ejected from Syria, she conceives, in one encounter with a gypsy violinist to whom she has never spoken, the child for whom she has begun to yearn. And finally, she is duped into running drugs into England, is caught and arrested and spends more than a year in prison. When she and her daughter emerge (yes, she is allowed to keep her baby with her), they return to the United States where she is finally sure that she knows what she has to do–finish college and find a spiritual teacher who can help her make herself useful to the world and to her child. She does it all.

Nancy Mehagian has one of the greatest gifts a person (or a cook) can have, the ability to make lemonade when all she has is lemons. She puts the most positive spin on even the direst situations. She sees her prison experience as an enforced retreat where her vision was bound to expand as her options narrowed. She continually asks herself whether what happens to her is misfortune or opportunity.

Siren’s Feast comes with a bonus, a collection of delicious-sounding recipes scattered throughout the account–some of her mother’s and grandmother’s best traditional Armenian dishes like Vosp Kufta (Armenian Red Lentil Patties), Kataif (Honeyed Shredded-dough Pastry), and her father’s recipe for home-made yogurt; and many recipes picked up throughout her travels such as Fattoush (Syrian Bread Salad), Nigerian Pepper Stew (taught her by a fellow inmate at Holloway), and the baby food she devised for the children in the prison nursery, Baby Feast.

A sad subtheme of Mehagian’s memoir is historical, the Armenian Genocide at the hands of the Turks, an event so brutal and senseless, that it is incomprehensible to the author. She can only say that in her quest for meaning, in facing, “. . . a legacy so filled with violence, loss, pain and death–the survival of my race and our unique culinary heritage has the sweet liberation of revenge.”

It’s unfortunate that the author chose to do without an editor. Writers need that second set of eyes unclouded by love or friendship. A good editor would have cut the book by at least 50 pages and shown the author how to infer results without describing every event leading to them. A knowledgeable editor would have urged the author to leave some space–after all, the ‘art’ in writing is almost more about what’s left out than what’s included–we don’t need every detail. A professional would have thinned out the many digressions and non-sequiturs that stop the reader in his tracks, flagged the poor word choices and awkward phrasing that slow the narrative, and polished the book into the gem it deserves to be.

Editorial issues aside, Nancy Mehagian’s Siren’s Feast, An Edible Odyssey will surely entertain and nourish the reader looking for a light read, a little social history, and some good recipes. Such a reader’s biggest question will undoubtedly be, ‘Do I shelve it under Cookbooks, Travel, Erotica, or Memoir?’

Lucky Girl
By Mei-Ling Hopgood
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill 2009
256 pages
$23.95

Reviewed by Alice Folkart

Mei-ling Hopgood’s Lucky Girl, a Memoir, maps the author’s journey of self-discovery. Hopgood was one of the first Asian children adopted by Americans after the Korean War. She was brought to the Midwest and given the best of everything, but, as she grew up, never felt as if she belonged. She became the perfect child–smart, talented, charming and popular. But, always wondered if there were anyplace where she would fit in.

This unease informs her childhood and teen years, and upon graduating from college, her adoptive parents reveal to her that she had not been orphaned, but had been given away. They encourage her to connect with her birth family, and so she makes the trip to Asia. She arrives in Taiwan and, surrounded by crowds of people who all look like her, for the first time in her life feels at home.

Overjoyed, she meets her mother, father and a gaggle of sisters, but her elation is short-lived as she encounters an almost impenetrable wall of language, culture, secrets and misunderstandings. Even a well-meaning sister, the only one who speaks any English, cannot help her scale it.

Mei-ling’s tragedy is that in finally finding her roots, she discovers that she’ll never be able to return to them. She is neither wholly Asian nor completely American, and she realizes that she may never fit in anywhere. The final irony is that she later settles in Argentina with her journalist husband, settles for being a permanent alien.

In Taiwan, she is lovingly accepted by her sisters, works hard to connect with her tradition-hugging birth mother, develops a strong dislike of her greedy, feckless father, and stumbles upon shocking family secrets. She learns that she and another sister had been given up for adoption because of their father’s greed and drive for a male heir-as he says, someone to worship him after he is gone, something that in the Taoist scheme of things daughters are not fit to do. Her birth mother had little say in the matter. The adoptions were arranged without her agreement, prices set, and the two little girls more or less sold.

The central question of the book is, “Is Mei-ling Hopgood a ‘lucky girl?” Her sisters say that she was lucky that she wasn’t sold to a Taiwanese family that would have raised her to be sold into a brothel at puberty. At least, they say, “You went to America, to nice people. That was ‘lucky.’” She was ‘lucky’ to be treasured by her American family, to be given every advantage, even the opportunity to explore her origins. But, she feels ‘unlucky.’ Hers has been, as the Chinese say, an ‘interesting life.’

Unfortunately, Ms Hopgood doesn’t have the story-telling skills to bring her tale to life. Lucky Girl, is a taxing read. The author’s English is awkward, almost as if it were a learned language. Poor or wrong word choices disturb the flow of the prose; the narrative voice is unstable, ranging from girl-friend chattiness to dry reportage; problems with matters of fact leave the reader wondering. And, finally, awkward phrasing and a plethora of grammatical errors give the book an amateurish air,

Lucky Girl does not have the polish of professional work. In fact, were it not for the author’s acknowledgments to an editor and an agent, one would think that manuscript was an early draft that had not yet been edited.

Mei-ling Hopgood’s Lucky Girl, a Memoir, might interest other cross-cultural adoptees and/or their parents, but would likely not engage the fastidious general reader.

About Alice Folkart

Alice Folkart, a California transplant, lives and write on the island of Oahu.  Her short fiction, reviews and poetry have been published in many on-line and print journals. She co-directs an on-line poetry workshop and helps to administer the Practice forum of the Internet Writing Workshop.  Her cat weighs 22 lbs.  Her husband plays the trombone.