Story by Erasmus Yang

Sometimes our past is the only truth-teller specially when the real-life persons are not always factual to us or when the personal memories likewise are not so certain over the years. Such is the wisdom of kind-hearted Erasmus T. Yang frustrated journalist wannabe and proprietor of a mama shop in the fictional Southeast Asia of Tandomon who finds himself inadvertently embroiled in the Sino-Soviet border clashes of the late 1960s. Told by journalist and award-winning novelist Scott Shibuya Brown the novel takes a comic look at one ambitious man's efforts to promote a fraudulent war memorial thereby almost precipitating international conflict through Yang's enthusiastic news reporting. Narrated in a charming first-person narrative of Singlish and Manglish (Singaporean and Malaysian English) as well as invented colloquial English the tale is both an entertainment and a warning in the tradition of early Naipaul Graham Greene and Joseph Heller. ?Julian Anderson