“Kaan has created a narrator who reveals his dramatic tale with such anguish and ironic restraint that truth-revealing consequences — the prickly truths of being inescapably human — are driven deeper into a reader’s heart. A work most deserving of serious attention.”

— Wayson Choy, author of The Jade Peony

 

“Twelve-year-old Chung-Man transports the reader from the halcyon days of upper-class life in pre-war Hong Kong into the brutality of the Japanese occupation where cruelty has no limits. Written in clean, elegant prose, The Water Beetles is a powerful and gripping account of a young boy’s coming of age during that most harrowing of times. A most impressive debut.”

— Judy Fong Bates, author of The Year of Finding Memory

 

In December 1941, the Empire of Japan invades Hong Kong. For the Leung family, the invasion is the end of a life of luxury and security. In the face of the advancing Japanese army the Leungs, no longer secure in their mansion, are dragged into a spiral of violence, repression, and starvation. The youngest boy, Chung-Man, escapes with his siblings, and together they travel deep into the countryside. But safety in this new world is tenuous and fleeting. Thrown into unfamiliar territory, he finds friendship and encounters betrayal when he is taken captive and imprisoned.

Although Chung-Man survives the war, he cannot escape it. Under the scarred shadow of his past, he drifts to America and adulthood, until he finally glimpses a route through his troubled and divided self.

Based loosely on the diaries and stories of the author’s father, this engrossing story of adventure and survival captures the horror of war with unsettling and unerring grace.