THERE ARE (NO) FALLING STARS IN CHINA

A veteran journalist reflects on nearly three decades in the field in Ortigas’ debut memoir.

The author’s earliest memory is telling herself a tale while sitting in the backseat of her father’s car, when she was 5 or 6.The daughter of a literature teacher, Ortigas recalls “a childhood filled with stories,” in which she recorded her own audiobooks and even wrote a musical. She later traveled the globe as a journalist for CNN before serving as senior correspondent for Al Jazeera, and she describes journalism, and the art of storytelling generally, as the “futile attempt to capture the uncapturable.” Although her career provided her with access to some of the most powerful figures in the world, the narrative centers on “the little joys or woes off-camera that have stayed with me.” She includes accounts of an impromptu outbreak of singing at a particularly tense moment at a Gaza-Israeli border crossing, and of sharing a meal with a goat inside a Mongolian ger. This is an insightful, literary work that continually searches for meaning. For example, the book’s title comes from a colleague of the author’s in East Asia who observed that “there are no falling stars in China,” due to the intense smog; he later declares his astonishment at having seen one there, about which Ortega notes, “even in China, that which conceals things will clear—and those on the ground will reflect the stars above.” A self-described “dreamer,” the author acknowledges the ironies of her entering into a career that brought her into contact with wars, natural disasters, and people in poverty. The book is generally uplifting in its emphasis on the beauty in everyday life, but it doesn’t shy away from painful stories, such as that of Lola Pilar Frias, an 80-year-old woman she met who was among hundreds who were enslaved and raped by Japanese soldiers during World War II: “The horror they experienced was unfathomable, but Lola Pilar recounted it. In song.” The book also provides a clear-eyed view of TV news reporting: “Rapidly digesting and reducing people’s realities to less than two minutes of TV. That is the privilege of the job, and its cruelty.”

A deeply personal insider’s look into modern journalism.