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Pangolins, Faith, And A Librarian’s Quest

• Michele McAloon • Season 4 • Episode 154

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Care about wildlife conservation, China-Africa politics, religious freedom, and character-driven storytelling with real stakes, this conversation is for you. 

An interview with author David Pinault on his real world fiction book

Earth Dragon Run

A Spiritual Entertainment

Ignatius Press

A quiet librarian gets pushed out, grabs a stuffed monkey, and walks straight into the underbelly of our global moment. We dive into Earth Dragon Run, a propulsive novel that uses one endangered creature—the pangolin—to map the hidden circuitry of animal trafficking, cyber scams, and state-backed extraction across Africa and Asia. What starts as a quirky quest becomes a moral investigation: How do you keep your soul when markets price everything and protect nothing?

We follow Danny Quirk, a 70-year-old with more books than friends, and Minnie Meixing, a Hong Kong student-turned-refugee who channels her courage into wildlife rescue near the China border and later in South Africa. Their paths illuminate hard truths: demand for pangolin scales in traditional medicine, snares that silently kill in the bush, and mines where “cost optimization” erases worker safety and scars the land. Along the way we unpack Cardinal Zen’s witness, the Vatican’s uneasy deal with Beijing, and why younger Chinese volunteers abroad quietly defy cruelty even as the Party tightens its grip.

The conversation moves from San Francisco’s Chinatown to Hong Kong marches, from snare sweeps near Kruger to casino-linked cyber scam hubs in Cambodia. We meet characters inspired by real encounters—Afrikaner farmers, Zimbabwean migrants, mixed patrol teams—whose cooperation in the bush cuts through propaganda. We also set Catholic tradition beside Jain nonviolence to ask what genuine compassion demands now: not slogans, but practices that shield the vulnerable. And yes, we talk Latin, old prayers, and the armor of God—because spiritual formation isn’t nostalgia; it’s training for a world that fights back.

Find out more about Professor Pinault other books  https://ignatius.com/authors/david-pinault/




Miichele mcAloon:

Hello, you're listening to Crossword, where cultural clues lead to the truth of the word. And my name is Michele McAloon. You can find out more about me on bookclues.com. Okay, so this week we've got a fiction book, which is unusual for this show, but this is a fiction book anchored in the reality of today. So it's a good book, multi-layered book. The author is seasoned. In case anyone is interested, I have an article in National Catholic Register this week about an icon coming from Ukraine that traveled to Britain to serve the Catholic Military Association of the UK. You might want to look that up on National Catholic Register. Stick with me. We've got some great books coming up on education, The Cradle of Democracy by James Traub. It was just reviewed in the Wall Street Journal. We've got Columbus and his nine lives, Charles Darwin and Catholicism. So we've got some good books coming up. If you have any suggestions for me, please contact me at bookclues.com. Tell a friend about the show. Thanks, guys. God bless you. He has been on this show four times because he is so prolific, and I talk about none other than Professor David Penault. Hello, Professor. How are you? Oh, just fine. And thank you so much, Michelle. It's really an honor and a pleasure to be back with you again. And you can always come back. Professor David Panault, he is a professor emeritus at Santa Clara University, where he was a religious and theology professor. So he has been on my show four different times over and some just great books. I really encourage you to go back to some of my other podcasts. I'll post them in my notes. He's actually written eight books. And this is, is this your eighth book? Eight. And I'm working on number nine now. Wow, that's great. Just keep doing it. Keep doing what you're doing. But I mean, uh, we we talked about Providence Blue. He wrote the introduction to Charles Foucault, Crucifix on Mecca's front porch, which was great. But today we are to talk about a really good book, a such a multi-layered book. It's called Earth Dragon Run, a spiritual entertainment. It's a book with multiple layers. And I think because you are an author with multiple layers, you're classically trained, you understand your religion, you understand your theology, you're so well read, and you bring it all to make a really a story that I I call it fiction, but it's actually really based in a lot of what is going on in the world. So it's sort of a fiction nonfiction. And I learned a lot from reading this book. Let's begin with your story, Mr. Don Quixote. You're an aging nobleman enamored by your books. What setting off with your squire, Nikimi. Nikima. Explain to us a little bit that.

Speaker 3Dr David Pinault:

That's right. So at the level of the plot, how the story starts, the hero, a somewhat stumble bum hero, is a very reclusive college campus librarian by the name of Danny Quirk. And he's someone who is a dreamer, he's idealistic, he does better with his books than with people. And his colleagues on campus tend to refer to him as Quixotic, quirky quirk. And uh he gets into, I would call it, ideological trouble on his campus, finds himself suddenly jobless, restless, friendless, and adrift, and he needs something new in his life. And as you mentioned, Michelle, he also has a kind of friend, a plush, stuffed toy monkey named Nikima, who he winds up taking with him on various episodes and in his adventures. And of course, in the eyes of the world, that makes Danny Quirk look quirkier and stranger than ever. And what winds up happening is that because of the fact that he relates to animals better than to people, and he's been doing some rescue work back home in California with stray dogs, he winds up volunteering on an impulse to serve at an animal wildlife rescue center in South Africa. That's sort of how the action begins, begins in this motion. There's a lot more to say, but that's sort of a starting point.

Miichele mcAloon:

You've just hit on some real key points in that story. Nikema the monkey, who is actually a little bit of comic relief to it, which is actually really funny. And if you understand the story of Don Quixote, you understand Nikima, who is actually a figure from Tarzan, right? So Tarzan the eighths. We're talking, oh, what, Edward Rice Burroughs, right? But so you run away from the woke police, run away from the the old person's home. You go in the bush in South Africa, where they are rescuing a very unusual mammal. And most a lot of people are probably not familiar with this. I will put this a picture of it in a show notes. It's a penguin. Tell us what a penguin is and why this star of your store.

Speaker 3Dr David Pinault:

Notice I did not say penguin. That's that's the first thing that confuses people. We're not talking penguins, we're talking pangolins. Okay? Pangolins, also known as scaly anteaters, they are mammals, not lizards, although when you look at them, see pictures of them, they're so sinuous and serpentine, some people would say that's a snake, or it must be a lizard. But no, it's actually an armored mammal. And I would say, Jody and I, my wife and I, we've both done volunteer work rescuing them, they're surprisingly personable as well. Now, in fact, pangolins, the the word pangolin actually comes from Malay and Indonesian, uh tranguin, which means to roll up in a ball. Because if you try to hurt them, these creatures who are toothless, they don't have any teeth, they defend themselves by rolling up into a ball, presenting their scale armor to the outside if someone tries to eat them. How big are they? Okay, so they they vary in length. The smaller ones may be just about two and a half feet long. Bigger ones could be, you know, a good three and a half, four feet. The weight will vary, but I would say on average, maybe about 15, 20 pounds. Okay? A small doll almost. Yeah, that's right, about that size. And the thing is this, the reason that they're so heavily trafficked is because of the fact that according to traditional Chinese medicine, this goes back centuries, right? There's a belief that the powdered ground-up scales from a pangolin and its flesh can serve as a kind of cure-all panacea for everything from rheumatism to cancer to male sexual dysfunction. Okay? And so it's kind of a prestige, a very pricey, expensive prestige ingredient in this so-called traditional Chinese medicine down to this day. They're almost completely extinct in China, and but because of the ongoing appetite for this prestige food, Chinese sponsored or Chinese-linked traffickers and smugglers throughout Southeast Asia and now throughout Sub-Saharan Africa have been trafficking these mammals, often in connection with other types of illicit activities that I go into in the book. Traffic them to the main market in communist China.

Miichele mcAloon:

Well, let me ask you something. I mean, you bring up a great line in your book. Is they steal our animals to sell them back to us. Yeah, I thought that was a a great line. I thought it was sort of a shocking line. They've got an appetite for what do you call it, bushmeat, where of animals that they eat. Do they not have any sensitivity towards animals or or and I'm asking a big gross question there.

Speaker 3Dr David Pinault:

Well, let me tell you about something that happened to me in Shanghai some years ago. This was just before Xi Jinping consolidated power, so it was easier for foreigners like me to go in and give public lectures. Fudan University has a what's called the Xu Rici Institute. And it's basically a way for international Christian scholars to give presentations on a Chinese campus. So they invited me together with some other people to uh give presentations on the campus of Fudan University in Shanghai. I chose to give it on the topic of animal trafficking in Southeast Asia, but with a particular emphasis on this argument that animals are capable of joy and suffering. They're capable of suffering. And therefore they deserve our consideration. We should be what the priest Andrew Lindsay describes as humans should be a servant species. Just as Christ came as a servant to us, we in turn should be a servant to other species. Okay? Instead of taking a kind of dominionist attitude of being overlords, we should help other creatures. Anyway, so I made that pitch and I talked about the fact that animals at least deserve our humane treatment. The older generation in the audience got pretty angry, and people were saying things to the effect of, here's some foreigner, here's some American trying to impose Western values on us. Whereas the younger generation, they did not contradict their elders in the auditorium. But afterwards, a number came up to me and essentially said, We're with you, thank you for coming here. And several of them took me on a private tour of the so-called wet markets, you know, slaughter places and stuff.

Speaker 4:

Yeah.

Speaker 3Dr David Pinault:

Yeah. It was very upsetting. But I remember talking to, I mean, I I don't want to go into too many details because it's so upsetting, but I noticed, for example, that on the slaughter blocks where they kill dogs, you know, because they also eat dog meat, right? A number of people. And the butcher block is right in front of where the dogs are caged, so the dogs can see what's happening to dogs. Well, it's awful. Yeah. You know, and and when I try to make a, you know, sort of a mild protest about this, one of the vendors, butchers, said to me something effective, what are you talking about? They're just like vegetables. Like vegetables, he said. In other words, he can't, couldn't figure that it worth getting upset any more than over cutting or peeling a carrot. Okay. Right. Right. So there are some big differences, but I want to emphasize that the younger generation in China are much more hopeful about that. And I want to emphasize this. This is something that I mentioned in the afterwood to my novel, Earth Dragon Run. That is, I regard myself as a staunch opponent of the Chinese Communist Party, which, as I mentioned, is to me the number one international civilizational threat that we face. But in the course of the volunteer work overseas that Jody and I did, we, on a number of occasions, met young Chinese volunteers who had essentially expatriated themselves from China and wanted to do the best they can to help animals wherever they had settled.

Miichele mcAloon:

I can't imagine young people signing up for this, especially with their exposure to the internet and all the cat videos and all that other stuff and all the videos of animals. You know, I mean, I'm being kind of a little facetious here, but I can't see younger Chinese. I one time I had a great talk with a Chinese general. And, you know, something he had two daughters, and he said, I just can't, I can't kill my daughters. And he said, I'm not a party favor because I I didn't produce a son. I've got two daughters, but two daughters have a right to life too, right? So it it's not monolithic thinking. Um party is monolithic thinking, but exactly.

Speaker 3Dr David Pinault:

That's a very important point. I'm so glad you brought that up. The other thing that I want to mention that's a very important strand in the novel is that at the beginning, Danny Quirk, Quixotic, Quirky Quirk, he's a bit confused about what direction his life should take now that he's 70 years old. This is a challenge that anyone who's getting up there in age can. But the other thing is that also up to up at the very beginning of the novel, he has been sort of taking for granted the Roman Catholic faith that he grew up in as a Christian. And I describe him at the beginning of the novel as a kind of off-again, on again Catholic, but more off than on, you know. And that's something that you mentioned the various layers in the novel, that's something else that I wanted to bring out, this notion that it's possible for us to continue to grow, even when we're in our 70s, we can continue to develop spiritually. And part of the novel is addressing the question of how can we grow spiritually in what we undertake to do.

Miichele mcAloon:

Yeah, I tell you, you just hit it right on the head because you talk about, I mean, that your book is really, in a lot of ways, about ageism too, about age and how can still lead a fulfilling life. You're not young in years and you're still writing novels. I love your leisure luxe. The retirement, oh my word. I just looked at that. I thought, oh Lord, I know a couple places like that. I thought, wow, boy, just hitting on the head. And I tell people all the time, it's not a sprint, it's a marathon. Spiritual development is. It is, it's something we do every day. And I do love the Catholicism. I love the old prayers that you have in here. I love your prayers to St. Michael and his dependence on St. Michael, and it really is. He's fighting evil. You have some very interesting characters. Zhang Mek Sing. Zhang Meksing, how do you say that?

Speaker 3Dr David Pinault:

Oh, that's right. The you're talking about the female lead here. Right.

Miichele mcAloon:

Right, right.

Speaker 3Dr David Pinault:

Right. Zhang Mexing is Oh, I probably butchered that one. But as with many young Chinese who are working overseas, she has taken an English name for herself. So Meixing, beautiful star, Mexing calls herself Minnie. So Minnie Mexing, right? Yes. She is somebody who she's a young uh 24-year-old, and she's someone who is part Manchurian by ancestry. There's a kind of a subplot there, too, from the northeast of China. But she has grown up in and received her university education in Hong Kong. And there she got involved in various demonstrations against the oppressive rule of the Chinese Communist Party. And of course, her character maps onto a lot of political and social developments in Hong Kong since 2019. Absolutely. Yes. So she winds up becoming a refugee, having to flee Hong Kong. And the novel traces her escape and flight, which, by the way, I patterned after some of the real life adventures of Hong Kong dissidents. You know, so I mean, as you correctly mentioned, so much of the story tracks onto current events worldwide. And in the story, she winds up volunteering at a wildlife rescue center in the northern part of Vietnam near the border with China, helping to rescue and care for pangolins, these scaly armored ant eaters, actually working at a place where Jody and I served several times.

unknown:

Yeah.

Speaker 3Dr David Pinault:

She makes it to South Africa. Yeah.

Miichele mcAloon:

Boy, you really dig into a lot of that. I mean, with the Hong Kong 100 and the protests, the the white paper, the, you know, the bing pot. I mean, all of that. I recently this summer had an interview on the life of Jimmy Lai, who I mean, yeah, who has been convicted now. I mean, he'll die in prison now, and they're not going to let him go. He was a Hong Kong billionaire, really, who owned, he was a media mogul, a manufacturer, and a Catholic, a Roman Catholic. And he has been labeled as a dissident and put into a Hong Kong jail. He also touched base with Cardinal Zen, 93 years old and still kicking it up, man. I mean, even last week, you know, ripping the Pope apart.

Speaker 3Dr David Pinault:

Cardinal Zen is someone whom Jody and I had the great privilege of meeting in December 2018. I had reached out to him telling him that Jody and I would be visiting Hong Kong, and we would be delighted if he could have the time to be interviewed. I mentioned that I do work as a freelance journalist. And it was a cold call. And to my surprise and delight, he said, Well, why don't you come over for dinner and you can interview me over dinner, you know? So yeah, I was thrilled. And it turns out that the that, of course, he had something on his mind too that he wanted to discuss and to broadcast, namely his ongoing opposition to this entente, to this understanding that Pope Francis had set up with the Chinese Communist Party. You may have heard of this. For the benefit of listeners, I'll just mention that the Vatican constructed an agreement with the Chinese Communist Party whereby the Chinese Communist Party would be allowed basically to pick and to nominate who can get to be a bishop in China, and then basically the Vatican would sign off on it. Pope Francis wanted to do this because he wants to have more leverage in China. Of course, this the CCP, the Chinese Communist Party, they like this because the fact that they have been trying to suppress the underground Catholic Church ever since 1949 when Mao Zedong first came to power. And Cardinal Zen is someone who understands that the real church in China is the underground church, not the so-called patriotic association. Right. And I'll just mention that Cardinal Joseph Zen, this is someone he was born in Shanghai in China during the Japanese occupation, okay? And when Mao came to power as a very young man, Cardinal Joseph Zen fled to Hong Kong, got his education there, became a seminarian, was ordained a priest, and then volunteered to go back as a missionary to China during the Cultural Revolution, when the chaos and violence, especially against religion, was at its height in Mao, China. He went through all kinds of challenges and difficulties there, eventually came back to Hong Kong, became bishop of Hong Kong, and then became a cardinal. And he is a great admirer, and this is something he conveyed to us personally. Cardinal Zen is a great admirer, especially of Pope Benedict XVI. And so I mention all this because Cardinal Zen inspired the creation of one of the characters in the story, and that is the uncle of the dissident Minnie. His name in the story is Father Jacob Chen.

Miichele mcAloon:

It's actually really good. And I tell you, this that man, 93 years old, and he is still ripping it up. We need men of courage, and the church needs men of courage, and he has been a beautiful example of that. Let's talk about Africa. I went to school with a bunch of West African priests in at Catholic Institute in Paris for my kin law degree. And one thing they told me was just the rapacious nature of the Chinese in Africa now. Talk to us a little bit about that.

Speaker 3Dr David Pinault:

Yeah, a lot of thank you. That's an excellent question, Michelle. We don't have exact numbers, but there is more than a million, probably two million different Chinese businessmen doing work, especially throughout what we used to call Black Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa. And many, if not most, of these businessmen are linked to, what do they call, Chinese state-owned enterprises. And they, in so many cases, are like kind of a front for spreading CCP, Chinese Communist Party influence and interests throughout Africa. And the tendency is that what happens is these businesses fronting for the CCP, they spread gifts around, especially to politicians in various countries, and they get permits to basically extract and exploit the natural environment, whether it's lumber or especially mining these days, rare earth, okay, talking in not only South Africa, but in Zambia, Congo, etc. And it's absolutely ruinous to the environment and completely exploitative of the local people. In the novel, what happens is that a lot of the animal trafficking and the snaring of animals, we'll have to come back to that, these illegal snares that are set up, in the novel, all of that is linked to people who are working for something called the China-Africa Friendship Mining Corporation. That's official title, but in fact, it's linked to an actual mining operation that was taking place almost next door to where Jody and I were volunteering in South Africa. And I had the opportunity to interview a number of employees, black and white, okay, of various races who worked there. And what they told me about conditions at the mine were very similar to what I report in the novel. Okay. First of all, that the previous owners, Brits, Australians, they had some concern for worker safety. They had various types of gear that everybody would be issued, you know, helmets, steel tipped boots, and you know, heavy gloves and things like that. Once the Chinese came on board, and what they called cost optimization, they drop all that. The workers don't get the protective equipment. The environmental conditions are much worse. And then also the people complained to me about not just the coldness and unfriendliness of the Chinese, but basically feeling that they're being treated as inferior beings. And that's something, that widespread exploitation, environmental runation, all of that is something that is really going under the radar to a large extent. We don't hear about it very much. And part of what I like to do in my fiction, and you really see it, I think, coming out in this Earth Dragon Run novel, is to draw attention to current issues, political and spiritual, through the fiction. That's why I had that subtitle, a spiritual entertainment.

Miichele mcAloon:

And I Yeah, that's good. Yeah. That is good. Ateya, you know what, Europe, you need to pay attention here to what's happening in Africa. As of this year, you know what's happening? As Trump did the tear-offs, stopped the Chinese goods from coming into the states. Guess what? They are dumping now on European markets. So this junk, they are just dumping it fast fashion. That is horrible for the environment. They are dumping it in droves now. And I mean, the the legislature of Paris is up in arms. People aren't up in arms about it because this is what they do in Africa. They dump their stuff in Africa and ruin their markets. That is that is exactly what they do. So this is not just a Africa problem. This is a Europe problem. So, and I imagine it is a South America problem. So these are, these are not good people. And, you know, and I think it's probably especially poignant in Africa because those people are so poor that they, I mean, it it's really probably really it's tantalizing and ruinous at the same time. Is that correct, Dave? Yeah, I think that that's very fair to say.

Speaker 3Dr David Pinault:

The poorer a person is and the more pressing the immediate needs to have something to eat and to get water to drink, the fewer choices you feel you have. And we, in countries like the United States or in Europe, we who still have a certain amount of ability to choose need to wake up now while it's still possible. That goes back to what I was saying about the subtitle of the book, Spiritual Entertainment. I I note at the beginning of the book that the word entertainment, I mean it in two senses of the word entertainment. This goes back to really archaic English via the French. Entertainment meant in the sense of sustenance or maintenance or support, especially for guests that you're hosting, such as military troops or people at an inn, providing basic sustenance or maintenance. And then over time, the word entertainment came to have an extended meaning of providing amusement. The way that I conceive of my fiction is yes, I definitely want to amuse people, offer readers a world that they can enter and feel at home in. But at the same time, I'm hoping that it provides them sustenance, sort of support for the road, the journey of life as we return back to our father. And that's why I call it a spiritual entertainment. That is, I'm hoping that it will sustain as it entertains and challenges us.

Miichele mcAloon:

Interesting. One of the sub j subtitles or sub subplots is too is the Greek myth of Faithan. Faithan, yeah. I slipped my memory. Yeah, of Faithan. And you and she knows that and she lives by that. And and that is Zhang Mijing. But that's Minnie, and she she actually, and I maybe this is really ethnocentric of me, but I mean she knows her Greek. She knows her poetry. She knows, I mean, she's a well-educated woman, and she relies on that.

Speaker 3Dr David Pinault:

Yes. You see, here's the interesting thing. While we were volunteering overseas, Jodi and I met a couple of young Chinese women. We were really struck by them. First of all, not it's not too surprising to find out that they were not enthusiasts of Xi Jinping or his precious Chinese Communist Party. And wouldn't be overseas, like they would tell us, you know, we wouldn't be able to talk to you like this now if we were back in China. But also what struck me is what enthusiasts they were, not just for contemporary Western culture, but for I was called going back to the roots, classical tradition. And then I did some research, you know, in getting ready for the novel, and this was sort of a four-year process. What went into Earth Dragon Run was four years of overseas volunteer work, research in the field, and then a lot of scribbling at my desk, okay? And I came upon a number of articles published in English in Hong Kong. Now, this goes back to the British period, because remember that from the 1840s until 1997, Hong Kong was a British crown colony. And the Chinese were very happy to be living there instead of under the heavy hand of the government on the mainland in China. A number of universities in Hong Kong offered really excellent programs both in Christianity and in various forms of classical studies. And I read articles published in English by Hong Kong Chinese scholars about figures like John Keats, the poet, drawing on his knowledge of the classical tradition. And so I'm not just making this up. Of course, it's a minority interest, but nonetheless, what Minnie represents is the fact that, well, I guess what I'm trying to say is she becomes aware that the Western classical tradition can be a spiritual resource to strengthen us. And that is a motif in the novel that if we are going to survive this worldwide civilizational struggle, and I mean that seriously, that the Chinese Communist Party, it aims at world domination. We may think, oh, well, we can retreat within a certain hemisphere and then no one will bother us. But the Chinese Communist Party, I say this with complete seriousness, it aims at world domination. So the question is, how do we equip ourselves? How do we put on the full armor? You know, I quote Paul's letter to the Ephesians a number of times. How do we put on the full armor of God? And part of those resources is our own tradition as Christians, and then also the classical tradition of the Greek and Roman heritage that Christianity itself drew from, that is a resource, and we need to acquaint ourselves with that because that serves as a source of sustenance and strength. And the novel explores that and plays with it in various ways. So that is another motif that comes out in the story in Earth Dragon Buddh.

Miichele mcAloon:

And also you use your Latin, and you said it Latin takes time, but some things that are worth the time, right? And I just I love that. I I mean I absolutely love that statement because it does. You it really adds to the book. The Latin part of it is the language of the church. It is the language of civilization, I think of Western civilization in many ways. That's right.

Speaker 3Dr David Pinault:

The thing is, Danny Quirk, right? He's a 70-year-old in the novel. And of course, I was turning 70 as I started writing this, you know, so it was very much on my mind. But Danny Quirk, like your servant here, we both were altar boys back when Latin was used for the mass and when dinosaurs still roam the earth, as they tell us, right? And and I and I guess I persist in thinking of Latin as a resource that we should be able to draw on.

Miichele mcAloon:

It it it absolutely is. It is language clarification. As a canon lawyer, I I'm more and more I'm going back to the Latin because sometimes you need precision in language. What does it mean? What does this word mean that everybody can agree on? And I know the Vatican is kind of I mean, I was disappointed that Pope Leo didn't reinforce the need for Latin in a recent statement, but I just think it's always there and it's such a tool. It really is. Once you learn Latin, you can learn other languages very easily. So anyway, my soapbox about Latin. The head of the animal shelter was very interesting because he was he's also caught in sort of a racial, wow, uh, you know, a downpour, I don't know how to say a racial trap. He's white, he's African, his family has lived in Africa for 400 years, but he's also been run off his land. And we know what happened in Rhodesia, right? That became Zimbabwe. Tell us a little bit about him and how you met him and how you formulated this character. That's right.

Speaker 3Dr David Pinault:

Well, the the fictional character, Sebastian Dual, is Afrikaner. And so he's uh white, but also his family can trace its descent in the continent going back several centuries. And and as he says in the novel, he says something that I heard various Africanists say when they're criticized. Hey, we're African too. Our families have been here for centuries. I should mention that the province in which Jody and I were volunteering in South Africa, that's Limpopo. And for listeners who have been to South Africa, you may be aware that that's immediately adjacent to Kruger National Park, not too far from the border with Mozambique. Limpopo is home to a what I would call a militant movement called the Economic Freedom Fighters. Never good. Yeah, yeah. And that's Julius Malema's group, and he's, I would call him a kind of black extremist nationalist. He's the one, a politician who has led these public chants of kill the boars, you know, meaning white farmers. And there have been a number of incidents that have taken place, and I by the way, I met some people whose families had suffered this. There have been a number of incidents where white families living in isolated farms have been butchered, been slaughtered, you know, in their homes. Understandably, many of the Afrikaners, many of the whites feel themselves beleaguered. And I should mention also that one of the things that I found very powerful in our time in South Africa is that the best place where I saw people coming together was on these anti-poacher patrols. Yeah, I mentioned you already that a number of these Chinese quote-unquote businessmen have paid locals to go out in the bush and set these snares. The snaring is illegal. These basically metal choking loops that they put in the bush set them by the hundreds. And it's basically death by slow strangulation. It's a horrible way to die. And when Jody and I have been removing snares with our colleagues on patrol in the forest, in the jungle, you can see wherever we came upon the corpse of a strangulated animal, that the earth was torn up for yards and yards around it as the animal tried to escape. Anti-poaching snares, they call snare sweeps, as you remove the snares on these patrols, we would be joined by Afrikaners, whites of English descent, some blacks, and then also what they called colored or mixed race, people who are saying of Indian descent. That's where people able to come together. The problem in Limpolpo is that this so-called economic freedom fighter movement really deliberately tries to stir up hatred against the whites, but then also, and this kind of puzzled me at first, I would have thought that they would be big into what they call Pan-African unity. But actually, a lot of these black nationalists, they resent black immigrants from Mozambique and from Zimbabwe, what used to be Rhodesia. In other words, there are a lot of impoverished migrants who come there who are also black, but then there's a kind of black nationalist backlash against them, too. And I'll also mention that I met, I met a number of people from Rhodesia slash Zimbabwe, both blacks and whites, who had had to leave after Mugabe came to power in Rhodesia. That'd be like circa 1980 and thereafter. They really had heartbreaking tales to tell. And they're just hoping that they can hang on now in South Africa. In the novel, I wanted to try to draw attention to all of this human history that I had the opportunity to sort of gather and bring together, and then try to figure out how to present it to readers in a way that would be accessible in story form.

Miichele mcAloon:

It's a good story. That's at the bottom line, although we're talking about a lot of different themes here, Dave brings the together and weaves it together in a very fine fashion and actually a very vivid storytelling. It is a great narrative. I mean, you are page turning, you feel like, okay, what's going to happen next? And Danny Quirk, who's got his monkey and shoe princess, and you really do some good character development. And one other, the young black man who wears the crucifix, whose face has been injured by black nationalists. That's right.

Speaker 3Dr David Pinault:

Nicholas and Como. Yeah. And I wanted him in the story because of the fact that he maps onto something we were talking about a moment ago in my novel Earth Dragon Run. Nicholas is someone who, and again, this tracks onto the lives of people that we met and interviewed while we were in South Africa. He's someone who is from Rhodesia, and he's someone who he's he's black, but is very appreciative of the fact that he received a Christian education from Catholic missionaries in Rhodesia, okay, what used to be called Salisbury, after Mugabe and his government come to power, and so many of the whites have had to flee. Well, many of the blacks had to leave as well because when Mugabe came in, he favors certain black tribes over others, and so people belonging to other tribal groups have to flee. His life experience moving from Rhodesia/slash Zimbabwe to South Africa tracks onto the experience of black Rhodesians that I met. One of the controversial points I touch on in the novel, but I'm simply quoting, is that a number of the black people that I met in South Africa who were from Zimbabwe, they told me they're old enough to remember that as difficult as things were in Rhodesia, it was infinitely better than what it turned out to become in Zimbabwe. Yeah. And that is something that we need to keep in mind. So often people become ideological purists and they point to some kind of deficiency or saying, oh no, you know, we don't have absolute equality here. Let's tear the whole system down. And then what replaces it winds up being really kind of a nightmare. You know, and I think that I wanted to basically put in that good word for Rhodesia.

Miichele mcAloon:

I tell you, what I really saw in your book too is the poison of identity politics. Yes. And you know what? We are not groups before God. We're individuals before God. We are not groups before a U.S. Constitution. We are individuals before a U.S. Constitution. And that is how a democratic government works. That is how the Catholic faith works. And I kind of wonder if maybe our Western values and Western ideas, that's what it does. It enforces that. And if you take that away, I'm not sure what else is in place of that. You know, maybe that's white chauvinism on my part or Western chauvinism on my part, but I haven't seen a system better that values the individual versus a state versus an identity versus, because in the end, we are created beings. God created us individually, loved us individually, and that is how we're meant to live our lives. I really think that. Not recognized we're white or black or green or whatever you want out there. You know, we're we're recognized as brothers and sisters. So your book doesn't leave the reader without hope. And I'm terrible. I I don't do a lot of these fiction of authors because I always give away the ending. So I'm not going to give away the ending, but I will talk about redemption. You offer the possibility of redemption in the end.

Speaker 3Dr David Pinault:

Yeah. Yes, thank you. Because part of what, and again, I don't want to spoil the ending either, but the uh the novel takes the reader on quite a journey, if I may say so. It ranges. It ranges from San Francisco and its Chinatown to Hong Kong to Vietnam to South Africa to Shanghai, but also culminates in Cambodia near the ancient temple ruins of Ankhor Wat. And part of what's going on in the novel has to do with the cyber scam center inside a casino in Cambodia. And for anyone who's been following international headlines, that tracks on to cyber scam operations that we're all becoming much more aware of now. And again, not to spoil the story, but what I have noticed is that a lot of international, transnational crime, it's all often interlinked, also is sometimes linked to what's going on in terms of things like operations in casinos and cyber scam centers. And you will see that in the novel.

Miichele mcAloon:

Dave, you also have a thing about Indian spirituality. Now, I mean, that you you want to talk about foreign. I I know nothing about Indian spirituality, right? But you also touch upon that why.

Speaker 3Dr David Pinault:

Yeah, okay. So another thing, another strand in the novel is a character from the Indian state of Rajasthan, the desert area on the western border of India with Pakistan. And his nickname is Gujendra. And there's a whole subplot linked to him. But what interested me is in the course of my studies, by training, readers may already know, I'm a lifelong Catholic, but by profession, I'm an Arabist and scholar of Islam, but with an interest in world religions. So I have taught a number of world religions over the years. One of the religions that I have incorporated into a course called the religions of South and Southeast Asia, one of those religions is called the Jain Tradition, J-A-I-N. And the Jain tradition is one of the oldest religions in India, geographically associated especially with the Western state of Rajasthan. And the Jain religion, which goes back at least to the 6th or 7th century BC, it's a religion of radical nonviolence and respect for animals as fellow sufferers and fellow travelers on the wheel of existence. Jainism, like Hinduism and Buddhism, believes in reincarnation and the notion of karma, okay? But it interested me for those two key reasons: intense respect for animals as fellow sufferers alongside humans, and also for the idea of radical nonviolence. So infinite compassion, infinite nonviolence. In the story, what I'm interested in exploring is this character Gajendra, he winds up at the same animal rescue center as Danny Quirk and Minnie Maishing. He disappears under mysterious circumstances. In fact, he disappears before the other two characters are arrive. I don't want to say too much about to spoil the plot. Right. But what interested me was to do a kind of comparison of essentially Catholic Christian views and South Asian Jain views concerning how do we live in this world? And if we are idealists, and both Gujendra and Danny Quirk, they are idealists, both of them. They're both Quixotic, so to speak. Quixotic right. Yeah, yeah. And they don't entirely quite fit easily onto this physical earthly plane of ours. And they both get into trouble, you know, and they're sort of, they're almost sort of like doppelganger twins of each other in a sense. But it's also an opportunity to set two religions side by side kind of in conversation with each other. And I enjoyed that very much, partly because of the fact that when I taught all these courses on world religions, I always, always would accompany students on field trips to the given places of worship, not only to observe religious rituals, but to talk to the worshippers and get a sense from their own lips of what their religion meant to them. And some of those trips that I enjoyed the most was always to the Jain temples, you know, just to hear them talk about principles of nonviolence, how do we extend compassion to animals, and how do we make our way in this world of ours, you know, as lovely and crazy and messed up as it is.

Miichele mcAloon:

Wonderful. I tell you, folks, if after this interview, you're not running to the bookstore, running to the Amazon store, I tell you, you're missing something. It is, it's actually, like I said, it's a very charming book. It's a very impactful book, and it's a very packed book, but it's it's not hard reading, it's easy reading, and actually it's a really fun read. And you might learn a thing too along the way. So, Dave, I really congratulate you with this book. Do you have a website where people can go find out more about you?

Speaker 3Dr David Pinault:

Yeah, I so I I don't have a website as such, but I'm pretty active on Facebook and also on X, Twitter. And if you go to Facebook and just type in my name, as a as I always say to my students, if you can spell my last name, you're way ahead of the game already. And look me up on Facebook, you'll see the links to various articles I've done, the books I've published. And I would say that if you enjoy Earth Dragon Run, you may enjoy the other uh novels I've published as well. And you can find that information on Facebook pretty easily. And then, of course, also they're listed on Amazon as well and Ignatius.com.

Miichele mcAloon:

Right. And the his his publisher is Ignatius Press. And really, Providence Blue is good. You also have another one, The Museum. What's that novel?

Speaker 3Dr David Pinault:

Yes, yes. And then the first novel I published is called Museum of Seraphs in Torment, an Egyptological Fantasy Thriller.

Miichele mcAloon:

And uh, you know what? I will have you on a fifth time when you finish that next book. Okay. All right. Pleasure. Thank you. God bless. Thank you.