[thyrsus]

That style is not restricted to Asian speakers. Reading (a translation of) Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude" with its deep recursive layers of introducing a topic and then giving the backstory thereof - the firing squad from the first paragraph gets explained a hundred or so pages later - I immediately recognized my wife's normal pattern of discourse. I then congratulated her on having a Nobel prize winning speaking style :-)

[jfengel]

I'm afraid I'm cheating -- I've never read the book but I am watching the Netflix series.

So I can't say if it's a faithful or reasonable adaptation of the book, but it is quite well done. I suspect that it's less deeply recursive than the book, but it captures a sense of magical realism for which I've heard the book praised. The camerawork is remarkable and the performances are excellent.