Category: Book Reviews

Migrant Laowai: a review of Quincy Carroll’s ‘Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside’

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She continued to badger him in Mandarin. She asked him why he had come to China and, more pointedly, what he was doing in Ningyuan. Daniel told her that he was bored of America, and when he spoke, the others started, taken aback. They considered him as if he were crazy.

One of the things you learn about China, once the initial excitement wears off and having a white face is no longer a novelty, is that you are an outsider. Master Chinese or not, you are still an outsider.

Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside is the story of two outsiders. Daniel is a young ESL teacher who tries to ingratiate himself with China. He has great Mandarin, understands the culture and takes his job seriously.

Thomas has recently arrived from a kindergarten in Changsha, where it’s implied that his departure was not by choice. Daniel gets him signed on at the last minute, and Thomas is not the least bit grateful. Quite the opposite: he believes it is the school’s duty to hire him, China is his playground.

In that way Thomas is like many older men I worked with in China. Compared to Daniel, Thomas is cynical, making no effort to understand China. He passes cold judgments and gives his teaching duties the same enthusiasm you would muster for sweeping a dirty floor.

Daniel is the young optimist, less set in his ways. Throughout the book he displays a fondness for Chinese culture absent in Thomas. For Daniel, as for many expats, China is a place for discovery. For Daniel, that dream is still vivid:

They asked [Daniel] about China, but he could not articulate how it had changed him, for, despite trying his hardest, he could not explain it to himself. There was a wildness to the country that fulfilled certain promises in his heart, promises he had made to himself as a boy but had long since forgotten.

The China described in this book was brimming with possibility, opportunity, and the barriers that held you in check back home are gone. Daniel seeks what he wants, understands what he doesn’t want: to live a quiet life of work like his friends. As for what he does want, he decides the best solution is to integrate himself into Chinese culture.

Thomas makes no effort, thumbing his nose at everything they do, barely speaking Mandarin. Tension between Daniel and Thomas grows, climaxing at a Spring Festival dinner. After Daniel calls out Thomas for being a creepy lecher, Thomas points out:

After all is said and done, he’s here for the exact same reasons as the rest of us: easy living, zero responsibility, and a chance to make himself into whatever he wants.

The truth of that statement cannot be glossed over. No matter what Daniel tells himself, the Middle Kingdom is a place where Daniel can work little, live freely and dream the eternal dreams of youth in a developing Never-Never Land where responsibility comes to die.

Daniel understands that Thomas has a point, that Daniel is also an outsider no matter how hard he tries. He gets a taste of this earlier, before argument with Thomas. Daniel is close to the carpenter and his family — the carpenter’s son shares his English name — and Daniel agrees to celebrate Spring Festival at their house, bringing the carpenter some whiskey.

Over dinner they commend Daniel on his Mandarin, and we slowly see what Daniel is: an oddity. A show. They pressure him into eating a dog’s paw, and after a heavy round of drinking the men turn on their new karaoke machine. Daniel doesn’t want to sing, but…

When Hong noticed him standing there, he stood up and started pointing — first at Daniel, then at the screen. He pulled him by the forearm to where he had been standing, then gave him a microphone and sat down. Laowai chang! he shouted, to the approval of everyone else. Then he started chanting: Laowai chang! Laowai chang!

They want Daniel to dance for them. He refuses, but in the end he does what every other laowai does, no matter how hard they try to resist.

He dances.

***

All of us who teach English in China are migrant laowai. Some just acknowledge it. For all of Daniel’s attempts to integrate himself, one must ask, is he successful?

Thomas isn’t, and it is clear that he stopped trying years ago. While Daniel is a migrant laowai in denial, Thomas understands not only what he is, but that it is too late to change. After Thomas wears out his welcome, he pulls a midnight runner; we then find him in Bangkok, ready to start fresh:

Hailing a cab, he paid the driver using the last of his money, then climbed into the backseat and nodded off, dreaming of Bangkok. He knew that he would have a drink in his hand soon enough, and, after all, he had always been a believer in second chances.

East Asia offers many men second chances. For men like Thomas, it offers third and fourth chances too. Men like Daniel are still on their first.

Men like Thomas better hope the supply never runs out.

***

Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside is available at Amazon and Inkshares.

You can learn more about author Quincy Carroll by following him on Twitter and liking his Facebook Page.

Quick Book Review – The Southern Reach Trilogy, by Jeff Vandermeer

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Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that gather in the darkness and surround the world with the power of their lives while from the dim lit halls of other places forms that never were and never could be writhe for the impatience of the few who never saw what could have been.

Annihilation — creepy, well-written sci-fi/horror. A lot of questions raised.

Authority — boring, still well-written. Switches the setting from Area X to the Southern Reach, the organization looking over Area X. Raises more questions.

Acceptance — overly written, goes nowhere, answers nothing.

Read the first, skip the other two. There is no reason to read the next two books, especially if you think a trilogy might tell a complete story.

Book Review: Good Chinese Wife, by Susan Blumberg-Kason

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The Book: Good Chinese Wife: A Love Affair with China Gone Wrong, by Susan Blumberg-Kason

The Quick & Dirty: An awful marriage built on a foundation with the strength of whipped cream.

The Review:

A self-described wallflower, Susan wants to leave behind her mundane upbringing in suburban Chicago. China, the place for expat reinvention since 1979, provides her with a way: Cai Jun, a graduate student in Music from Hubei province.

The night Susan meets him she’s locked out of her dorm room, and after he returns her phone card, she talks to her friend Janice about this attractive exotic guy:

“He couldn’t understand the English instructions, so he didn’t even use the card,” I told Janice.

“I heard. Still, I don’t think you should’ve given it to him.”

“He seems honest.”

“You don’t know him.”

***

Good Chinese Wife is Susan Blumberg-Kason’s memoir of her failed marriage to a Chinese man named Cai Jun. Her marriage was an extension of her own interest in China. On a 1988 high school trip to Nanjing:

That trip showed me I could be popular in ways I never experienced at school in the United States. China seemed like a place where I could start over and shed my inhibitions with new people who would never know I had been a wallflower all of my life.

It’s tempting to say she fell in love with China first, but in reality she fell in love with her own idea of China: the possibility of personal reinvention, that in the Middle Kingdom you can become the idealized version of yourself that you will never be back home. Cai represents this idea. From their first dance:

…dancing with him seemed so different than it had with the other men in the room. Suddenly I felt coordinated, even graceful. … I also felt comfortable in his arms, as if he could whisk me away from my past inhibitions and humiliations.

It’s hard to know what else she sees in Cai. When justifying her pending marriage, she writes, “He listens, he understands, he cares”…but how? If he ever listened, understood or cared, it is not shown in the book.

***

Susan is very much lost in a Chinese fairy tale and she describes their courtship as such, from their first dance to their first kiss to Cai’s own description of his life in the Cultural Revolution. Perhaps mundane for Cai, it comes off to Susan as something out of a movie.

The fairy tale ends in Shanghai, where the defining moment in their relationship occurs. After a long boat ride down the Yangtze from Wuhan, where Susan’s copy of Beijingers in New York provided what little company it could, Cai gives her the cold shoulder. He had promised Susan that he would take her to a book store to buy her an English book, but after buying train tickets, he abruptly changes his mind. When she brings this up, he won’t talk to her the whole train ride. When the a stewardess comes by offering lunch, he deliberately orders one.

Cai doesn’t improve from there. After a week of traveling, he tells her she needs to bathe because “women are dirty”, and has Susan bathe in a dirty bathroom, using the bowl and rag method. When she hesitates to wash herself with a rag above a squat toilet that serves as a haven for sewer rats, he decides she needs a lesson in how to bathe:

Cai squatted next to the basin and pantomimed splashing water upward onto his crotch. “Like this.” He glared at me while he continued his miming. “Chinese peasant women take baths like this.” And then he repeated, with a snarl, how women were dirty, especially in the summer.

***

It didn’t surprise me to learn that Cai was already divorced. We’re given his perspective on what happened, but the way he treats Susan helps you draw your conclusions. He has a daughter with his ex-wife. Susan encourages him to be part of her life, just as later when she encourages him to be part of her son’s life.

But some people just aren’t meant to be parents or spouses, just as some people aren’t meant to live abroad. From the forced bath, Cai and Susan visit America, live in China and finally move to America.

Cai has a hard time adjusting to life in a new place. He handles it about as well as you’d expect. A new job doesn’t help. Neither do new friends (with whom he spends more time than his wife and son), and then there’s the circumcision.

Per Jewish custom, Susan wants her son ceremonially circumcised:

“In the Jewish tradition, baby boys have a circumcision ceremony.” Careful not to preach, I explained the tradition and why Jewish people subscribe to it.

Either she didn’t fully explain it  or her words went over Cai’s head. Regardless, Cai thought it was an innocuous tradition; he likes tradition and he doesn’t understand what circumcision entails until he hears his newborn son scream. Cai comforts the boy, the glimmers of sympathy fading as he leaves the boy in a car seat and stomps off to his room.

***

Numb, I continued to stand there and wonder if our cultural differences were greater than I could handle. … Was it China, or was I the one at fault?

Their marriage was built on an awful foundation, doomed to failure from the first kiss to Susan’s flight from San Francisco. But it’s important to separate individual behavior from culture influences. It’s not cultural differences that ended their marriage; it’s not cultural differences that made Cai give Susan an STD, nor was it the root of his insinuation that “women are dirty” and their trouble at conceiving must have been her fault. No, it’s the behavior of a child lost in a world of adults; someone who has no control over the events around him and never will.

There is a basic way people should treat each other, especially in a marriage. Cai wanted a doormat. Unfortunately, for the first few years of marriage, he got one. After Susan finally has enough, we have to wonder, What took you so long? Why didn’t you just leave him before?

If he divorced me, what would I tell my parents and my friends? It never crossed my mind to threaten Cai with divorce if he didn’t start treating me better. But even if I’d been stronger, I wouldn’t have given up after just three months of marriage. Surely everyone needed time to get used to living with another person.

I lived through two divorces growing up, so I’ve seen it firsthand: it’s not that easy. Not when you’re invested emotionally and perhaps financially in someone, not when there’s a child in your life. Babies often save marriages, and that’s rarely a good thing.

And in the end, we realize that’s it’s a difference not of culture, but rather, of character. Some people know how to treat others.

Others simply don’t.

***

Available at Amazon!

Easier

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You know, Hitler wanted to be an artist. At eighteen he took his inheritance, seven hundred kronen, and moved to Vienna to live and study. He applied to the Academy of Fine Arts and later to the School of Architecture. Ever see one of his paintings? Neither have I. Resistance beat him. Call it overstatement but I’ll say it anyway: it was easier for Hitler to start World War II than it was for him to face a blank square of canvas.

The War of Art is a great book, damn near invaluable, not only for artists (of all stripes), but really, anyone who wants to do something with their lives other than eat, work and reproduce, work some more and die.

Think like this: what’s easier to do? Is it easier to…start an argument on Facebook than work on your query letter? Get caught up on others’ silly problems than do your revisions? I’m paraphrasing what Steven Pressfield says in the book, so I’ll end this little commercial with a link: The War of Art

He writes a blog series, Writing Wednesdays. It’s good stuff, much more worthwhile than say, sharing a silly Buzzfeed/Thought Catalog list or the daily outrage the online tabloids manufacture to drive pageviews.

Book Review: Outbound Flight, by Timothy Zahn

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He cocked an eyebrow.

Before the prequels, when the sequel trilogy was definitely never going to happen, we had The Thrawn Trilogy.

It’s easy to forget, what with the prequels and a book now it seems for just about every character who appears on screen (and even some non-characters; the Millenium Falcon hardly counts as a character) how important the Star Wars novels once were. They ranged from the inspiring (The Han Solo Trilogy) to the less inspiring (The Black Fleet Crisis) to the outright terrible (anything by Kevin J. Anderson). Let’s not forget the strange either (The Crystal Star). For many of us, the Star Wars expanded universe was the obvious sequel trilogy.

The Thrawn Trilogy got everything started in 1991. Timothy Zahn got over well, and he didn’t do it with prose; when a character expresses surprise, he “cocks an eyebrow” or if Zahn feels like switching it up, he’ll “twitch a cheek”. This happens so often I can’t help but wonder if everyone in Zahn’s version of the SW galaxy suffers from mild Tourette’s. No, Zahn got over via superb research, and a skill that many authors lacked.

He understood Star Wars.

He understood the locales, the characters, the appeal. His new characters fit well into the Star Wars universe. Early in Heir to the Empire, it’s believable when Pellaeon muses that Thrawn could have pulled out a victory at the Battle of Endor, even after the Executor went down. It’s believable that clones grown too quickly could go insane (and that the clones were the invaders, not the defenders, but that’s another argument for another time) and that a Force-sensitive clone could go doubly off his rocker, especially combined with years of isolation. It’s believable that Obi-Wan would one day be unable to linger as a Force ghost.

It’s also believable that the Jedi would want to explore outside the galaxy.

The source of Outbound Flight comes from the following exchange in Heir, after Pellaeon has suspicions about their new ally/pawn, Joruus C’baoth:

“Yes, sir.” Pellaeon braced himself. “Admiral… I have to tell you that I’m not convinced dealing with C’baoth is a good idea. To be perfectly honest, I don’t think he’s entirely sane.”

Thrawn cocked an eyebrow. “Of course he’s not sane. But then, he’s not Jorus C’baoth, either.”

Pellaeon felt his mouth fall open. “What?”

“Jorus C’baoth is dead,” Thrawn said. “He was one of the six Jedi Masters aboard the Old Republic’s
Outbound Flight project. I don’t know if you were highly enough placed back then to have known about
it.”

“I heard rumors,” Pellaeon frowned, thinking back. “Some sort of grand effort to extend the Old Republic’s authority outside the galaxy, as I recall, launched just before the Clone Wars broke out. I never heard anything more about it.”

“That’s because there wasn’t anything more to be heard,” Thrawn said evenly. “It was intercepted by a task force outside Old Republic space and destroyed.”

Pellaeon stared at him, a shiver running up his back. “How do you know?”

Thrawn raised his eyebrows. “Because I was the force’s commander. Even at that early date the
Emperor recognized that the Jedi had to be exterminated. Six Jedi Masters aboard the same ship was too good an opportunity to pass up.”

When I first heard of this book, I cocked an eyebrow myself — is this a story that needs to be told? I remember a lot of excitement when this book was first announced, though what was the source of the excitement? Was it Zahn’s return to the Star Wars universe, a momentous occasion heralded by a million fanboys/girls suddenly crying out in glee? These same people, who probably couldn’t name one of Zahn’s non-SW novels, even the book he won a Hugo for? Or was it because they found the references to it so interesting, yearning to know the details of this doomed expedition beyond the galaxy?

The big problem with this book is that even if you don’t already know the ending, a single glance at the blurb gives the game away:

“Now, at last, acclaimed author Timothy Zahn returns to tell the whole extraordinary story of the remarkable–and doomed–Outbound Flight Project.”

Not a big deal, right? Like Titanic, we all know the ship sinks. But since we know the ultimate conclusion, we need a great story leading up to it.

We don’t get one.

First, Obi-Wan and Anakin come aboard. They don’t do anything. Oh, we get a cheap glimpse of Anakin’s corruption when he approves of the original C’baoth’s methods (and there’s no surprise here — the original is just as batty as his clone). They come aboard for a half-assed reason and leave just before it’s destroyed for an equally half-assed reason. What’s worse is that if you know what happens, and you know this is between Episode I and II, then you know everything they do is meaningless, rendering their scenes a waste of ink and a waste of our time.

The other characters don’t fare much better. Jedi Jinzler had a potentially interesting arc. After all, she meets a long-lost brother who is not Force sensitive, who resents her for being their parents’ darling little Jedi. This could have been interesting, but it doesn’t really go anywhere. She meets him, feels sad about it…and then that’s it.

Rounding out the list: Jorj Car’das doesn’t know his right from his left, Quennto and Marris have some meaningless jealous lover angle, and Thrawn. Yes, the Magnificent Bastard himself is not yet a Grand Admiral but a Chiss Commander who believes in preemptive strikes. His people don’t believe in preemptive strikes. Trouble ensues, again, events referred to in another book, this time the Thrawl Duology (Vision of the Future, specifically).

Thrawn’s well-done, the ending confrontation is well-done (despite how it cheapens Thrawn’s original quote on the matter — C’baoth basically forces his hand), and overall, it’s not a bad book.

It could have used more on Jinzler’s brother, no Obi-Wan and Anakin, a more competent Jorj Car’das and just a more interesting story leading us from the Outbound Flight’s launch to it’s destruction.

As it stands now, you can just read the conversation from Heir to the Empire and not miss anything.