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Westerners are flocking to China in increasing numbers to chase their dreams even as Chinese emigrants seek their own dreams abroad. Life as an outsider in China has many sides to it - weird, fascinating and appalling, or sometimes all together. We asked foreigners who live or have lived in China for a significant period to tell us a story of their experiences and these 28 contributions resulted. It’s all about living, learning and loving in a land unlike any other in the world.
- Sales Rank: #666557 in eBooks
- Published on: 2013-07-01
- Released on: 2013-08-01
- Format: Kindle eBook
Review
"Great vignettes from world class writers...a celebration of the outsider's experience in China, in all of its juiciness and fetid rancour." --Time Out Shanghai
"Excellent. Concise and truthful." --South China Morning Post
"Although other anthologies have featured outstanding journalism about China by Western writers, Carter's collection is the first to focus on the wide-ranging experiences of foreigners living in China." --China Daily
"The authors, mostly experienced writers who have traveled widely in China, offer tales beyond those of the usual laowai experience." --Shanghai Daily
"The majority of stories are individual gems and an enjoyably diverse range of issues are found in the book." --Time Out Hong Kong
"The moral of this collection appears to be that though almost everything has changed, one basic thing - the allure of China to a certain kind of Westerner - remains curiously consistent." --Taipei Times
"Funny, poignant, and wry...the outcome is a depth and variety about the expat experience and life in China that is almost unsurpassed." --Asian Review of Books
"Fast-moving romps through a rapidly-changing changing society." --Caixin
"An eminently dip-into-able, informative and enjoyable collection." --That's Shanghai
"One might be tempted to classify it as a travel book of sorts; what is being traversed and recollected throughout is not the lay of the land, but rather, the contours of confusion, excitement and isolation that every China expat has, at one point, had to clamber across and conquer." --The Beijinger
"A surprisingly refreshing, instead of rehashing, collection of essays, written by professionals, instead of amateurs...at times hilarious, at times beautiful, but always relatable..." --China.Org
"(Editor) Tom Carter has pulled together an impressive cast of writers, established and amateur alike." --Beijing Cream
"If there is an overarching message to take from the book, it is that holy !@#$ China changes quickly." --Shanghaiist
"The vignettes lead the reader through a variety of emotions; some will tug at your heartstrings, others will leave you chuckling in understanding, and a few will really make you think." --Shanghai City Weekend
"Presents a more realistic China." --Li Jihong for Shanghai Review of Books
"As a Chinese writer with a certain cynicism, I did not expect to find anything truly surprising. But surprised I was, and my own stereotypical presumptions stand corrected." --Xujun Eberlein for Los Angeles Review of Books
"The result is a highly readable, often humorous, and at times brilliant book that is unerringly direct: the authors gathered together here do not shy away from troublesome issues." --Asian Correspondent
"The title dis-serves them...the range, humor and insights in this book place it among the best of its kind." --Asia Sentinel
“By turns funny, scary and insightful—every foreigner in China has a story, these are some of the best. Here we have the laowai experience in China in all its multifarious permutations. From the dedicated insiders to the seriously lost; from those who have sought to deep-dive China to those who’ve suffered glancing, but eye-opening, blows.” —Paul French, author, Midnight in Peking
“These essays have heart. From Urumqi to Shanghai, these foreign devils just can’t help but smile at what China has taught them.” —Global Times
About the Author
Alan Paul (author of Big in China) * Aminta Arrington (author of Home is a Roof Over a Pig) * Audra Ang (author of To the People Food is Heaven) * Bruce Humes (Shanghai Baby translator) * Dan Washburn (author of Par for China) * Deborah Fallows (author of Dreaming in Chinese) * Derek Sandhaus (author of Tales of Old Peking) * Dominic Stevenson (author of Monkey House Blues) * Graham Earnshaw (author of The Great Walk of China) * Jeff Fuchs (author of Ancient Tea Horse Road) * Jocelyn Eikenburg (blogger of Speaking of China) * Jonathan Campbell (author of Red Rock) * Jonathan Watts (author of When a Billion Chinese Jump) * Kaitlin Solimine (author of Empire of Glass) * Kay Bratt (author of Silent Tears) * Mark Kitto (author of China Cuckoo) * Matt Muller (blogger of Pathology of Wanderlust) * Matthew Polly (author of American Shaolin) * Michael Levy (author of Kosher Chinese) * Michael Meyer (author of Last Days of Old Beijing) * Nury Vittachi (author of The Curious Diary of Mr. Jam) * Pete Spurrier (author of The Serious Hiker's Guide to Hong Kong) * Peter Hessler (author of River Town) * Rudy Kong (author of Dragons, Donkeys, and Dust) * Simon Winchester (author of The River at the Center of the World) * Susan Conley (author of The Foremost Good Fortune) * Susie Gordon (author of Moon Beijing & Shanghai Handbook) * Tom Carter (author of CHINA: Portrait of a People).
Most helpful customer reviews
27 of 28 people found the following review helpful.
Not unsavory enough
By David I. Cahill
Even before this book came to press it was already in the thick of polemic and controversy - for all the wrong reasons. Some advance-copy reviews by feminist editors in the expat zines of Beijing and Shanghai have been withering, particularly of editor Tom Carter's own "exploitative" and "juvenile" contributing story on a brothel visit. It is actually one of the best pieces in the book, its tawdry, slapstick style perfectly suited to a group of clumsy foreigners haggling in the shabbier variety of Chinese brothel. It is the only story in the entire collection, in fact, that merits the book's title. Before I came to the book, I was expecting and hoping for just that, something unsavory, stories of a refreshingly seedy and disreputable nature, peeling back a new layer of reality in Chinese society as more and more foreign pioneers venture deeper into the country. Inevitably, someone would take it upon himself to dredge up a collection of lascivious or discomfiting encounters and slap it together as a book.
What we have here instead is, alas, a much more banal take on "unsavory elements": "the communist propaganda machine" use of the phrase (as Carter first recalled it) to describe anyone of questionable, less than revolutionary morals. Foreigners - formerly "foreign devils" - are by definition unsavory; their mere presence in the Middle Kingdom unsavory. It is not possible to be a foreigner in China and not simultaneously bumbling, gauche, vulgar and unsavory. Thus any random collection of non-fiction stories of foreign devils wandering around or working and living in China will do. The 28 contributors represent quite a spread, scattered about the country in pretty much all walks of life, but what cannot be said about them (with a few exceptions) is that they are unsavory. They are, on the contrary, painstakingly polite, respectful and normal. They are strenuously family-friendly; nine of the stories - those by Levy, Paul, Muller, Bratt, Arrington, Washburn, Solimine, Watts, and Conley - concern actual families and children or the teaching of children. The pieces are all good clean fun, worthy of inclusion in Reader's Digest or those bland, antiseptic Intensive/Extensive Reading textbooks for freshmen English majors in Chinese universities.
Inevitably, the collection is uneven. The pieces by Peter Hessler and Simon Winchester are the most assuredly written, though they don't really tell us anything we can't get from their own books about China. Meyer, Polly, Earnshaw, Spurrier, and Kitto are good, competent writers but fail to particularly stand out, unlike Watts' piece on the German botanist and eccentric Josef Margraf, and Fuchs on Tibetan muleteers, which benefit from their intriguing subject matter. Stevenson mars his intriguing subject matter of life in a Chinese prison with snideness (here I direct readers instead to the extraordinary book Prisoner 13498 by Robert H. Davies of his experience in Chinese prisons). Humes' horrific account of being violently mugged suffers from his gratuitous histrionics while recovering in the hospital; the tantalizing question and cliffhanger of how he was able to pay for the huge medical expenses (without any cash or insurance) is hinted at and then forgotten. Some pieces lack contextualization, like Eikenburg's account of her daring courtship with a Chinese male, but what decade is she referring to, exactly? Interracial relationships on the Mainland are far more ubiquitous and accepted now than two or three decades ago, when I imagine her relationship took place; a reader unfamiliar with China might wrongly assume things are as stringent and racist today as ever.
Personally, if I had been given the same anthology project with the same title and the same contributors to choose from, I would keep three. I would start the book off with Winchester's piece as a prologue (instead of its current slot as epilogue), then proceed with the spicy if rather innocuous account of KTV escorts among China's privileged by Susie Gordon, followed by Carter's aforementioned piece. For the succeeding stories, I would have to find alternative, more intrepid contributors willing to challenge bourgeois readerly expectations and really get down and rock 'n' roll in China's seamy, truly unsavory underside. After all, I would only be doing what China's own writers have already long been doing, like Wang Shuo, Jia Pingwa and Zhu Wen back in the 1980s depicting life among hoodlums and lumpen elements at large, or the graphic accounts of casual sex and drug use by Hong Ying, Wei Hui, Mian Mian and other female writers of the 1990s. Until that happens, pass on the word of Tom Carter's enticing new collection at the local bake sale or church group back home when queried on a latest wholesome introduction to China to curl up at the fireplace with.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Seeing China Through Multiple Lenses
By Lloyd Lofthouse
"Unsavory Elements" edited by Tom Carter, the author of "China: Portrait of a People", has twenty-eight short memoirs that offer a balanced view of China from expatriates who have lived and/or traveled there.
But the title almost misleads because not all of the authors come off as unsavory elements--most are there to learn and not to judge. Only a few of the stories in this collection were written by expatiates suffering from some form of sinophobia.
I also value books that teach and I think that many of the stories in "Unsavory Elements" did that refreshingly well.
For a few examples, first there was Paying Tuition by Matthew Polly who wrote: "One of the first things I had learned during my stay was that the Chinese love to negotiate. They love it so much that even after an agreement is reached, they'll often reopen negotiations just so they can do it all over again."
I have visited China many times and--unlike most Westerners--I enjoy negotiating, but I didn't know about the reopening gambit. Next time, I may want to give that a try and extend the fun.
In Communal Parenting by Aminta Arrington, I learned that the "Chinese have a fundamentally different relationship with their history than we Westerners. History is a subject we study in schools," and that history is not connected to who we are.
"Not so for the Chinese," Arrington writes. "History here [in China] is not book knowledge. Rather, their history is carried along with them as they walk along the way, an unseen burden, an invisible shadow; unconscious, and therefore, powerful."
Kaitlin Solimine in Water, For Li-Ming writes about the five-months she stayed in China as a teenager in a high school, home-stay program, and it was her first time outside of the United States. For those few months, Li-Ming was her Chinese mother.
Here is the gem that Solimine shares with us: "That's the thing about Chinese mothers: hidden behind their maternal expectations and critical diatribes are women who will fight to the death for you. As soon as I called her Mama, Li-Ming would be my strongest ally for the only months I knew her."
From Graham Earnshaw in Playing in the Gray we discover: "There were no rules. Or rather, there was only one rule: that nothing is allowed. But the corollary, which reveals the true genius of China's love of the grey--in contrast to the black and white of the West--is that everything is possible. Nothing is allowed but everything is possible. It's just a matter of finding the right way to explain what you're doing."
Reading Empty from the Outside by Susie Gordon we see that the "New China isn't shackled with the Judeo-Christian Morals of the West."
Some in the West may see this lack of Judeo-Christian morals in China as a bad thing but that depends on how deeply entrenched a Westerner is in fundamentalist Christian morality. China--believe it or not--does have a moral foundation that many in the West turn a blind eye to. If you are married to a woman who was born in China and grew up there during Mao's puritanical repressive twenty-seven years as its leader, you might understand what I mean.
In conclusion, there is Tom Carter's signature-title piece. In his short Unsavory Elements, Carter says in one passage, "Claude admittedly couldn't care less about Chinese culture; he was simply, like so many other foreigners in China--myself included--aimless and desperate for an income."
There is so much more to this book called "Unsavory Elements" than these few examples. If you have an open mind that isn't infected by sinophobia and you want a better understanding of the Chinese, I highly recommend this collection.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
Dispatches from China’s most “unsavory” expats
By AA Pearce
Entranced by the sights of Tom Carter’s much-heralded picture book “China Portrait of a People”, I thought I’d give his collection of short stories a go. I haven’t been to China yet, and based on what I’ve read in these dispatches I’m not sure I could even handle the cowboy life of an expatriate there. Some stories, such as Carter’s bordello visit and Susie Gordon’s karaoke cathouse, were a bit much for me. But I do not deny that prospective expatriates and adventure travelers will find within these 28 page-turning narratives every inspiration they’d ever need to make their way to China.
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