Quincy Carroll’s Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside is, on its surface, a tale of two foreigner teachers in China — the idealistic, ‘in search of the real real China’, young Daniel; and the jaded, booze-soaked, cynical old Thomas. For anyone who has lived in China, they are characterizations of personalities we’ve all met, and perhaps been, at some point.Read More
The following is an excerpt from my recently completed novel, Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside. The first chapter was awarded 1st Place in Medium.com’s 2012 Fiction Writing Contest. At the moment, I’m trying to find a home for it. If you like what you read here, please pass it on!Read More
This new collection from Signal 8 Press brings together 26 stories from the lives of expat women living in Asia. Being an expat woman living in Asia myself, I jumped at the chance to read and review it.Read More
Telling me I don’t know China is a big claim, and I have to admit my long-term laowai ego caused me to take a serious pause before digging into this book — one of the initial offerings from new expat-run Taiwan-based publisher Camphor Press.
My doubts quickly abated as You Don’t Know China deftly dispelled several misconceptions I had long carried with me. Hubris in check, I found myself thoroughly enjoying John Ross’ witty and well-researched collection of mythbusting the hyperbole surrounding China’s present and past.Read More
The editor and author dishes on the behind-the-scenes decisions and drama that went into producing Unsavory Elements: Stories of foreigners on the loose in China.Read More
Novelist and some-time-Laowai Lisa Brackmann chats with us about her just-released follow-up to 2010’s Rock Paper Tiger
They roamed the streets of her hometown, knocking their sticks along to lay a path in that endless shade. What they could not see with their eyes the cards showed them by touch. Lu Jun was little when her mother made them show her her future. They rambled on for awhile, illshapen words boiling down …Read More
I started writing a review of Leslie T. Chang’s “Factory Girls” several months ago when I first finished the book. Embarrassingly my attraction to shiny objects and bits of ribbon had shuffled the unfinished post into what was surely eternal-draftdom, until I happened across it this morning while doing some housekeeping here on Lost Laowai. …Read More
I’m going to assume that most of the readers of Lost Laowai are the kind of people who bother to run VPNs and the kind of people who follow the China blogosphere. If so, they may have seen Troy Parfitt’s “Why China Will Never Rule the World” coming up again and again. Peking Duck, Seeing …Read More
I’m a huge bibliophile. When I moved to China in 2005, half my luggage weight allotment went to books. I knew that, living in Hainan, I probably wouldn’t have access to the kind of foreign language (i.e. English) bookstores you can find in Beijing or Shanghai. So I brought my own. Of course I could …Read More
If you’re planning a trip, or living in China, chances are you own a Lonely Planet guidebook. In the past, using LP showed the world you were young and crazy, and would rather stick toothpicks in your eyes than hit up the main tourists spots with all the other blue-hairs. (Or as others saw you: …Read More
I realize I’m about a decade late posting a review of Peter Hessler’s River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze, but it was only recently that I finally took the time to read it. I can’t be certain why it took me so long to pick up Hessler’s seminal work, but I think it was …Read More
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