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
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
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
I first heard of MandMX.com back about a year and a half ago when they featured Lost Laowai in a comic of theirs. So when Magnus, the “M” of MandMX, contacted me to let me know they’d compiled their large collection of bilingual, China-themed comics into a new book, I was excited to get my …Read More
While it’s not new (but new to me), here is an interesting talk on C-SPAN by Peter Hessler, best known as the author of River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze and Oracle Bones: A Journey Through Time in China. Hessler does a great job of reminding us (even several years since this talk) that …Read More
I ran across an article at Found in China entitled Chai Ling: then and now, which made mention of Philip J Cunningham, author of a new book called Tiananmen Moon. Over the years I’ve seen an article here or there about Cunningham, but had no idea he was so intimately involved in the protest, being …Read More
When China shifted its view on food subsidies this week, it was considered a major about face for a country that has been open to free trade for the last 30 years. According to writer Naomi Klein in the conclusion of her book The Shock Doctrine: the rise of disaster capitalism, this turn is happening …Read More
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