Isham Cook

Fascinating memoir of the great British travel writer's sojourn in the American West.

Hecht has potential as a writer if he ever buckles down and does the actual labor involved.

Compelling memoir by an eccentric hippie and China scholar.

Interviews with ladyboys looking back on their lives; illuminating but somehow feel it's not the whole story.

A unique memoir about an expat in Malaysia who discovers a hitherto unknown drug whose bizarre effect is to counteract addiction.

Lively account of Shanghai expat bar scene, but Olden made the mistake of publishing a memoir without any attempt at editing; reads like a series of gassy emails.

Brilliantly written novel set during 1860s China, with a Shakespearean breadth of language, dialogue and voices.

Sardonic account of 1930s China in all its splendid squalor, elegantly told.

Alternative and more persuasive account than Paul French's Midnight in Peking of the Pamela Werner murder. I've read both accounts of the Pamela Werner murder–Paul French's Midnight in Peking and now Sheppard's book. Both offer radically different accounts, and I have to say I am far more convinced by Sheppard's. This isn't the space to go into much detail, except to say French's account gets off to a bad start when he places the location of Pamela's body in a ditch outside the Tartar Wall directly below the Fox Tower. Newspapers at the time of the murder, fed by Peking police reports (e.g. the London Times of Jan. 9, 1937, quoted by Sheppard) noted the body's location in a ditch on the INSIDE of the Tartar Wall and considerably west of the Fox Tower (some 750 meters); the discovery by the Fox Tower seems to be French's invention, in order to sensationalize his story by linking the murder to this legendary haunted tower. However, these conflicting locations are starkly different in terms of their logistical feasibility and the suspects in either case; and it's quite telling as an example of the sensationalism of French's entire book, which though admittedly an engrossing page-turner, has more in common with literary fiction and mystery novels than hard facts. The comment above by the one-star reviewer that French's inaccuracies are “relatively inconsequential” is not true; on the contrary, they are very consequential, as you'll discover by reading first French and then Sheppard.

Entertaining but rather breezy account of the sex wars in contemporary China.

Was more impressed with Pinchbeck's classic travelogue of interior travel, Breaking Open the Head.

History of a misunderstood drug by a practitioner and connoisseur.

Intriguing philosophy by a contemporary Daoist, grounded in traditional Chinese medical practices.

Classic account of the hidden side of 1930s Beijing by a famous British scholar of China.

Brief and somewhat truncated account of Shanghai by a longtime resident and author.

Lots of people aren't going to like Arthur Meursault's Party Members: Chinese customs officials who find reasons on every page to blacklist the book; patriots who don't tolerate anything that puts their country in a bad light; cynics who freely disparage their own country but can't stomach a single criticism by a foreigner; the humorless; sinophiles grateful for the privilege of being allowed into China; the Pollyannas who run the expat magazines assuming the burden of preventing China at all costs from losing face.

Meursault has done what everyone up till now has carefully avoided doing. He has gathered up all the worst aspects of Chinese society (a long list) and out of the trash heap hashed together an inexorable plot and absorbing narrative. Some may ask why anyone would go through the trouble of needlessly hurting the Chinese people's feelings. The answer is simple. When everyone tacitly agrees not to write a certain book, this is precisely the book that needs to be written. Somebody would have written this book sooner or later. Meursault got his foot in the door first. I have to say he's done a pretty good job at it too, but we're not talking gentle satire here. After a relatively benign comic start, things quickly descend into the most uncomfortable, brutal reading experience even for the jaded. And that's the whole point. China isn't an easy place for a lot of people, including the Chinese themselves.

We are not meant to like the hero of the story, Yang Wei (whose name means “impotent”), a lowly faceless bureaucrat in a menial job with the city government. Certain things are so ugly they're almost beautiful, and that's where the humor lies. The Chinese do things in their daily life that the rest of the world doesn't. All the author has to do is describe them. The rudeness of strangers, the fake friendliness of those who want something out of you, the toadying and money-grubbing, the class contempt for rural migrants, the obsession with iPhones and luxury handbags and black Audis to the exclusion of anything else in life, the squalor and the spit, are all wrought into a sharply focused technicolor mosaic, systematically unfolded. Visitors to China who have witnessed the disaster zone known as a public toilet are in for a delight, as they follow a drunken Yang Wei into a restaurant's men's room and watch his contribution to this particularly Chinese form of performance art. The scene is worth the price of the book alone, but since I want the author to reap some earnings from his effort I won't divulge any details.

Soon the rollicking comedy takes a darker and more disturbing turn. Yang Wei's member begins talking to him and starts instructing him on how to really be a dick, which is the only way to get ahead in China. Over the course of the rest of the narrative he undergoes a part Dorian Gray, part Kafka's Metamorphosis-style transformation — the book's depraved but brilliant conceit — which again I don't wish to divulge here and spoil for the reader. But along the way you can expect many horrendous scenes, such as a repulsive and quite explicit three-way sex scene involving our hero, a prostitute, and a bucket of KFC. Yes, the chicken meat is engaged with sexually. Meursault has a great deal of fun with the notorious irony that the comfort food of choice for a great many Chinese, for all their disparagement of Western food, is none other than KFC.

Many will protest that Meursault's is a grossly one-sided affair. One could turn things around and concoct an equally convincing positive account of China, full of uplifting scenes and lovely, memorable characters. Even novelists depicting China's political repression seek to counter the struggle or tragedy with sympathetic protagonists engaged in heroic actions and stoic determination against the forces of evil or disaster. This is to miss the point. The problem is, this is exactly what almost every novelist on China, Chinese and foreign, already does. Meursault himself mentions Bret Easton Ellis and Chuck Palahniuk as among his literary influences. We wouldn't want to condemn those two important and highly popular novelists merely because they explore the dark side of contemporary American society. When China learns to take it on the chin and lose face again and again and again; in other words, when China mellows out, as it must at some point in the future if it doesn't want to explode, it will be able to take critiques of its society in stride and laugh them off like water off a duck's back.

I salute this debut novel by Arthur Meursault which is guaranteed to earn him more enemies, Chinese and foreign, than friends. But to me there is no more admirable way of knowing who your true friends are than by declaring forthrightly where you stand.

While the title is intriguing, I found this on the whole lacking in substance and insight.

Illuminating account of Daoism by a contemporary scholar of the field.

Originally published in 1985, updated with a 2010 preface. Dispassionately lays out key points in the history of Chinese medical thought from the Shang Dynasty up through the Cultural Revolution, where acupuncture gets credit for its analgesic properties. See this in action in Antonioni's 1972 documentary Zhong Kuo, filmed in China and famously showing a conscious and smiling woman having her belly cut open for a Caesarian, no pain killers (we're assured) apart from acupuncture needles surrounding the incision.

Illuminating account and welcome addition to the growing Emily Hahn bookshelf.

Somewhat workmanlike account of an episode in Balinese history.

Essential text in the growing library of mind medicines.

Some useful contemporary applications of Confucianism which I'm afraid most would find not very relevant to their lives.

History of a misunderstood drug which should be made legal.

At a time when genre writers are rapidly clearing the field and no novelist who hopes to survive these days dare write a book without a murder or a torrid romance set in the historical past, I applaud the stubborn, heroic and foolhardy who act as if “literary” fiction were still alive when they alone know what the term even means anymore. Or call it “experimental” fiction, that which defies readers' expectations in having no clear beginning, middle and end, in other words a nonlinear narrative. I'm also on the lookout, as a China expat book watcher, for the rare novel which doesn't feature your pensive cheongsam-clad woman on the cover, with her fan or umbrella, too modest to be viewed except obliquely, from over her shoulder. Thus Kaitlin Solimine's oddly designed and titled Empire of Glass caught my attention when it first came out, though it took a while to work its way to the top of my reading list.

Solimine chronicles the history of a Beijing family over the latter half of last century up through the year the author herself lived with the family as a teenage exchange student. The cultural and linguistic hurdles of being thrust alone in a country as foreign as China would be daunting enough for anyone that young, but she bonded closely with her host family and was deeply and positively affected by the experience. The challenge for the author, in retrospect, was how to surmount the claustrophobic constraints of a straightforward first-person narrative by an impressionable sixteen-year old and achieve a more objective distancing, how to shift the focus from herself to her adopted family as they experienced their own reality. The result is a complex, layered narrative with multiple frames and fragmented perspectives, as if the story could only be viewed through intersecting prisms (suggestive of the book's title and cover of shattered glass), at the cost of a more unified vision.

One prism shows us Baba's (the father) mental upheaval as a teenage soldier when thrust into a sexual encounter with a captured American female army nurse just across the Chinese border in the Korean War. Half a century later, when the blond teenage Solimine (“Lao K” in her narrative incarnation) writes herself into the story, she ignites in the now elderly Baba memories of the blond nurse and fresh longings. He is on the verge of assaulting her when he pulls back after a single caress. I was relieved nothing worse happened, but the novelist in me craved a more explosive outcome, a more momentous, grievous event or a primal scene, out of which the narrative could erupt with a more inexorable purpose, than the actual denouement, Li-Ming's (the mama of the family) slow death from cancer, which dominates the final chapters.

What holds these dispersed threads together is a dense, finely woven poetic texture (“Time was words etched into caves. Books hidden under beds”; “I looked to my hands and saw only a broken sun, a damned, irreversible dawn”), which though occasionally overly bejeweled and abstruse, invites a second reading.