I finished a book for the first time in nearly a year

Apparently a semester winding down has jump-started the former glory of my reading habit, and in the last week I have finished 2 books that I started last summer. I don't normally review books on this blog, but I'm feeling extra-literary, so here goes.

I bought this book specifically to bring to China and have something to read on the trip over here and I was settling, and my plan was to have my mom send more books as I was ready for them. It seems like a good enough idea, but I just never got around to actually reading this book that I had heard so much about; I would bring it with me to Sunday dinner at my favorite Muslim noodle shop, read maybe 10 pages or so a week. I didn't read more than that in one sit until I was stuck on the boring side of the Changsha Airport heading home for Spring Festival, but when I got back to China I neglected it, again. Mostly my own laziness is to blame, but also partially at fault is how painfully slow this book starts: I don't understand Swedish history, politics, or economics, and those were the predominant early issues. Also, from the background I had read on the Millennium trilogy, I knew that there were 2 main characters--Mikael and Lisbeth. Spoiler alert: these two don't even meet until 328 PAGES into a 600 page book! All that being said, the book deserves the international hype is has gotten. The characters are interesting and not totally likable, which I really like, and after those first 300 pages the story takes off like a rocket (bad cliche, I know, but I'm out of the habit of creating good ones). I read the last half of the book in 2 days, and was utterly disappointed that I did not yet own the next two. I actually bought the second one, my first ebook purchase on iBooks, but as of right now I can only read it on my iPhone...and reading another book that size about 30 words at a time is disheartening.

Two of the most surprising gifts I have ever gotten were given to me by my dad a month or so before I left for China. This man, bless him, does not have the strongest history when it comes to presents that are practical or applicable to my actual life, so for him to give me two books on teaching in China, out of the blue, was a total shock. The first one I read while I was still in America.

This is an autobiographical novel written by a woman who taught for a year in China in the late 1980s, one of the first big waves of foreign teachers allowed in the country after the Communists came to power in 1949. My mom can attest to how freaked out I was by this book, and she had to remind me, repeatedly, for at least a week that it had been 20 years since Rosemary Mahoney had been there, and things would not be so bad for me. It's a really gritty look at China emerging from the scars of the Cultural Revolution into the capitalistic late 20th century, and as teachers living long-term within China's borders, we get to see so much that tourists miss. Even though it was set in 1987/88, it was my first glimpse at the kind of life I would be living here in the Orient: something utterly different than the one I had in the States.

The second book my dad gave me was slightly more recent (published 1998, from letters from 1993/95), and I started while I was still home. Maybe I was burned out reading about China, and I know I was under stress from one of my summer jobs, but I only made it 96 pages in (out of 326). After finishing The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, this was my next choice, and I finished it within four or five days.

If anyone ever cares to know what my life here is really like, this is the closest you're going to get. These teachers were working through the Colorado China Council and writing back to a woman named Alice Renouf, telling about every aspect of their lives here in the East; a few of the featured writers even worked here in Changsha, my current hometown! The little bit that I read last summer was interesting, but after living here for 10 months this book was like reading stories from my own friends. I was sooo sad to finish it, because I wanted to read more, and I felt connected to these people, even though it's been nearly 20 years since they lived here. Teaching in China is like being an RA, it's this common understanding that unites people faster than many other things can. In reading this book, I learned that some aspects of foreign life in China have changed drastically (some teachers found hidden microphones in their apartments and their American family members received phone calls from Chinese officials to make sure they weren't spying), but some things are exactly the same as they were back then (foreigners have always attracted attention, and I suspect they always will). Stories about traveling, communicating, eating, and working in China made me laugh because I've been through many of the same issues. The editor also pulls in some fascinating tidbits from psychology about the process people go through when they move into a totally different culture from their own, and she has letters from people who weren't able to adjust and either didn't come back or cut out early. I really can't say enough good things about this book, and I obviously identified with it in a big way. It makes me happy that I have been keeping journals the whole time I've been here, because maybe someday they can be published for the next generation of ESL teachers in China. I'll close with a quote from one of the letters that absolutely sums up how I feel about where I am, geographically and in my life.

"I don't regard China as two years abroad. It has been two years of my life, as natural and connected to my life before as it will be to the days after."