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China - Superpower or Basket Case? You decide!
Abdiel LeRoy's ten years in China are an adventure in every sense of the word, with "reverie and revulsion, miracle and monster, friend and foe." Through five consecutive memoirs, we accompany him from teaching jobs in the western province of Sichuan to broadcasting roles at China's state-media giants in Beijing.
What we find is a nation of extremes that works its magic and misery on him in equal measure. With a journalist's eye and lively wit, Abdiel will have you laughing between the tears!
"An adventure, a memoir, and certainly one of the more entertaining books about China before us today."
San Francisco Review of Books
1. Dispatches From Chengdu-Beguiled in China!
"The girls here are dazzling," Abdiel observes as he begins work as an English teacher in Chengdu. The food is delicious, the cameraderie joyous, and the enthusiasm of his students infectious.
But how long will the honeymoon period last? Until the pollution becomes unbearable? Or administrators bring false charges against him? Or until his class of postgraduates cheat in their exam?!
The question is, will a campus romance compensate?
2. Laments From Leshan-China's Oppression of the Poor
What does Communism mean in a country that drives poor farmers off their land and restaurant owners into bankruptcy? That takes students out of the classroom and sells them into slavery while their teachers pocket the proceeds? Abdiel is witness to all this as he takes on his second teaching assignment.
Yet there is light amid the darkness as he befriends a famed artist, enjoys the attentions of a student named Emma, and joins locals for a swim in the Dadu River.
3. Chidings From Changping-China's Educational Backwater
Another teaching gig, this time with "some of the laziest, dumbest students who ever wasted oxygen in a classroom," and worse, with unprecedented levels of surveillance!
Abdiel struggles to maintain academic discipline at Geely University, a private institution near Beijing, where wealth subsidizes failure in a "fraudulent exchange of papers-banknotes from students' parents, meaningless certificates in return."
4. Briefings From Beijing-Chinese State Mediocrity!
After two years in China's education system, Abdiel takes on its media empire when he joins China Radio International (CRI) in Beijing. Following an ill-fated stint in newscasting, he starts to record audiobook episodes and becomes fascinated with the Tang-dynasty 'Poet Immortal', Li Bai.
But trouble is brewing as surely as a cup of oolong cha, as the station ups his workload, degrades contract terms, and misses salary payments. All amid a culture of paranoia as producers fear "the American embassy might be listening."
A brush with Chinese police follows when they take him in for questioning and insist he sign a false confession!
5. Perspectives From Peking-Out of the Frying Pan...
Abdiel joins China Central Television in Beijing, and things can only get better after his miserable ordeal at CRI, right?
But now, Xi Jinping is installed as China's leader, and the authoritarian screws are tightening again. Nor has incompetence relaxed its chokehold on China's cultural discourse. We are about to find out how far which managers will go to punish quality in a workplace wedded to mediocrity! Meanwhile, we witness China's reversion to the repressive instincts now playing out against Hong Kong and the Uighurs of Xinjiang.
Yet there are moments of joy as Abdiel again takes to the Beijing stage, this time playing the lead role in a British comedy.
These memoirs will surprise and inform you, even as they entertain
