I’m a Kiwi who has spent most of the past three decades in Asia. My books include Formosan Odyssey, You Don't Know China, and Taiwan in 100 Books. I live in a small town in southern Taiwan with my Taiwanese wife. When not writing, reading, or lusting over maps, I can be found on the abandoned family farm slashing jungle undergrowth (and having a sly drink).
I wrote...
You Don't Know China: Twenty-two Enduring Myths Debunked
You Don’t Know China takes a wrecking ball to misconceptions old and new on topics ranging from history and economics to language and food. Learn the truth about feng shui and Chinese medicine. Find out whether Marco Polo really went to China. Does the Great Wall actually deserve its name? Is studying Mandarin worth the effort? Should smartphone owners lose sleep over suicides at Chinese factories? Informative, entertaining, and sometimes controversial, the book is a welcome antidote to the schizophrenic hyperbole surrounding China’s exceptionalism and its supposed rise to global supremacy.
This 1934 work tells the moving story of a young country girl called Cuicui and her ferryman grandfather. As the girl comes of age, she catches the eye of two brothers. It’s a simple plot but beautifully told, with sympathetic depictions of the common folk and rich nostalgic evocations of rural life. The “border” in the title refers to the West Hunan setting near the provincial border with Sichuan. The area is also a cultural border between the Han and various minorities. Shen Congwen grew up there and was himself of mixed heritage. Chosen to receive the 1988 Nobel Prize in Literature, he died before the announcement, and the prize – following the rule against awarding posthumously – went to another writer.
Originally published in 1934, "Border Town" tells the story of Cuicui, a young country girl who is coming of age during a time of national turmoil. The granddaughter of a poor ferryman, Cuicui grows up in Chadong, a small town in China's exotic southwestern frontier, where she is sheltered from the warlord fighting that was prevalent in China in the 1920s. Like any teenager, Cuicui dreams of romance and finding true love. She's caught up in the spell of the local custom of nighttime serenades, but she is also haunted by her grandfather's aging and imminent death. Both Cuicui and…
It’s probably the best novel about foreigners in China, notable for Carroll’s precise, evocative, and flowing prose. Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside follows the strained relationship between two American English teachers during an academic year in Ningyuan, a small city in southern Hunan. There’s likable Daniel, a few years out of university, and then there’s the new arrival upsetting things, the misanthropic older Thomas Gulliard. Tensions between the two main characters build gradually to a series of showdowns. Although the novel is a thought-provoking, beautifully written rumination on the expatriate experience, Hunan Province is not especially central to the story. The local color, however, is very good, with author Carroll drawing on his own time spent living in Ningyuan and Changsha.
Everybody wants to think they're the only foreigner living in China.
Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside tells the story of two American English teachers in rural China. Daniel, a young college graduate, is enjoying his seemingly idyllic life in the small town of Ningyuan when Thomas, an entitled deadbeat content to pass the rest of his days in Asia skating by on the fact that he's white, arrives at his high school. The two men take an instant dislike to each other, and in the ensuing battle of wills tensions build to a showdown, with one…
This strange novel consists of vignettes presented as encyclopedia-style entries written by the narrator. He’s an “educated youth” relocated to the fictional rural Hunan village of Maqiao as part of the Cultural Revolution “learn from the peasants” movement, reminiscent of Han Shaogong’s own experience of being sent to the countryside. First published in 1996 and in English in 2003 (expertly translated by Julia Lovell), the novel is better than the premise suggests, and it often features in “best of” Chinese literature lists.
One of the most-talked about works of fiction to emerge from China in recent years, this novel about an urban youth "displaced" to a small village in rural China during the Cultural Revolution is a fictionalized portrait of the author's own experience as a young man. Han Shaogong was one of millions of students relocated from cities and towns to live and work alongside peasant farmers in an effort to create a classless society. Translated into English for the first time, Han's novel is an exciting experiment in form-structured as a dictionary of the Maqiao dialect-through which he seeks to…
In this poignant story of lifelong female friendship, Lily and Snow Flower must navigate the stifling social restrictions and upheavals of nineteenth-century China. They’re aided by what is arguably the star of the novel: Nüshu. This is a secret phonetic script, used exclusively by women, and limited to a small area of southwestern Hunan Province. Messages written on paper or fans, or embroidered on cloth, could be passed back and forth, allowing for secret communication. And this is how Lily and Snow Flower maintain their friendship through the years.
Lily is the daughter of a humble farmer, and to her family she is just another expensive mouth to feed. Then the local matchmaker delivers startling news: if Lily's feet are bound properly, they will be flawless. In nineteenth-century China, where a woman's eligibility is judged by the shape and size of her feet, this is extraordinary good luck. Lily now has the power to make a good marriage and change the fortunes of her family. To prepare for her new life, she must undergo the agonies of footbinding, learn nu shu, the famed secret women's writing, and make a…
This acclaimed 1962 novel about a Yangtze River gunboat, the fictional USS San Pablo, and its crew, was adapted into a major 1966 film. The author drew upon his own experiences aboard a gunboat stationed in Changsha and Hankow. The protagonist is an independent-minded machinist, Jake Holman. At the heart of the novel is the clash of waning Western imperialism and emerging Chinese nationalism in the mid-1920s.
This now-classic novel by Richard McKenna enjoyed great critical acclaim and commercial success when it was first published in 1962. The winner of the coveted Harper Prize, it was on the New York Times bestseller list for seven months and was made into a popular motion picture that continues to be shown on television today.
Set in China on the eve of revolution, the book tells the story of an old U.S. Navy gunboat, the San Pablo, and her dedicated crew of ""Sand Pebbles"" on patrol in the far reaches of the Yangtze River to show the flag and protect…
An entertaining mystery on a 1894 trans-Atlantic steamship with an varied array of suspects, and a detective who must solve his case in six days to prevent international conflict.
Retired from the British Indian army, Captain Jim is taking his wife Diana to Liverpool from New York, when their pleasant cruise turns deadly. Just hours after meeting him, a foreign diplomat is brutally murdered onboard their ship. Captain Jim must find the killer before they dock in six days, or there could be war! Aboard the beleaguered luxury liner are a thousand suspects, but no witnesses to the locked-cabin crime.
Fortunately, his wife Diana knows her way around first-class accommodations and Gilded Age society. But something has been troubling her, too, something she won’t tell him. Together, using tricks gleaned from their favorite fictional sleuth, Sherlock Holmes, Captain Jim, and Diana must learn why one man’s life came to a murderous end.
In The Spanish Diplomat's Secret, award-winning author Nev March explores the vivid nineteenth-century world of the transatlantic voyage, one passenger’s secret at a time.
Captain Jim Agnihotri and his wife Lady Diana Framji are embarking to England in the summer of 1894. Jim is hopeful the cruise will help Diana open up to him. Something is troubling her, and Jim is concerned.
On their first evening, Jim meets an intriguing Spaniard, a fellow soldier with whom he finds an instant kinship. But within twenty-four hours, Don Juan Nepomuceno is murdered, his body discovered shortly after he asks rather urgently to…
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