3 New Memoirs on Expat Life in Asia

If you're like Writer Abroad and love a good travel/expat memoir–specifically one that deals with Asian cultures, go East, dear blog reader, go East. In June, three new memoirs by women writers were published. One of the books is by Tracy Slater, who previously contributed to Writer Abroad back in 2013.

The Good Shufu: Finding Love, Self, & Home on the Far Side of the World 

By Tracy Slater 

The Good Shufu is a true story of multicultural love, marriage, and mixups. When Tracy Slater, a highly independent American academic, falls head-over-heels in love with the least likely person in the world--a traditional Japanese salaryman who barely speaks English--she must choose between the existence she'd meticulously planned in the US and life as an illiterate housewife in Osaka. Rather than an ordinary travel memoir, this is a book about building a whole life in a language you don’t speak and a land you can barely navigate, and yet somehow finding a truer sense of home and meaning than ever before. A Summer ’15 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection, The Good Shufu is a celebration of the life least expected:  messy, overwhelming, and deeply enriching in its complications.

Putnam/Penguin, June 30, 2015

 

Year of Fire Dragons: An American Woman's Story of Coming of Age in Hong Kong

By Shannon Young 

When a bookish 22-year-old follows her Eurasian boyfriend to his hometown of Hong Kong, she thinks their long distance romance is over. 

But a month later his company sends him to London. She embarks on a wide-eyed newcomer's journey through Hong Kong—alone. 

The city enchants her, forcing her to question her plans. Soon, she must make a choice between her new life and the love that first brought her to Asia.

Blacksmith Books, June 7, 2015 

 

Here Comes the Sun: A Journey to Adoption in 8 Chakras 

By Leza Lowitz 

At 30, Californian Leza Lowitz is single and traveling the world, which suits her just fine. Coming of age in Berkeley during the feminist revolution of the 1970s, she learned that marriage and family could wait. Or could they? When Leza moves to Japan and falls in love with a Japanese man, her heart opens in ways she never thought possible. But she’s still an outsider, and home is far away. Rather than struggle to fit in, she opens a yoga studio and makes a home for others. Then, at 44, Leza and her Japanese husband seek to adopt—in a country where bloodlines are paramount and family ties are almost feudal in their cultural importance. She travels to India to work on herself and back to California to deal with her past. Something is still not complete until she learns that when you give a little love to a child, you get the whole world in return. The author’s deep connection to yoga shows her that infertile does not mean inconceivable. By adapting and adopting, she transcends her struggles and embraces the joys of motherhood.

Stonebridge Press, June 2015

Expat Author Book Gift Guide

Finally, a gift guide that includes new books written by expats (or former expats). Below is a short list of books published within the last year by writers who have previously been featured on this website. The list is organized by the country the writers used to live in (or still currently live in). 

China

Since Big in China, which was optioned for film, Alan Paul has written a new book, One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band. Read his previous interview with Writer Abroad.

Kristin Bair O’Keefe has a new novel, The Art of Floating, which follows her debut novel, Thirsty. Read her previous interview with Writer Abroad.

France

Dirty Bertie: An English King Made in France is Stephen Clark’s newest book. Among his many others include A Year in the Merde. Read his interview here.

Portugal

Philip Graham’s latest book is How to Read an Unwritten Language. He is also the author of The Moon, Come to Earth, which is a collection of stories about his time in Portugal. Read his interview here.

Switzerland

Diccon Bewes’ most recent book is Train to Switzerland: One Tour, Two Trips, 150 Years and a World of Change Apart. It follows the success of Swiss Watching. Read more here.

International Writing Round-up: Workshops & More

Can’t find a job in your home country? Then maybe this op-ed, Can’t find a job? Move overseas, from The Washington Post, will convince you to look internationally.

University of Oxford Fiction Tutor Amal Chatterjee and award-winning poet Jane Draycott will present a Creative Writing Weekend in Amsterdam from March 1-3, 2013. Topics include fiction and poetry. The course fee is 250 Euros.

Anyone who thinks China is threatening to become the next world superpower obviously hasn’t seen that a good portion of its residents don’t even have toilets.  Listen to an episode of This American Life on what some expats in China, including the China Correspondent for The New Yorker, have to say about living in China.

The English Bookshop in Zurich, Switzerland will host a reading on Sunday, December 2, from 16:00-17:30, featuring JJ Marsh, who is the author of the Zurich-based debut, Behind Closed Doors. She will read from her second novel in the series, Raw Material.

What the heck does it mean to find a fresh voice? It’s hard to say, except Writer Abroad knows one when she reads it. So if you are looking for a new blog to keep you entertained during work (wait, you would never read a blog during work) check out Reading and Chickens. It’s written by Shalini, who is not a writer abroad, but rather an American writer in Seattle.  But since Seattle is over 1700 miles from her hometown in the Chicago area, Writer Abroad has decided to give her an honorary international status.

Any writing news you'd like to share?

Where in the world is English the most fun?

Much more effective than "Keep Out"

Writer Abroad loves English. Even more so now that she lives in a place that treats verbs as afterthoughts. While residing amongst German speakers allows Writer Abroad to enjoy her one-article language all the more, the place to really appreciate all English is capable of is China.

Yep, for lovers of English, there is no better place to go right now than China. In the People's Republic, English is fun. Even when it's on trashcans.

Please deposit your organism accordingly.

Where in the world do you think English is the most fun?

Confessions of a Reluctant Journal Writer

Writer Abroad has always felt there must be something wrong with her since she doesn’t enjoy keeping a journal. Shouldn’t all writers love that kind of thing?

A smaller notebook might encourage bigger thoughts.

It's not like she hasn't tried. She did keep a daily journal in third grade, since it was a required classroom activity. In this journal Writer Abroad recorded insights like, "Today was sunny." or "Today I went to choir. It was boring."

That’s why it was such a big deal for Writer Abroad to actually succeed in keeping a journal during Baby M's first year. And writing it turned out to be so emotionally freeing that it helped her deal with the loss of other kinds of freedom that most new parents experience.

Speaking of freedom, Writer Abroad had her first taste of it again when American Grandma came to babysit so Writer Abroad could go to China for two weeks. But Writer Abroad didn’t bring a journal to China. Imagine her guilt. Three days into her trip, she broke down and bought one in Beijing to justify her writer self. Just a small one. One that didn’t scream “write down everything you did today,” but rather, one that encouraged her to write down one interesting thing per page.

The small pages of the above notebook satisfied her short copywriter attention span and allowed her to fill pages fast.

For example, on one page she wrote,

The first thing I saw in China? A Starbucks.

On another page she wrote,

I don’t feel as tall as I thought I would.

And on another page she wrote,

An 80-year-old Chinese woman who is clearly on her first flight ever just examined a pad of New Zealand butter and ate the whole piece with a fork.

In the end, Writer Abroad didn’t fill her entire Chinese notebook, but she did conquer about two-thirds of it. All it took for her to enjoy journal writing was a smaller page. And that was a big lesson to learn.

If you’re a writer, how do you feel about keeping journals? Have you found a journal-writing style that works for you?