Book Review: Unsavory Elements: Stories of Foreigners on the Loose in China

The expat is a curious species, especially the China variety – so often found shunning the local language for a dialect more given to bragging rights – coming and going, never quite committing to the land they hope to flourish in. If the very word “expat” has become unappetizing, Earnshaw Books’s new nonfiction anthology, Unsavory Elements, is something of a corrective, with a vast cast of writers introducing polyphonic flavor and depth into the expat stereotype.

From Matthew Polly trying to make financial gain out of his time training with the Shaolin monks, to Kaitlin Solimine’s elegy for the “Chinese mother” she gained during an exchange program to Beijing, and Rudy Kong teaching ice hockey to his students in Dalian, the tapestry that is laid out here is hardly monochrome. One might be tempted to classify it as a travel book of sorts; what is being traversed and recollected throughout is not the lay of the land, but rather, the contours of confusion, excitement and isolation that every China expat has, at one point, had to clamber across and conquer.

Certainly, many of the stories take as their starting point the bewilderment and absurdity of day-to-day living in China; more often than not, they manage to break beyond that, rallying around our commonalities and underlying aspirations: the possibility of assimilation and exchange, of being open to and intrigued by some greater realization and fulfillment. At the collection’s end, then, the China expat is still no less of a curious specimen – it’s just that the curiosity endemic to the species now seems to be its saving grace.

Tom Carter, the editor of Unsavory Elements, discusses the anthology at The Bookworm on May 21 (copies of the book for purchase are also available at The Bookworm). Read our previous post with excerpts here.