DeWoskin - Foreign babes in Beijing: Behind the scenes of a new China
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- Book:Foreign babes in Beijing: Behind the scenes of a new China
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- Publisher:W. W. Norton & Company
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- Year:2005
- City:China
- Rating:5 / 5
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Further praise for Foreign Babes in Beijing
A deft, daffy comedy of errors.
William Grimes, New York Times
For a real insiders look at life in modern China, readers should turn to the work of Rachel DeWoskin, who spent five years in Beijing. Her book is written with enormous warmth for its people. And it is all the better for avoiding neat conclusions.
Sophie Beach, The Economist
A cleverly layered account. DeWoskin has considerable cultural and linguistic resources.
The New Yorker
Ms. DeWoskin deserves special praise for not dumbing the book down for those unfamiliar with Chinashe avoids clichd generalizations, preferring to present closely observed detail.
Emily Parker, Wall Street Journal
DeWoskin [has] the perspective to collapse the personal and political to great, and occasionally hilarious, effect.
Christine Smallwood, Salon
Rachel Dewoskin is the most engaging of narratorsshrewd, self-deprecating, and a hawk for nuance. Foreign Babes in Beijing opens with swift revealing scenes and never stopsa fabulous and necessary inside portrait of the China they keep forgetting to tell us about.
Sven Birkerts
DeWoskin recalls her five wild and wondrous years in China in her wacky, yet insightful, new memoir, Foreign Babes in Beijing . Her memoir becomes a fascinating inside look at China in transition.
John Marshall, Seattle Post Intelligencer
What makes DeWoskins account [of her experience] so readable are the multifaceted ways she understands her role and her time in a changing China, and her cheerful, self-assured navigation through weird realms of cross-cultural desire and misunderstanding.
Tess Taylor, San Francisco Chronicle
[An] entertaining romp. Her memoir weaves humorous tales of Sino-U.S. culture clashes both on and off the set with astute observations of the two cultures.
Publishers Weekly
[DeWoskin] speaks Mandarin fluently, and some of the books best passages pay eloquent tribute to the beauties and intricacies of the language. In addition to being intelligent and talented, DeWoskin is charming and self-deprecating.
Wendy Smith, Newsday
Hers is the ultimate insiders view. Exhibiting sensitivity and uncommon wisdom, DeWoskin delivers a candid and valuable portrait of a China few Westerners get to see.
Carol Haggas, Booklist
DeWoskin herself makes a charming, rather humble narrator, and her prose is as gripping as the content.
Kirkus Reviews
Rachel DeWoskins engaging book doesnt stop at the exuberant, sexy comedy of a young American who becomes an actor in the Chinese TV serial of the title. This is an ambitious, as well as an amusing book: DeWoskin gives us a fresh, alert, intelligent, and personal look at the nature of culture and cultures. She thinks well about the large issues underlying matters like dating and casual chatter, and she reports the intimate realities underlying world-scale events. DeWoskins brisk, unpretentiously thoughtful chapters provide flashes of illumination that bring the word brilliant back from clich.
Robert Pinsky
Anyone who has ever traveled beyond their comfort zone will relate to DeWoskins insightful, delightful story of being an American transplant in China, the most foreign of nations. Part memoir and part travel journal, Foreign Babes in Beijing is both respectful and very funny.
Amy Richards and Jennifer Baumgardner, coauthors of Grassroots: A Field Guide for Feminist Activism
Behind the Scenes of a New China
W. W. Norton & Company
New York London
Lyrics from Power of the Powerless reprinted courtesy of Cui Jian.
Copyright 2005 by Rachel DeWoskin
All rights reserved
First published as a Norton 2006
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
DeWoskin, Rachel.
Foreign babes in Beijing: Behind the scenes of a new China / Rachel
DeWoskin.1st ed.
p. cm.
1. ChinaSocial life and customs19762. DeWoskin, RachelTravelChina. I. Title: Behind the scenes of a new China. II. Title.
DS779.23.D48 2005
951'.156059'0820973dc22
2005000939
ISBN: 978-0-393-34007-5
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110
www.wwnorton.com
W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.
Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT
For my family:
Judith and Kenneth
Aaron, Jacob, Melissa,
and Adam Hunter
And the loves of my life:
Zayd and Baby Day
T here is a Chinese expression for the blindness brought on by inside perspective: jing di zhi wa , frog in the bottom of a well. The frog looks up and sees only a single circle of the sky; he thinks he sees clearly, but he doesnt know how big heaven really is.
Since the 1600s, Westerners have journeyed to China and preserved flashes of the middle kingdom they saw. Beijing served as the empires capital for more than eight hundred years, but was never pried open like the treaty ports of Shanghai, Canton, or Tianjin. Instead, it stayed shrouded in the center of gates and concentric walls. At the middle of the great throne halls of the Forbidden City, Beijing was the essence of China, rarely seen.
Now the city is on display. The Forbidden City itself is open to locals and foreigners; the tangled confusion of hutong alleys that ringed Beijings center has been carved into boulevards and express-ways. Skyscrapers have shot up over the squat, bureaucratic buildings that lined once-empty avenues, and street stalls have been sacrificed for sleek boutiques, cafs, and sushi bars. Aging with grace and hesitation, the city embodies all the contradictions of the modern world, offering dizzying lessons on the intersections between an antique past and a global present.
I lived in Beijing for over five years, peering at the patches of China visible to me. I was, even inside China, an outsider watching as the worlds longest continuous civilization lurched inexorably into the twenty-first century. My notes from Beijing are about the people I knew, as well as the language and frameworks with which we came to know each other. Against the advice of cautious friends, I kept diaries of hundreds of Beijing discussions. Chinese are generous with time, praise, and conversation. Any foreigner who speaks even a shred of Chinese is a friend, encouraged to say and hear more. Grateful for the years of language lessons and insights, I wrote them down.
At the core of all my Beijing interactions, both the successful and the not so successful, was language. The Chinese language has density and ambiguity, made richer by my evolving but always uncertain grip on its edges. Much of the interface between my Eastern and Western friends was revealed in the elastic span between our words and the entertaining process of connecting Chinese and English. We came to speak in what we called Chinglish, an efficient hybrid of English and Chinese, importing the most expressive components of each language into the other. Beijings hip, globalizing population converses and identifies itself almost entirely in this mixed language, a representation of some mixed feelings and selves. Our best tool for creating communication that worked was pinyin , which means literally spell sound. A Romanization system for Chinese characters, pinyin made it possible to decode the sounds of the language, and so speak and understand it. Major street signs in China are written out in pinyin , as are the Chinese names in this book.
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