Customer Reviews

American English

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Whether he's eating dog, visiting a brothel, or waking up next to some nameless Korean girl, first-time author Andrew Luxner paints a picture of modern Korea that is much at odds with Western images of traditional Asian societies. American English chronicles a year of the author's life spent teaching English to a rich cross-section of Korean society. Among his students you'll find bored housewives, belligerent salarymen, spoiled children, and sexy-yet-incredibly-innocent Korean university co-eds. The cast of characters, which includes a degenerate opium-smoking Australian, an alcoholic Canadian, and an obsessive American loverboy, would be right at home in an Irvine Welsh novel. Not only does he give a detailed account of day to day life in Korea's crowded and booming capital Seoul, he humourously and all-too-painfully recounts his troubles making intercultural relationships work in a largely closed-off and xenophobic society. For those who plan on visiting Korea for business or for pleasure or are simply curious about life in one of the Asian Tigers, this memoir unflinchingly describes what one can expect from the ironically nicknamed "Land of Morning Calm".

I've trampled about quite a lot with a backpack strapped on and dealt with many of the unfamilar, bizarre and mostly interesting situations when you are plopped down in a foreign land where it's an adventure to find a loo, get a bed or generally do just about anything without pi**ing off the locals.

And it's the feel of these strange sort of situations that you get in reading this book.

Before I travel, I typically read three or four books on the culture (history, literature, etc) along with the obligatory "Let's Go" guidebook. These are all very interesting and useful, yet they lack the concreteness of real life. It's very nice to find books like "American English" that provide a "real" and individualistic account of the place. So I would recommend the book to young travelers, travelers to Korea and to those of us who like to recognize their adventures in in the travels of others. I would not recommend it to people who are overly conservative. After all, "American English" is about the real experiences of a young American male.