Customer Reviews

Coming Home Crazy: An Alphabet of China Essays

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

China is not a mystery country anymore. Yet it still remains mystical to many ordinary foreigners (or "barbarians"). Well, Holm tells it well in a very down-to-earth fashion. His chronicle of life in China approaches you as real, uproariously hilarious at times, and remains insightful throughout the chapters.

I have studied and worked in China over the past three years. This book has travelled with me on my many train rides over China. I simply could not think of a better companion. And I thoroughly enjoyed it every time I read/revisited a random chapter.

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in China, and especially those who have their own China experiences and also who are set to commit some time exploring the country themselves.

Mr. Holm fills this book about China with amazing insight, stories of daily life and blood stirring tales about people trying to keep alive ideas that Americans have allowed to die and rot. What do we know about freedoms? The author shows us a nation where the people are willing to smuggle in books, learn other languages and even take in foreign ideas while living under a government that is more than willing to punish them for doing so. A nation that treat the kids like gems and the adults like resources. A nation that has recycled everything, from people to soil to noodles for thousands of years and will continue to do so forever. A book not only about Chinese culture but also about American thought.

If you are looking for the "definitive China book," this is not it. Read something else. But if you are interested in how Americans cope with a year or two's posting as a teacher in a Chinese university -- or if you have been, or will be, on such a posting yourself -- you may well enjoy this book.

It's organized as a series of vignettes which average five to ten pages. The vignettes are kind of like diary entries. They describe daily life, bureaucracy, teaching, food, travel, friends, housing, and so forth. This kind of information can be hard to find. Of course the author went to China in the late 1980s, and a lot has changed since then.

This is not a book that was buffed and polished, edited, re-edited, and beautifully designed by a big publishing house looking to make it into a best seller, like Peter Hessler's "River Town." The up side is that it is very genuine and lacks the slightly annoying preciousness of "River Town." It's more like going to a slide presentation at the house of your neighbor who just came back from China, and being handed a photocopy of the journal they kept.

For a man who was only in China a year and doesn't speak Chinese, Helms saw a lot, and understood a surprising amount of what he saw. His writing is top-notch, and he comes across as a warm and congenial human being. (Granted, as Atila the Hun might, if he could write.) This poetic series of essays is a nostalgic delight to those of us who get homesick for a China that was never quite our home, and an excellent flow-of-conscious introduction for those who plan to go and want to avoid being shocked or disoriented, or at least be aware it's not just jet-lag when you are a bit shocked and disoriented.

I give the book five stars on the basis of its genre. Helm's ecclectic travelogue should not, of course, be mistaken for an in-depth attempt to understand the subjects he treats. As a missionary, I naturally also don't agree with his jibes against Christian evangelists, and find it ironic that he tells us to "eschew evangelism" in one essay, while in another admits to evangelizing himself, on behalf of his concept of democracy. Also he is a bit simplistic to complain that Chinese walls are "inhuman" and human beings ought to "tear them down." In fact walls are intensely human, the world being what it is, as is Helm's irritation at them. For those who would like to better understand the psychology behind some of the walls China builds against the outside world, after you finish this wonderful book, for desert I recommend Wild Swans. (The book, I mean, not the bird.)

Author, How Jesus Fulfills the Chinese Culture (d.marshall@sun.ac.jp)

This book by Holm is excellent and offers many funny accounts of his one year stay in the Middle Kingdom. Holm is a masterful writer who was able to put many aspects of China's complex and often confusing culture into a Western perspective that we can all relate to. After spending a year in China myself, I found Holm's stories refreshing and very true to life. Highly suggest this quick read.

English professor Bill Holm is a first-rate observer of travelscenes. He brings an incredibly rich artistic and liberal arts background to his season in China, and faithfully records the flying sparks of the encounter. China is not a simple culture, and Holm respectfully writes no more than what he personally learns.

The thing that make this book different is that, instead of the usual slices of life + bigthink one finds in travel writing these days, he has organized his observations into a lexicon of essays. For instance, one essay entitled "Black Hair" relates the Chinese people's fascination with his red hair; another, "Tickets, Please" tells of his frustration at simultaneously having to have a Chinese factotum and being subjected to constant petty price gouges. Whimsy and offbeat insight abound, as his sense of irony and humor and humanity are touched seemingly at every turn. Ten years later, I'm still enjoying this unique little book.

It takes a little bit of effort for a non-liberal to enjoy this book, if that is an issue for you. Prof. Holm is an academic culturatus of the first order, with little that's kind to say about less refined Americans. He seems to have a special contempt for his American students, as they come off the worse in comparison with his rapt Chinese pupils. Maybe if he transferred to a _college_, instead of teaching thirteenth grade at his state institution, he'd find more enthusiastic students.

Most depressingly familiar is how, like so many other academics, he reckons his professional skill and artistic talent as translating into political perspicacity. This leads him into such nauseating statements as one in which he explicitly draws a moral parallel between the election of a Republican president of the U.S. in 1988, and the Tiananmen massacre the following year. His disgust at lumpenprole Americans is such that he records himself inwardly shouting at them, "I'm the American! Not you!" Prof. Holm is a member of America's cultural elite, and there's nothing wrong with that. But ideas that don't work tend to cluster in institutions where ideas don't have to work in order to survive. That's a reason why so many of his mindset are clustered in academia.

But if none of this bothers you, or you agree with him, then this book is recommended heartily.

As a Chinese-American living in Minnesota, I found this book to be especially poignant, but I think it will appeal to anyone who is concerned with the freedom of the human spirit. Holm's descriptions of his students' energy and love of discovery, in contrast with his anger at the beauracratic pig-headedness of the Chinese government, captures the mixed emotions that most of us feel about the current Hong Kong situation. Above all, it brings one to the realization that we in America do not appreciate what we have enough

I really loved this book, having read it right after returning from 3 months in Taiwan, although before my more recent trips to the mainland and Hong Kong. Since I was experiencing reverse culture shock at the time, everything he said felt like a punch in the gut. When he missed home back in MN, I knew EXACTLY what he was feeling--I'd felt those pains of homesickness myself just weeks before. ALL I CAN SAY IS IF YOU ARE AMERICAN AND PLANNING ON SPENDING A YEAR IN CHINA, YOU MUST READ THIS. His stories ring so human, and American, and TRUE. It won't prepare you for the long nights when you really FEEL IN YOUR GUT how far from home you are, but at least you might catch a glimpse of how bittersweet such an adventure can taste... It's all painful, and exciting, and fun, and frustrating--and like Helm, you won't trade it for anything...

As an expat currently living in China, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I find myself hoping to read other books by him as well.

Bill brings back memories of life in China and the amazing difficulties people deal with daily.
My time in Guangzhou in the south only varied by climate with Bill's Xian existence, and his wish to return to these education-loving students is familiar as I observe the attitudes of American students falter. I could smell the baoudze and see the Overseas Chinese tai chi in the parks just from enveloping myself in the book on my Metro train. Missed a few stops, too. Thank you Bill for your caring rendition of the life and I wish you continued travel to China.