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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Beware!!, March 28, 2008
This review is from: Fried Eggs with Chopsticks: One Woman's Hilarious Adventure into a Country and a Culture Not Her Own (Paperback)
I bought this book because I am planning a trip to China and like to read anything I can get my hands on about the country I'm planning to visit. I was so excited to find a travel account by a woman traveling alone in China. I looked forward to funny anecdotes, ideas about what to see and a general sense of life in China. Instead I found a 300 page rant about anything and everything Chinese. Frankly I'm confused as to why the author went to China in the first place and even more confused as to how she managed to get the book published. She complained about everything. She didn't like the food (unless it was McDonalds), the people, the transportation, the accomodations (unless it was the Grand Hyatt), or the sites/entertainment (unless it was the HBO in her room at the Grand Hyatt). She seemed not to understand that she was a guest in the places she visited or that the most valuable trait of a traveler is open-mindedness. She took almost every situation personally, as in when she described a bus journey to Kunming, "The road surface was unspeakably bad....we hurtled over holds and leapt from the crests of little jumps that seemed to have been laid out solely to test the resiliance of our bones." Page 237. Moreover she was almost insulted that few people could speak English and, ever unprepared, seemed to expect others to go out of their way to help her. At the same time, she complained each time anyone tried to speak with her. Evans would do better to stay put in her native England and spare the inhabitants of any other country from having to put up with her. This book is frustrating mainly because it has the potential to deter readers from a trip to China. I will be looking for a more open-minded and curious account of the country and it's people.
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The way NOT to see China, November 7, 2006
This review is from: Fried Eggs with Chopsticks: One Woman's Hilarious Adventure into a Country and a Culture Not Her Own (Paperback)
Polly Evans travels by bus, train, plane, boat and taxi all over China. She learns how hard it is to move about a nation when you don't know how things work, when you don't know the language and when you're not smart enough to bring rolls of your own toilet paper. I mean, half the book is interesting points of hard won knowledge about the Chinese culture but the other half is full of whining complaints about the food, the filth, the yak-butter tea, the crowded trains, the dirty restrooms and so on. The list seems to go on forever. And sometimes she seems to be more insulting than funny. I think, what happened, is that she thought that mainland China would be like the Hong Kong she had lived in - but just a little less. She thought she would find cities kind of like Hong Kong but not as rich or as clean. What she failed to understand was that the People's Republic of China is HUGE. Over three MILLION square miles. She is going to find layers and layers of history and dirt, educated people and ill mannered ones, nice towns and muddy slums. And as she seemed to go without planning, figuring out things day to day, of course she's going to have a rough time of it. Of course most of the tour information for Chinese sites is outdated - the information in tour guides are outdated for museums in DC! A great book for people who think they can pack up, buy a ticket and head over there without any planning, common sense or language classes. I loved it.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Like it or not, snot is gross, September 18, 2009
This review is from: Fried Eggs with Chopsticks: One Woman's Hilarious Adventure into a Country and a Culture Not Her Own (Paperback)
I got this book because I'm planning on traveling through China by myself soon. I was really surprised by the reviews here--so many of them accuse Evans of not adequately preparing for her trip to China, despite the fact that she studied Mandarin for a year before she left! Evans presents a pretty typical western view of China, and she's being vilified for it in these reviews. Yes, many people are bothered by the fact that spitting is so common in a country in which 50% of the inhabitants have TB. So why is it such a big deal that Evans was disgusted with this? It's silly to expect people who have grown up in a different culture to not be turned off by this sort of thing. Call it cultural insensitivity if you will, but by my standards, shooting snot onto your dinner plate in a restaurant when you've finished eating is gross. The real problem with this book is that Evans presents no passion for traveling. I assume she must have one or she wouldn't be a travel writer, but this book reads like someone gave her a contract and she had to write a book. It seemed that she just went down a list of cities and ticked them off, telling us nothing about herself, why she was doing this or what she learned from it all. There just wasn't a lot of depth. I liked the disgusting details she included about the toilets, the snot, etc. but that isn't quite enough to make an engaging read. 2.5 stars.
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