This is a memoir of an American who travelled to Asia to teach English. I've done two tours of this duty myself and am always happy to have the chance to compare notes with another veteran. (I haven't lived in Seoul in years; it's mostly laziness that keeps me from updating my hometown on here, but a small part of my heart is still there, and it beat quite strongly as I read this book.)
The gold standard for such a book is
River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze (P.S.) by Peter Hessler, who has contributed a blurb endorsing this book to the promotional material. (Hessler journeyed into the interior of China with the Peace Corps in the mid-90s; Levy did so a decade later, and while the two volunteers did not serve in the same regionk a side-by-side comparison of the authors' experiences is a useful way to track China's rural development in the intervening years.) It's a tearfully poignant tale of cross-cultural friendship and a chronicling of an ancient society in transition.
As for this book, the rather flip title and especially the kitschy cover illustration had me worried that this would read more like a cheap parody. But one shouldn't judge a book by its cover; it wasn't long before I realized that Kosher Chinese is, both intellectually and emotionally, every bit the equal of River Town. And that's high praise indeed.
The book strikes a slightly goofy tone, especially in the opening chapters, but that's only because the author is faithfully recounting his first impressions of a new culture; and when one is making the acquaintance of a society quite different from one's own, there are many times when one must simply bow to the absurd.
As it goes on, Levy becomes increasingly used to the rural Chinese lifestyle, and his descriptions of it take more and more uniquely local habits for granted, but he never fully acclimates to some of them. A recurring theme is the struggle to balance himself between respect for another culture which is in no way inferior to his own and the desire to share the experiences and perspectives of his American life. He recounts many failures to strike the right balance and often thinks back on a cynical Australian he met at a party who told him "They know what they want from you, and they'll take it and use it and leave the rest, no matter how hard you try to stop them." He often thinks back on Greg the Australian, as part of a larger theme of reflecting on how, in the name of "X with Chinese Characteristics," the Chinese assimilate elements of other cultures and mix and match them in ways that are hardly recognizable to someone familiar with the original article: sometimes amusingly, sometimes impressively, sometimes horrifically.
He encounters facets of Chinese society which are extremely jarring to him; sometimes (like abandoning kosher laws) he breaks his own cultural taboos and finds himself better for it, while other times (like witnessing an appalling case of animal abuse) he gives in to feelings of outrage which are likely just to make a bad situation worse. No matter how upsetting an incident may be, he never invokes some objective standard of morality but scrupulously avoids making cultural judgments.
Humor is present throughout the book--irreverent where Hessler would have been ironic--but it's far too intelligent to turn the book into the parody I had initially feared it would be. It's often used to dilute upsetting passages, but in ways that complement rather than compromise the pathos of the incident being described. One very memorable example involves Levy recounting how, despite the skill his Jewish mother and grandmother brought to the task of instilling in him a sense of guilt, not even they had prepared him for "Guilt with Chinese Characteristics"--which is what he felt when he realized there was nothing he could do to help a once-happy young girl who had been forced to drop out of school and collect recycleables on city streets: a victim of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics.
All of these things are weaved together perfectly to produce a seamless narrative, but the strongest element is friendship. The book is filled with people who are separated from Levy by barriers of cultural misunderstanding, but who are nonetheless able to recognize mutual goodwill and establish unique, unusual, but definitely genuine and meaningful relationships.
The book is beautiful and heartwarming. It's a must read for anyone interested in cultural exchanges between the US and China; but beyond that, it rests on universal truths of diversity and commonality of human experience which anyone, anyone at all, can appreciate.
