This fascinating autobiography offers not a success story; nor a paean to the resilience of the human spirit; nor a search for identity constrained by class, race, and gender or the other usual suspects; nor a tearjerker that engenders in the Western reader a sense of superiority or schadenfreude. Rather, it is a tale of the joys and hardships of simple living, of an enduring curiosity about the world, of teachers and friends, of marriage and divorce, of Chinese and American societies, of tofu and jalapeños, of character flaws and personality quirks, of humbug and folly.

Dr Xiuwu R. Liu studied English at Hunan University in Changsha, contemporary American society at the Graduate School of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, American studies at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, and the philosophy and methodology of cross-cultural inquiry as well as modern China at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. Since 1994 he has been an assistant professor of interdisciplinary studies at Miami University in Oxford, USA. Liu is a member of the American Philosophical Association. His previous books include Western Perspectives on Chinese Higher Education (Fairleigh Dickinson, 1996), Jumping into the Sea (Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), Wandering from China to America (1st ed., Zip, 2006), Deflating Human Beings, corrected version, 4 vols. (2022) and Chinese Satire (2022).