If you have always dreamed of living in China and are ready to take that step, Moon Living Abroad in China delivers what you need to know about your move—in a smart and organized manner. Wife-and-husband author team Barbara and Stuart Strother have extensive experience working, traveling, and living in China. With their expertise, you'll receive the information you need, including essential information on setting up your daily life, applying for visas, tackling finances, and looking for employment. You'll get practical advice on education, health care, and how to rent or buy a home that fits your needs. The book also includes color and black and white photos, illustrations, and maps to help you find your bearings. With insight into navigating the language and culture of China, Moon Living Abroad in China is a helpful resource for tourists, business people, adventurers, students, teachers, professionals, families, couples, and retirees looking to relocate.
Shannon Aitken has all the insight on what it's like to live in Beijing-she's made the move there herself. In Moon Living Abroad in Beijing, she offers firsthand advice on navigating the language and culture of this exciting metropolis and outlines all the information needed to settle down abroad in an organized and straightforward manner. Moon Living Abroad in Beijing is packed with essential information and must-have details on setting up daily life, including obtaining visas, arranging finances, gaining employment, choosing schools, and finding health care-plus practical suggestions for how to rent or buy a home for a variety of needs and budgets, whether it's a small apartment downtown or a sprawling villa in suburban Shunyi. With extensive color and black and white photos, illustrations, and maps to help you find your way, Moon Living Abroad in Beijing makes it easy for anyone to transition to a life abroad.
He Liyi belongs to one of China's minorities, the Bai, and he lives in a remote area of northwestern Yunnan Province. In 1979 his wife sold her fattest pig to buy him a shortwave radio. He spent every spare moment listening to the BBC and VOA in order to improve the English he had learned at college between 1950 and 1953. For "further practice," he decided to write down his life story in English. Humorous and unfiltered by translation, his autobiography is direct and personal, full of richly descriptive images and phrases from his native Bai language. At the time of He Liyi's graduation, English was being vilified as the language of the imperialists, so the job he was assigned had nothing to do with his education. In 1958 he was labeled a rightist and sent to a "reeducation-through-labor farm." Spirited away by truck on the eve of his marriage, Mr. He spent years in the labor camp, where he schemed to garner favor from the authorities, who nevertheless shamed him publicly and told him that all his problems "belong to contradictions between the people and the enemy." After his release in 1962, the talented Mr. He had no choice but to return to his native village as a peasant. His stratagems for survival, which included stealing "nightsoil" from public toilets and extracting peach-pit oil from thousands of peaches, personify the peasant's universal struggle to endure during those difficult years. He Liyi's autobiography recounts nearly all the major events of China's recent history, including the Japanese occupation, the Communist victory over the Nationalists in 1949, Mao's disastrous Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, the experience of the labor camps, and changes brought about by China's dramatic re-opening to the world since Deng Xiaoping came to power in 1978, No other book so poignantly reveals the travails of the common person and village life under China's tempestuous Communist government, which He Liyi ironically refers to as "Mr. China." Yet he describes his saga of poverty and hardship with humor and a surprising lack of bitterness. And rarely has there been such an intimate, frank view of how a Chinese man thinks and feels about personal relationships, revealed in dialogue and letters to his two wives. He Liyi's autobiography stands as perhaps the most readable and authentic account available in English of life in rural China. He Liyi's previous book is The Spring of Butterflies (London and New York, 1985), a translation of Chinese folk tales.
Presenting the Travel Diaries of Karl Pilkington: Adventurer. Philosopher. Knob head. Karl Pilkington isn’t keen on travelling. Given the choice, he’ll go on holiday to Devon or Wales or, at a push, eat English food on a package holiday in Majorca. Which isn’t exactly Michael Palin, is it? So what happened when he was convinced by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant to go on an epic adventure to see the Seven Wonders of the World? Travel broadens the mind, right? You’d think so...
