222 mm x 146 mm, 224 pages RRP: R155, ISBN 978-1-4152-0061-2 Publication date: 27 June 2008, Category: Travel Description Part memoir, part travelogue, Drinking from the Dragon’s Well is an entertaining, insightful account of the author’s time spent teaching English in China and Taiwan. Alex Smith, aspirant novelist, jaded social editor, and reluctant English teacher, makes her way to the centre of China in the hopes of writing a ‘Great Chinese Novel’. On a scant budget, she trips through Shanghai, sails the Yangtze, explores the dusty relics of Xi’an and sojourns in Beijing. Eventually she signs up for a job in a bastion of conservative communism on a university campus in Wuhan, home to nine million people. After a year she finds herself broke, stranded and hungry in a semi-deserted, snow-covered campus locked up for the holidays, and decides to escape to Taiwan. Her detailed impressions and experiences create a multilayered text, documenting China and its many facets, from its people to its poetry, as well as aspects of the complex and engaging author herself. From Drinking From the Dragon’s Well, page 99 A man smiled at me at six one morning. Although it was just a small smile, it was kind. His face was familiar to me because that middle-aged man was something of a legend in those parts.       I saw him smiling, and although I would have sold my grandmother (no, never that, Connie!) to talk to him and get his story, that morning I didn’t pay him too much attention because I was to begin Tai Chi lessons with Li Bing, whose Chinese name meant radiant. To her English-speaking friends she was known as Henna. I’d invited Sam to Henna’s lesson, but he wasn’t interested in the fun that can be had at sunrise in China. Naturally, I was disappointed. Sam was a problematic hero; in almost every respect he let me down (or maybe, more fairly, I should say that he being mortal did not fulfil the expectations of fiction), but he was still my hero of convenience. To read on E-mail us a comment on this book. (Comments may be edited and used on this website.) To buy this book www.exclusivebooks.com www.kalahari.net home   writers   books   contact   buy   rights all content © Umuzi, Random House Struik this website designed and maintained by Guanaco.co.za