Fried Eggs With Chopsticks
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- £4.99
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
When she learnt that the Chinese had built enough new roads to circle the equator sixteen times, Polly Evans decided to go and witness for herself the way this vast nation was hurtling into the technological age. But on arriving in China she found the building work wasn't quite finished.
Squeezed up against Buddhist monks, squawking chickens and on one happy occasion a soldier named Hero, Polly clattered along pot-holed tracks from the snow-capped mountains of Shangri-La to the bear-infested jungles of the south. She braved encounters with a sadistic masseur, a ridiculously flexible kung-fu teacher, and a terrified child who screamed at the sight of her.
In quieter moments, Polly contemplated China's long and colourful history - the seven-foot-tall eunuch commander who sailed the globe in search of treasure; the empress that chopped off her rivals' hands and feet and boiled them to make soup - and pondered the bizarre traits of the modern mandarins. And, as she travelled, she attempted to solve the ultimate gastronomic conundrum: just how does one eat a soft-fried egg with chopsticks?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Evans reprises the light, kooky formula she adopted with her debut travelogue (It's Not About the Tapas: A Spanish Adventure on Two Wheels) in this account of her solo trip across China. Armed with Wet Wipes, a smattering of Mandarin and tips from friends in Beijing, she travels by bus, train and even a mule from Beijing to the polluted Mongolian city of Datong before zigzagging south to Shanghai, then on to Tibet and ending in Hong Kong. Attracting attention along the way as a waiguoren, or foreigner, she marvels at the "alluringly foreign... but also... hellishly frustrating" country while vigilantly rubbing her hands with antibacterial lotion, a habit that doesn't prevent a nasty cold. In restaurants, she orders by pointing to others' meals; in squalid public restrooms, she holds her breath. She learns a little kung fu and calligraphy, eats stewed dog and drinks yak-butter tea. Though Evans beefs up the story with historical nuggets on the Mao regime and more, her jaunty style often verges on the cartoonish, as with her impressions of unintelligible Mandarin: "gobbledy gook." Evans's sophomore effort will make an entertaining companion for armchair travelers who enjoy women's magazine style travel writing.
