Rice Ticket [Paperback]

 

 

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I picked this one up with some trepidation since it didn't appear to be the sort of book I'd enjoy. I was surprised and pleased to quickly discover I'd guessed wrong. Although the cover suggests this is a tale of a young girl of Chinese extraction dreaming of her future, it's actually the story of a rather stiff and culturally awkward English engineer serving as a "foreign expert" in China. Fleeing his unhappy marriage and a smothering wife in England, Christopher Chinley has determined to go to China by himself to offer his expertise, such as it is, in dam building to the Chinese government. He is slated for a stint at Dong Hu University in Wuhan but from the first he's a fish out of water as he struggles in Beijing to adapt to the national culture and the officials and employees whose job it is to make him comfortable and, of course, keep tabs on him.

Chinley is annoyed by nearly everything but he doesn't know how to be himself and so is constantly swallowing his frustration and irritation as he pretends to go along with the officials about him. Worse, denying an interest in anything female (he is trying to get away from a failing marriage after all), he can't seem to avoid contact with young women, particularly polite and seemingly acquiescent Chinese women. He blunders from encounter to encounter, trying to keep his head above water and get a little solitude in a country where solitude is at a premium.

When he finally gets to Wuhan he already has a growing circle of acquaintances including his Chinese minders and helpers and his fellow "foreign experts", one of whom, a boorish American with huge booted feet and an abundance of facial hair, proves to be the greatest annoyance to Chinley of all. First the American, Jeffrey Ward, is intolerant of loud noises, including robust conversation, in the "foreign experts" house where they're all living and then, when Chinley finally realizes he is up for a little sexual dalliance after all (possibly the result of a concoction he picked up at a Chinese herbalist's shop back in Beijing and has been imbibing religiously since), it's Ward who seemingly thwarts him. Both the mature Chinese woman Chinley covets (the wife of one of his official minders!) and the youngest sister of a Chinese girl Chinley had met in Beijing turn out to be involved with the troublesome American, to Chinley's ultimate dismay.

This is a very funny and perceptive tale of one aging Brit's hopeless attempts at a last fling in the hinterlands of modern China. Poor Chinley is thwarted again and again by circumstance. Alcohol takes its toll on one prospective paramour even as Chinley's own daughter shows up on his doorstep unannounced with lice in her hair and not a shilling to her name, having tramped through Asia to reach him. Chinley plays the good father while trying to win one of the seemingly eligible Chinese ladies but all he manages to entice, in the end, is one Welsh woman of suspect vintage, the widow of a fellow "foreign expert," in a marvelous scene which shocks the senses and the funnybone simultaneously in the university's gym-like dance hall which has a certain resonance with another somewhat disreputable place dubbed, appropriately, "Madame Klimbam's".

By this time, Chinley has already found himself potentially on the wrong side of the law after a run in with the irascible Ward that's as comic as it is physical and has just returned from the countryside where he'd gone, ostensibly to buy an old sword from a blind Chinese martial artist, the grandfather of one of the sweet young things he has the hots for. Afraid to return to Dong Hu because of what he has done in his encounter with Ward, Chinley soon discovers that the Chinese penchant for avoiding embarrassment is his salvation, even though he finds himself repeatedly embarrassed anyway, in one exploit after another. Even his visit to a nearby dam and his presentation before thousands in the student body there has already descended into farce as he ends up literally singing for his supper.

Will the Chinese government finally get wise to him and kick him out of the country? Will the inelegant American, Ward, unman him? Will any of the lovely Chinese ladies he lusts for ever give him the time of day before his own wife, Dorothy, finds and reclaims him? And will the sweet young Sylvia make good on what he imagines she owes him?

Ged Neary has a wonderful ear for dialogue and caught me up, again and again, in the incredibly funny experiences poor "Professor" Chinley just can't seem to duck. The various women he chases each want their own rice ticket out of the stultifying world they find themselves in while Chinley has used his to enter it, though the absurdity of what he finds leaves him gasping for air and the reader gasping from laughter at his impossible mishaps. At least Mr. Feng (one of his industrious minders) manages to get a book of translated English idioms out of it, even if Chinley's own contribution to that illustrious work, offered at the book's end, is suspect.

SWM

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