Coming Home Crazy: An Alphabet of China Essays

by Bill Holm

Book Overview

Arranged by letter of the alphabet, with at least one entry per letter, these short pieces capture the variety of daily life in contemporary China.

Writing about traditions that endure in rural areas as well as the bureaucratic absurdities an American teacher and traveler experiences in the 1980s, Holm covers such topics as dumpling making, bound feet, Chinglish, night soil, and banking. In a new afterword to the second...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1571312501
• ISBN13: 9781571312501
• Release Date: August 2000
• Publisher: Milkweed Editions
• Length: 264 Pages
• Weight: 0.94 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Great, fun, and makes you think!

Mr. Holm fills this book about China with amazing insight, stories of daily life and blood stirring tales about people trying to keep alive ideas that Americans have allowed to die and rot. What do we know about freedoms? The author shows us a nation where the people are willing to smuggle in books, learn other languages and even take in foreign ideas while living under a government that is more than willing to punish them for doing so. A nation that treat the kids like gems and the adults like resources. A nation that has recycled everything, from people to soil to noodles for thousands of years and will continue to do so forever. A book not only about Chinese culture but also about American thought.

Witty yet insightful

China is not a mystery country anymore. Yet it still remains mystical to many ordinary foreigners (or "barbarians"). Well, Holm tells it well in a very down-to-earth fashion. His chronicle of life in China approaches you as real, uproariously hilarious at times, and remains insightful throughout the chapters.I have studied and worked in China over the past three years. This book has travelled with me on my many train rides over China. I simply could not think of a better companion. And I thoroughly enjoyed it every time I read/revisited a random chapter.I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in China, and especially those who have their own China experiences and also who are set to commit some time exploring the country themselves.

Crazy like a fox.

For a man who was only in China a year and doesn't speak Chinese, Helms saw a lot, and understood a surprising amount of what he saw. His writing is top-notch, and he comes across as a warm and congenial human being. (Granted, as Atila the Hun might, if he could write.) This poetic series of essays is a nostalgic delight to those of us who get homesick for a China that was never quite our home, and an excellent flow-of-conscious introduction for those who plan to go and want to avoid being shocked or disoriented, or at least be aware it's not just jet-lag when you are a bit shocked and disoriented.I give the book five stars on the basis of its genre. Helm's ecclectic travelogue should not, of course, be mistaken for an in-depth attempt to understand the subjects he treats. As a missionary, I naturally also don't agree with his jibes against Christian evangelists, and find it ironic that he tells us to "eschew evangelism" in one essay, while in another admits to evangelizing himself, on behalf of his concept of democracy. Also he is a bit simplistic to complain that Chinese walls are "inhuman" and human beings ought to "tear them down." In fact walls are intensely human, the world being what it is, as is Helm's irritation at them. For those who would like to better understand the psychology behind some of the walls China builds against the outside world, after you finish this wonderful book, for desert I recommend Wild Swans. (The book, I mean, not the bird.) Author, How Jesus Fulfills the Chinese Culture (d.marshall@sun.ac.jp)

Brilliant and very well written

This book by Holm is excellent and offers many funny accounts of his one year stay in the Middle Kingdom. Holm is a masterful writer who was able to put many aspects of China's complex and often confusing culture into a Western perspective that we can all relate to. After spending a year in China myself, I found Holm's stories refreshing and very true to life. Highly suggest this quick read.

A moving book about the state of humanity in China

As a Chinese-American living in Minnesota, I found this book to be especially poignant, but I think it will appeal to anyone who is concerned with the freedom of the human spirit. Holm's descriptions of his students' energy and love of discovery, in contrast with his anger at the beauracratic pig-headedness of the Chinese government, captures the mixed emotions that most of us feel about the current Hong Kong situation. Above all, it brings one to the realization that we in America do not appreciate what we have enough