Foreign Babes in Beijing

Found this post - a sort of book review - I drafted from a while back and I thought I'd get over my hangups of potential further embellishment and polishing...and just publish.

(My NYU summer school '08 professor Betty Liu's voice rings in my head often, "Condensing is an art form!" She is one who encouraged me to publish this...here I am, months later!)

My friend Al lent Foreign Babes to me...yes, the one with Hodgkin's. The one who BEAT Hodgkin's.
She is doing awesome...finishing up radiation, heading off to Venice in May to do an internship at the Peggy Guggenheim Museum. Such a rockstar.

Anyways, Al went to NYU, so naturally she had all these cool professors with rad worldly stories to impress upon young minds.

So she lent me Foreign Babes in Beijing by one of them, Rachel DeWoskin.



In a nutshell: it's Sex and the City meets The Office meets Lost in Translation.

Adventure is synonymous with life for DeWoskin- she grew up being tucked in with Goodnight Moon on trains throughout the Chinese countryside.

Her family bases themselves in Minnesota, and for college, it's off to Columbia, then immediately to China. (Today, DeWoskin splits her time between Manhattan and Beijing.)

She wanders around Beijing and China to find herself, but because of her background, it's a sort of 'coming home' in a sense.

Foreign Babes is a quirky, insightful, and self-deprecatingly humorous, and ultimately a neat insider's view to 1990s Beijing: a city struggling with young streaks of modernism while still rife with suspicion over the infiltration of Western ideals.

DeWoskin's title is the life and the soap opera she finds herself starring in. Literally. She becomes an overnight star to 600 million.

She has consistent insights comparing her life to her on-screen character Jiexi's, who like Beijing has an identity crisis centered around themes of tradition, sacrifice, love and opportunity.

DeWoskin's descriptions resonate through you: you can taste the hotpot, feel the wind of fellow bicycling commuter comrades pedaling along through gray industrial Beijing, chuckle at her apartment building's 'elevator schedule' ...to the point where you wonder if she is some sort of Master diplomat-slash-expatriate, where every cultural rift simply contains no irritation or fascination, like water off her own duck-lo-mein back.

Finally, she admits she never gets over the culture shock... the essence of what I perceive as that mystical Asiatic allure I have yet to personally experience.

Top it off with humorous conversations with fellow expats, as well as insightful commentary and surprising humor from the locals DeWoskin befriends, and you have a great cultural-type autobiography of sorts.