Dear Alice

The full title of this book is Dear Alice, Letters Home from American Teachers Learning to Live in China. It opens by saying "WARNING This book is not about China. It is about Americans encountering China. If you want to understand the difference, read on." What follows is a collection of letters by 36 Americans who were teaching English in China from 1991 through 1996. These adventurous teachers wrote home to Alice Renouf – the woman who got them their jobs – trying to capture the high hilarity and deep insights that come with adapting to a land one writer calls "on the opposite side of everything you can think of."

Marjorie Buck, Coordinator of Bowling Green International Festivals called the book "Easy to read and warm. . . a great book."
Karen Miller of the Intercultural Communication Institute said, "Makes me yearn to travel!"

An early letter from the Learning to Live in China section begins,
Dear Alice,
It has been an extraordinary month for me. You are right, I love and hate something about China every day. It is everything and nothing I expected. It is a mental explosion both inside and around me. I know less, and more, than when I left. And you are right again, I could never prepare well enough for China. It is like going to Mars.

A letter from the Great Adventures section reads,
We hiked the Tiger Leaping Gorge, north of Lijiang—probably the most remote place either of us had ever been. And we ended up doing it twice: Snow blocked the pass between Daju and Lijiang, so no bus for five days. We laughed and turned around and hiked back to get the bus from the other end of the gorge.
The bus rides in Yunnan were the scariest traveling, and probably the most unpredictable, we've ever done. Mountain roads—the Burma Road—and they turn off the engine to save gas going down hill. Pray the brakes hold. Never saw a guardrail.

purchase Dear Alice

Believing that the creation of books of enduring quality is the single most important contribution of any research center to its field of study, the Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley, publishes scholarly monographs on China, Korea, and Japan, as well as research and policy studies on the Asia-Pacific region. Manuscripts for the four series are peer reviewed before publication. Books are 6 x 9 trade paperbacks, economically priced.