The story appears on

Page A12

July 5, 2015

GET this page in PDF

Free for subscribers

View shopping cart

Related News

Home » Sunday » Book

An outsider’s experience in China

ANNE Depaulis felt an element of trepidation when she first set foot in Beijing as a student on a six-month program to learn Mandarin at the Beijing Teachers’ Training College in March 1986.

Everything looked bare and desolate. Bicycle repair stalls were a common sight at street corners. Spitting was a nasty habit. Children were passed through the windows as people tried to squeeze onto a bus during morning rush hours.

“I hated everybody and everything for a while as I became aware of huge cultural differences… I knew the key to my stay in China would be learning Chinese, keeping an open mind and accepting differences,” Depaulis writes in her book “From Rednecks to Red China.”

So, with an attitude of “Keep calm, smile and ask again,” she stayed.

She learned to cope with the bitter cold, made friends with locals and improved her daily skills of living in China as she traveled around the country, making full use of her holidays.

Upon her return to London, she was hired by an investment bank and, eventually, became a specialist in Asian financial markets.

“At that time nobody cared about Deng Xiaoping. The world of finance looked down on China, but little did they know!” Depaulis wrote at the end of her book.

In 2010, after her retirement, Depaulis recalled her short stay in China, recording her memories in 30 short pieces of writing. With a sense of humor and a positive outlook and balanced view, the book describes everyday life in 1980s China, a time when life wasn’t easy but people were mostly content.

“A very important part of the book is the intercultural content. I wanted to give an incentive to people not familiar with China to find out more about it. I felt very welcome in China and wanted to share that. I wanted to demonstrate that you gain a lot by exposing yourself to another culture,” she wrote in a letter to Shanghai Daily.




 

Copyright © 1999- Shanghai Daily. All rights reserved.Preferably viewed with Internet Explorer 8 or newer browsers.

沪公网安备 31010602000204号

Email this to your friend