Mr. Ding's Chicken Feet: On a Slow Boat from Shanghai to Texas

There's a lot of potential in the story of a young American woman hired onto a Chinese vessel to teach the sailors English as they cross the Pacific, and Kendall, a freelance writer who lives in Australia, hits it from time to time in this swift and eventful memoir of her weeks at sea as "Teach-ah." The setting is ripe for misunderstandings, loneliness, bonding and self-reflection. As her students' English improves and Kendall's Chinese and "Chinglish" develops, she befriends some of the men on board, attempts to sort out a series of cultural faux pas and thinks about her doomed relationship with her boyfriend back home. She hints at the deeper issues that influence her, most especially her nascent homosexuality, but only with glancing strokes that leave much unexplored and the relationship between the reader and writer stymied. The fun, however, is in the stories of the daily navigation of tight quarters, cultural collisions and storms—and the cigarettes, sweets and chicken feet that get them all through the long days and nights of sea and sky. (Oct. 3)