A YEAR IN CHINA
By Vincent Sack & Jon Perrywell
Authentic & OMF. 174 pages. £8.99
ISBN 978-1–85078–815-7
For many of us, China is a distant, exotic country that we glimpse in TV news reports, but whose geography is vague at best and of whose people we know little, so I read this very personal book with great anticipation.
Jon Perrywell spent a year teaching English in an agricultural university and he shares his experiences in the form of emails to friends and prayer partners at home. These sections are interspersed with the stories of the characters of some of the students that he teaches, which open up the huge variance in their lives. Some come from privileged, quite wealthy backgrounds, while others are from poverty-stricken rural families, where parents make huge sacrifices to better the prospects of their children.
