Writing a memoir as one's first book is one of the most arrogant things an author can do. The entire enterprise takes it as axiomatic that the world gives enough of a damn about someone with no previous achievements that their life story should somehow be worth reading. And what's even more arrogant is when said author announces this book's release by reviewing it himself.
So, without further ado, here's me being arrogant. 😂
"There are people in this world who refuse to play unless they know the deck is stacked against them. It took me nearly forty years and multiple trips around the world to realize I'm one of them.
And as cheesy as that hook is, I'm going to start with it because frankly I'm just not sure where to begin a memoir."
Well, there's something to be said for an author's ability to laugh at himself, and Harris establishes not only this trait but indeed what seems to be the most defining aspect of his personality in the very first two lines of this memoir. This book does indeed start off as exactly what it seems to be from the cover - the biography of a young, rather dumb American going abroad for the first time and finding himself hopelessly out of his depth. Readers from outside the US will indeed find themselves asking "Good Lord, are Americans really this stupid?" more than once within the first few chapters.
However, it doesn't stay that way.
Expat Shenanigans
After a brief prologue giving a bit of backstory on the author and detailing why he decided to go abroad in the first place (a woman is involved), the first chapter finds him on a TEFL internship in Beijing in August of 2012 surrounded by British interns including a fiesty redhead who becomes an important part of the first half (though not a romantic interest). From there it follows him as he is dropped into the middle of Southern China without a clue what he is getting into, and it is likely no surprise that much of the action in the first few chapters takes place in bars.
Through most of the first few chapters, the author's mindset seems to be "where the Hell am I and what the Hell is going on?" Think of Jack Burton with a Master's Degree. After two chapters describing the shock of getting accustomed to China, the author finds himself quickly back in America, but only briefly.
Getting Serious
Around the fourth chapter, after briefly introducing a cast of miscreants who will pop in and out of the story, the tone changes to one of "let's get down to business" and establishes himself as a professional teacher with a track record of getting results. In truth, this chapter covers so much time in so few pages that it probably should have been a book of its own (it covers four and a half years of teaching and never once depicts the inside of a classroom or mentions any of the author's students), but despite its frenzied pacing this chapter marks the author's transition from "fresh-off-the-plane-moron" to "seasoned expat," a transition which becomes important later on in Chapter 6.
Meanwhile, there are two romantic sub-plots in a row, both of which end badly, though that does not stop the author from picking himself up and establishing himself as the owner of a school.
A Tragic Ending
By the final chapter the author has left China and is in Ukraine, and considering that the previous chapter ends with New Year's Day of 2022, it's not hard to predict that this chapter takes a truly dark turn, quite quickly. It is a wake-up call for the author in a manner so painful that it should probably include kleenexes.
This chapter does a semi-reasonable job of tying up threads from previous chapters and nearly every major character in the book reappears, albeit briefly. In its second half the author (who is coping with depressions and showing signs of PTSD) reflects on his travels and begins to wonder "what was the point?" This leads to a conversation with a character from the beginning of the memoir who delivers a revelatory moment to the him before he finally makes a fateful decision: after ten years abroad, where will he go next - the homeland where he was never able to build a decent life, or the nation that destroyed the only life he ever knew?
Who Should Read It?
Well, Americans. Both the Woke-Left and the Pro-Russia-Right will find a bucket of cold water thrown onto everything they think is true (the former at the beginning of chapter 6 and the latter at the beginning of chapter 9), and the book is not subtle about challenging a lot of the self-aggrandizing views Americans hold dear. However, he does this without unduly praising either of America's leading rivals, China and Russia, who both get their self-image raked over the coals as well. Essentially, it feels like it ends with a toast saying "here's to America: the shiniest turd in the litterbox of Great Powers."
Dear @patriamreminisci !
Rob, Nice to meet you after a long time!
Are you currently working at a bookstore in Texas?
Will you publish a memoir of your travels abroad?
I hope your publications become a hit!
I am currently writing about the eternal war between the geniuse @valued-customer of the New World and the overlords of Japan.
@valued-customer is currently teaching me about many parts of America!
Hmm, I feel like you have more sex appeal with a beard!😄
I hope your health and happy!
Well I'll take your advice about the beard. 😁
In that photo I actually have one still, but it's trimmed very short.
The memoir is already published, and this book is it. The e-book is already available and the paperback should be available by the end of next week. That's what's kept me away from Peakd for so long: I've been busy writing.
As for valued-customer, your teacher of American history, 'take his words with a grain of salt' (do you know that expression?). He sees conspiracies lurking in every corner, and he gets so busy telling everyone to "question everything" that he forgets to question the ones who pose the questions (for they too have an agenda). He views the world as a philosophical exercise to be debated over Starbucks frappuccinos from comfortable chairs in coffee shops across the world, and builds his view of the world not on what is right or wrong but on what makes him seem the edgiest, and this makes him virtually indistinguishable from the Leninist and Stalinist collegiates who were so prolific in America in the '30's and '40's. I've personally seen him try to answer me with a meme that quoted demonstrably false statements made by a Polish eugenicist who supported Hitler, and then after having said statements debunked (by me, with fourteen citations of historically verified examples), he attempted to rehash the same meme a year later as if it was fact.
Personally, I consider him a quack who has no independent views of his own except "if majority say sky am blue, me say it am green."
Dear Rob,
I think it will be difficult for me to read your memoir because I am awkward at reading English! I hope your publication is a success!😃
Yeah, All living things need salt to survive, but if you eat too much, you will die!😆
Do you think he is a leftist?😳
Do you think he's a sophist into conspiracy theories?
I think he's a frontier man! I thought he was a genius because he used English sentences that even East Asians like me could understand!😄
No, he has as little tolerance for leftists as I do. I think he's basically what I described above: a man so accustomed to being lied to by the majority, that he presupposes everything he hears is a lie, even if the evidence says it's true. As I said, if the mainstream (be it Left or Right) told him "water is wet," he'd insist "no, it's dry." I'm aware that the establishment is fully capable of spinning lies but when the establishment narrative and my own five senses agree, I go with my senses while he insists "no, your senses lie to you."
As to his sentence structure, I'll admit there is something to be said for the ability to make oneself understood. 😅
Dear Rob!
I have a hard time understanding the nuances of your English!😅
I felt more familiar with @valued-customer's political and diplomatic English than yours!😉
I am more likely to be found in ditches with shovel in hand than coffee shops, and this incapacity to grasp that such earthen reality is potential underlies your inability to perceive, or even conceive, that such inquisition of particulars as has informed my perspective is possible. Your cognitive dissonance is well bulwarked by simply dismissing such fundament as contrarian.
It is rather droll to be relegated to such company as would surely lynch me on sight as Stalinists. Thanks for the hearty belly laugh.
This is the most laughable attempt to make an acid-trip sound philosophical that I've ever seen. "Inquisition of particulars?" You've never "inquired" about a single thing. You unquestioningly believe whatever is put forth by your own echo-chamber, and when confronted with first-hand testimony that refutes it you ignore it. Fact. In the entire sad history that I have spent wasting my time attempting to educate you, you have routinely asserted that your "knowledge" gained from conspiracy theorist websites was more accurate than my own first-hand experience (and that of some 13 million others." I've encountered people who believe what they're told to believe rather than what they see, but you're the first who has tried to parade that tendency as some form of profundity.
You do make an amusing patsy though. Every time I want to show how ignorant the average Conspiracy theorist is, all I have to do is screen cap a conversation where you've tried to argue with an eyewitness to genocide saying you know better than they do what is happening in their own country and that the genocide they speak of is not happening. You remind me of a MAS*H episode where Radar O'Reilly calls in to I-Corps to report the 4077th is being shelled and an officer who clearly has never worn BDU's in his life puts down his cup of tea and says "impossible. My latest intelligence report says there are no enemy units in your area. You are not being shelled, young man." And the best part is that while doing this, you unabashedly and unashamedly accuse me of "cognitive dissonance." Borrow a dictionary from someone who lives in a state where books aren't outlawed and look up what that phrase means, and then reflect on your own tendency that I just described (provided self-reflection is even within your capabilities).
I used to spend a lot of time responding to your posts and trying to show, from my own eyewitness accounts, that what you've been told to believe is in fact false. When it got to the point that your own blog was openly and unabashedly echoing demonstrable falsehoods that originated from the same monsters who are responsible for the murder of 174 of my students, that's when it clicked: "this guy's not just uninformed. He knows what is being done by the Russians he cheerleads for and he supports it."
Oh and I didn't "characterize" you as a God-damned thing. You're a Stalinist. Period. Your blog is a montage of Stalinic talking points, from the "Nazis in Ukraine" myth he invented in 1939 to the "Russia must save the world from Western Decadence" refrain that he used to keep morale up in the bread-lines, to your laughable audacity in putting "I think kindness is overrated" into your signature line while you habitually cheer for the ongoing genocide of Ukrainians and frame the Ukrainians themselves as "warmongers" for daring to fight back, and then rave for days when your government dares extend a helping hand to refugees who have faced ACTUAL hardship (a concept that a parlor-raised pipsqueak such as yourself can scarcely fathom).
You hate truth. But what's more damning is that you are a knowing, willful and frequent cheerleader for mass murder.