Michael Levy (2)

5:30 PM CHINESE DINNER; 7:00 PM AUTHOR EVENT. NON-MEMBER TICKET & CHINESE DINNER: $28.00; NON-MEMBER TICKET ONLY: $16.00; MEMBER TICKET & CHINESE DINNER: $23.00; MEMBER TICKET ONLY: $11.00. KOSHER CHINESE: Living, Teaching and Eating with China’s Other Billion, Michael Levy. In September 2005, ... (more)the Peace Corps sent Michael Levy to teach English in the heart of China's heartland. His hosts in the city of Guiyang found additional uses for him: resident expert on Judaism, romantic adviser, and provincial basketball star, to name a few. His account of overcoming vast cultural differences to befriend his students and fellow teachers is, by turns, poignant and laugh-out-loud funny. Kosher Chinese offers us a fascinating account of the often overlooked interior of China. BIG IN CHINA: My Unlikely Adventures Raising a Family, Playing the Blues, and Becoming a Star in Beijing, Alan Paul. Based on his award-winning Wall Street Journal online column, “The Expat Life,” Big in China explores Alan Paul’s unlikely three-and-a-half-year journey of reinvention in this rapidly developing country. At the heart of the memoir is his time fronting “Woodie Alan,” a blues band he formed with a Chinese partner. The cross-cultural collaboration became an unlikely success. “Woodie Alan” became symbolic of Paul’s entire China experience and proof of what transpires when one can suspend preconceived notions and plunge into a new reality.

An irreverent tale of an American Jew serving in the Peace Corps in rural China, which reveals the absurdities, joys, and pathos of a traditional society in flux In September of 2005, the Peace Corps sent Michael Levy to teach English in the heart of China's heartland. His hosts in the city of Guiyang ... (more)found additional uses for him: resident expert on Judaism, romantic adviser, and provincial basketball star, to name a few. His account of overcoming vast cultural differences to befriend his students and fellow teachers is by turns poignant and laugh-out-loud funny. While reveling in the peculiarities of life in China's interior, the author also discovered that the "other billion" (people living far from the coastal cities covered by the American media) have a complex relationship with both their own traditions and the rapid changes of modernization. Lagging behind in China's economic boom, they experience the darker side of "capitalism with Chinese characteristics," daily facing the schizophrenia of conflicting ideologies. Kosher Chinese is an illuminating account of the lives of the residents of Guiyang, particularly the young people who will soon control the fate of the world.