If someone had told me three months ago how ecstatic I would be to receive a shipment of books, I don't think I would have believed them.
When I packed to come here I crammed as many books as I could into my luggage, realizing that, after size 12 shoes, they might be the hardest thing to find here. I ended up fitting 13 books, from absolute necessities like my AP Stylebook and The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain, to new books like The World is Flat and Foreign Babes in Beijing.
It turned out to be a good move. I can get more Western goods than I need here—peanut butter, macaroni and cheese, a good selection of skin care products—but media is still a closely guarded category. For buying books in English, my options are limited to a small independent bookstore with a tiny English collection or the university bookstore, where I can purchase classics with both English and Mandarin in them. The only magazine I can find in Kunming is a state-owned newsweekly (today I realized I can get the Economist for 70 kuai, but I'm not sure how many copies they stock).
The expat-oriented bars and cafes here fill the gap some by serving as lending libraries. At the aptly named Chapter One on Wenlin Jie and Wei's Place near the city center, I can borrow books or exchange my precious literature in a two-for-one trade. The books are mostly awful—from Dr. Atkin's Diet Revolution to random sci-fi and other trash. People don't leave their good stuff at a bar; they keep it or give it to friends.
So when my friend who works at a publishing house offered to send some books, I was very grateful that she'd thought of me. She put them in the mail June 15. When, a couple of weeks ago, they still hadn't arrived, I got a little concerned. If the package was marked "books" there was a chance it wouldn't get here.
On July 22, I came home to find a package from the states, bearing the telltale label from the publishing company and containing six new books, including one I had secretly been wanting, the memoir of a young Chinese intellectual sent by Mao to toil in prison camp. Rest assured that this book does not have distribution in the PRC. I put the new books on the shelf with my old ones; thanks to my slow reading and my Chinese studies, it should take me a while to get through them.
And if that wasn't enough, today I received a package from my sister, containing her father-in-law's recent copy of The Atlantic Monthly, an issue packed with stories about China (along with photos of my adorable nephew and nieces).
Thank you so much, Adele, Miriam and Jim.
