Author: Ian Pogson
“What I knew about China I could have been written on a postage stamp. Now I may need two,” Pogson writes in the introduction to his diary of a year living in Shanghai as a engineer at a major Chinese auto group. He's not lying. The book is a long boring chronology of something familiar to any expat: complaints and stereotypes. Though there are moments of appreciation for “the locals” as such, but the bubble of superiority that Pogson cultivates is omnipresent. His list of 30 odd reasons why I will not miss Shanghai-which includes such gems as “they are simply stupid”-says it all. The main reason to bother with this book is the fact the writer knows nothing about China and isn't a writer. He is a middle-aged British chap with the gift of gab. Anyone who has spent any time in O'Malley's will recognize the type: the guy who sits on the same barstool night after night rehashing the same stories and jokes. But we can at least laud him for picking up the pen in his yearlong displacement from wife and hearth back in jolly old England and not young Shanghainese girls.
Lee Mack