An incredibly personal project, Awakening in China chronicles my experiences teaching English in China for a summer. Photographic illustrations from the trip fill the pages while a prose poem expresses different aspects of my travels. The book is enclosed by a custom made clamshell featuring the same marigold florial paper that decorates the book's end pages and front cover.
I lived for a summer.
In rooms aged and decaying—teaching English. Within fracturing concrete confines, I spoke my native tongue to twenty Chinese students who sang back to me in broken melodies. With warbling words, they revealed themselves. Their lives, fraught with disadvantages, were also strikingly simple. Beautiful in their quiet. Removed from the consuming busyness of American life. Each night, wrapped in mosquito netting, laying on a thin wooden board, thinking of my students, I passed into sleep (excerpt from booklet).
In rooms aged and decaying—teaching English. Within fracturing concrete confines, I spoke my native tongue to twenty Chinese students who sang back to me in broken melodies. With warbling words, they revealed themselves. Their lives, fraught with disadvantages, were also strikingly simple. Beautiful in their quiet. Removed from the consuming busyness of American life. Each night, wrapped in mosquito netting, laying on a thin wooden board, thinking of my students, I passed into sleep (excerpt from booklet).
