
An American Bum in China: Featuring the bumblingly brilliant escapades of expatriate Matthew Evans is the remarkable but true story of an Iowan misfit. At the age of twenty-one, cancer survivor Evans flees his Mississippi River hometown of Muscatine and heads to China in pursuit of love. He ends up destitute, deported, working as a professor at a prestigious university, homeless, imprisoned, and an accidental participant in the 2014 Hong Kong protests.
This chronicle of Evans’ five-year misadventure, which shows Sino-U.S. relations in a new light, will likely remind readers of Forrest Gump, Frank Abagnale Jr’s Catch Me If You Can, and Mark Twain’s stories of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. The folktale feel is complemented by twenty-four old-style illustrations from artist John Dobson.
The author of An American Bum in China is Shanghai-based writer Tom Carter, whose previous works include CHINA: Portrait of a People, for which he spent two years traveling to all of the country’s 33 provinces, and the controversial China expat anthology Unsavory Elements.
An American Bum in China by Tom Carter
Camphor Pres, September 2019 (ISBN 9781788691802)
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