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Memoir / Travel / Lesbian Interest

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Mr. Ding's Chicken Feet On a Slow Boat from Shanghai to Texas Gillian Kendall Terrace Books A reeling, funny, moving journey across the Pacific Ocean, told by the sole woman aboard a Chinese ship After accepting a job teaching English on a small engineering vessel traveling from Shanghai to Texas, Gillian Kendall embarks on a strange journey with no ports of call but exotic emotional landscapes. She is the only female aboard, surrounded by Chinese men. The cosmopolitan graduate student suddenly has to adjust to an alien world, thick with cigarette smoke, unusual sea creatures, and male sexuality. Kendall invites readers to travel with her across cultural divides as deep and mysterious as the Pacific while she explores her own culture, orientation, and heart. Excerpt Too shy to sit next to anyone, I sidled to the end of the nearest table, where Zhao, the chief engineer, and a few others were chewing heartily. A bowl of chicken feet graced the middle of the table, braced by several large bottles of beer and some jars of evil-looking pickles. I pointed to the central dish, saying "I would like to taste this." Several plates and chopsticks were thrust in my face, the owners cheerfully offering me their uneaten food. "That's okay." I bent over the communal bowl. The greasy steam made me gag. A dozen or so gray-yellow claws poked up at me. Each foot had four long, skinny toes, and each toe had a tiny, oval nail on the end. The joints, where the skin wrinkled, looked like human knuckles. I picked up the smallest foot, but it looked like the hand of a sick old lady. Shuddering, I dropped it. –from Mr. Ding's Chicken Feet Gillian Kendall is a freelance writer who lives in Melbourne, Australia. Her work has appeared in many publications, including The Sun magazine, Glamour, Girlfriends, and Curve. She is the coauthor of How I Became a Human Being and contributed a short story to The Student Body. For more information contact our publicity manager, phone: (608) 263-0734, email: publicity@uwpress.wisc.edu Of related interest How I Became a Human Being: A Disabled Man's Quest for Independence Mark O'Brien, with Gillian Kendall The Student Body: Short Stories about College Students and Professors Edited by John McNally

October 2006 LC: 2006007361 CT 216 pp. 6 x 9 ISBN: 0-299-21944-5 Paper $22.95 t ISBN-13: 978-0-299-21944-4 To order, you can accumulate titles in the Shopping Cart by clicking on the bulleted lines below. You can submit your order electronically, paying for it with MasterCard or Visa. Click here for further explanation of shopping cart feature. Never ordered from us before? Read this first.

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