The Mandarin Club

Subtitled 'Mandarin Lessons In Life, Love, And Language' this book is the recollection of a lifelong linguist learning Mandarin as an adult. It is full of recollections about the challenges of the language and observations about its history and relationship with the world's oldest civilisation.

Before living in East Asia, Fallows was assistant dean of languages and linguistics at Georgetown University. The book is accessible, relatable, and a goldmine of observations and insights about the Chinese language.

Guo Xiaolu is one of China's most successful living authors. Her books include 'I Am China' (which this group covered in 2022), and 'A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers'.

'20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth' is a coming-of-age story that has a lot to say about the changing role of women in modern China. Fenfang has travelled 1800 miles to seek her fortune in Beijing. Determined to live a modern life, she works as a cleaner, gets into bad romances, and finally has a sort-of big break with work as a film extra. She makes sense of much of this by conversing with 'Heavenly Bastard in the Sky' in her imagination.

This satirical horror novel explores the intersection of beauty and wellness standards with social issues like classism, racism, and sexism. The protagonist is a Chinese-American former piano prodigy who, needing to pay for her badly injured parents' care, takes a job at a beauty startup and has increasingly has to conform to the ugly side of the industry.

The New York Times described it as "a meditation on vanity, the ways in which the pursuit of physical beauty can betray the other sources of beauty in one's life,"

This is a generational China book, and one of the definitive texts about the experience of being a foreigner in China. In the 1990s, Princeton graduate Peter Hessler spent two years teaching English in the remote, landlocked Sichuan Province while representing the Peace Corps.

The depth and quality of the writing, the historical insights and its value as a time capsule are evidence of why he was subsequently made China correspondent for The New Yorker.