Chenxi and the Foreigner worth a read

Ever since Marco Polo’s youthful adventures hit the public domain, scores of travellers have dreamt of finding a passage to China.

In Chenxi and the Foreigner, it is 1989, a few months prior to the Tiananmen Square massacre, and 18-year-old Anna White is about to find adventure and romance in the maw of The Sleeping Tiger.

A high school graduate living in San Francisco with her mother, Anna visits her businessman father in Shanghai with plans to study at the Shanghai College of Fine Art.

On the business front, Mr. White is eager to make a fortune cleaning up the river through his engineering company. On the personal level he lives apart in a foreigners’ tower shielded from the sweat and smells of bicycle-riding locals.

Determined to make her own choices, Anna refuses to live in a fish bowl. Eager to explore every nook and street corner of this inscrutable and often grungy world, she thrives on the noodle shops, bustling markets and strange customs.

But it is the enigmatic Chenxi, an art student her father has hired to be her interpreter, who haunts her waking romantic thoughts.

She quickly learns that the casual freedoms taken for granted in San Francisco do not exist in China. Students paint on silk copying a picture from an open book. Each is identical. Freedom of artistic expression is forbidden.

When the school plans a field trip into the country, she is excluded because of her foreigner status. Gradually Anna develops an understanding of how the government’s iron fist controls every aspect of people’s lives.

Inspired by Anna’s love, Chenxi, as leader of the Red Wolves, a secret political organization, attempts a peaceful public protest demanding freedom and a chance to have a say in the way the country is run. But even peaceful acts of rebellion are dangerous and to save his own life, Chenxi must disappear.

Author Sally Rippen lived in China for three years, and her knowledge of the country comes through. The entire book is laced with short, vibrant descriptions of people and landscapes that create a distinctly local flavour of both the Chinese population and the invading foreigners.

This is a book that can appeal to both teens and adults. While adolescents might find Anna and Chenxi’s forbidden romance the most exciting aspect, Rippen’s storyline crackles with an authenticity that is hard to duplicate.

If anything, Chenxi and the Foreigner is a humbling read and definitely worth a go.