Far from boomtown Beijing, there is another China - join an unlikely vagabond couple exploring it in this exhilarating "Chinese On The Road".
This title is for readers of Xinran, Kerouac, Mao, Rinpoche, Mo Yan and Ginsberg, and fans of modern east Asian film. Venturesome young Japanese student Aya Goda travels deep into the remote western and southern interior of China as protests swirl in the cities and foreigners - especially Japanese - are cloaked with the authorities' suspicions.
Like some East Asian Cassady and Kerouac, Cao and Goda are a pair of wild kindred spirits in search of enlightenment and freedom, and Goda's prose - clear and metallic as a mountain stream - permits the reader to share their every intrepid step and twist and to taste tangibly different flavours of contemporary China.