Mr. Ding's Chicken Feet

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. "Like all voyages worth taking, Gillian Kendall's odyssey across the Pacific is also a journey into the human heart. What a skillful navigator she is, never losing sight of her true destination."--Sy Safransky, Editor, The Sun. "Mr. Ding's Chicken Feet is one of those rare memoirs that's both vividly nostalgic and utterly hilarious. A former Navy English teacher, author Gillian Kendall's flawless sense of comic pacing makes a book about life on the Tan Suo Zhe-a Chinese seismic vessel-teaching men to speak English as a foreign language so much more engrossing than one can imagine from the title (a reference to the crew's culinary delights). Affectionate and witty, Mr. Dings is a must read for armchair travelers and lit lovers alike."--Diane Anderson-Minshall, executive editor, Curve Magazine.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of LGBTQ+, Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.