'Jane Carswell’s account of a year teaching in a Chongqing middle school combines an acute eye for detail ...' Read further...

Professor Bill Willmott CNZM
Former Past President
New Zealand China Friendship Society

'This is a wonderful story of mid-life opportunity. Jane Carswell is a courageous woman and a spirited writer. Her book is ...' Read further...

Michael McGirr
Author of 'The Lost Art of Sleep',
'Bypass' and 'Things You Get For Free'

Bookseller+Publisher, October to November reviews

‘A light fresh memoir of a Westerner teaching in China, with insightful observations that lead to a journey of self-discovery. After throwing herself into the chaotic... ’ Read further...

Andrew Wrathall

The Sunday Age (Melbourne), 9 October 2009

‘The two journeys of the title are spatial and spiritual. Carswell was a music teacher in New Zealand, settled into middle age, but restless. She was selected ... ’ Read further...

Lucy Sussex

Launceston Examiner (Tasmania) 9 October 2009

'It’s a long way from New Zealand to China in more ways than one. The author makes this journey to teach English in a middle school in Sichuan Province ... ' Read further...

The Dominion Post (Wellington) 12 November 2009

‘A memoir by a 56-year-old Kiwi music teaching about 10 months of teaching English in China would not voluntarily make it into the teetering tower... ’ Read further...

Joanna Rix

bookshop page of New Zealand Community for ChristianMeditation website

http://www.christianmeditationnz.org.nz/bookshop.php

Ross Miller

The Age (Melbourne) 26 December 2009

'The Westerner's spiritual journey to the East has become such a cliche that any author writing on the subject must tread carefully. Jane Carswell treads not only carefully, but thoughtfully and originally. About a decade ago, New Zealander Carswell spent a year teaching English in a school in Chongqing, China. Most of the book describes that year, as she struggles with the challenges of living in a foreign land: from the practical such as unfamiliar toilets and cuisine, to loneliness and homesickness, to the extremes of cultural difference. Yet Carswell often found common ground with her Chinese students and colleagues, and was open to the different ways she encountered. This genuine openness is one of the qualities that sets Carswell's book apart. The word "journey" to describe any experience has been much abused by reality TV participants. Here, the word has real resonance. She talks of the two interrelated journeys she made: the outer and the inner. She explores her changing understanding of her identity with a light touch, never self-indulgent or didactic. On her return to New Zealand, a period that she describes only briefly, she became a Benedictine oblate. After her year away, Carswell discovered that she was a writer as well as a teacher: Under the Huang Jiao Tree is proof of that.’

Lorien Kaye

The Otago Daily Times (Dunedin) 12 December 2009

'Over the past few weeks, China seems to have been to the fore whenever I pick up a paper, magazine or pick up on a conversation. The accounts of life there differed wildly. Among them were the New Zealand tourist who described every experience in glowing terms, the smart young Australian journalist who went to explore her family’s roots, and felt (in spite of her Chinese ancestry) like an alien, young friends who went there to work and were subjected to a welcoming ceremony accompanied by many alcoholic “toasts”, the object of which seemed aimed at their losing face, businessmen who couldn’t cope with the pollution they found, and recently published statistics regarding the immense gains made in the quality of life there for the majority. Not surprisingly, these were widely differing accounts—it’s such a huge and diverse country. And most of them were mere snapshots in time, varying from days to weeks. This memoir by Jane Carswell of a year teaching English in a large Chongqing high school, living in the same compound as her fellow teachers and their families, one of only two European teachers in a city unused to white faces, gave me a more comprehensive perspective. Relentlessly honest and well-written, the book recounts her experience of everyday life in Chongqing alongside self-exploration of personal goals. She is fond of metaphor and uses it to give you a feeling of being there with her, whether describing her first impressions of the landscape “…beneath us the land boils into hills, blistered and bubbled, the terraced edges like a thousand eyebrows. Beside the imposing spread of the city, the airport looks startlingly small and somehow unsure of its function”, or her longing for “scraps of the natural world…I’m used to living in a home wrapped by garden”; so when she feels “…desiccated and sandpapered by the city” she looks over her balcony to where glimpses of “a little dusty green” and a few small animals and birds help to restore her equanimity. With her eye for detail and willingness to make the best of most situations, she provided me with a realistic-sounding guide as to what it must be like to be away from home and family in a metropolitan area with 31 million people, much of the time surrounded by fog, “a grey metal-and-rock world” in a culture where privacy is rare, your motives can be misunderstood, your lavatory is a hole in the floor, and you’re contracted to stay for a year. After a few months, she has “a strong disaffection for everything in the Chinese world around me” and is frightened by the sense of isolation she feels. Before long, however, she regains a balanced view. Bonuses are the insights she gets into a way of life where the sheer numbers of people demand a patience that is rare in New Zealand, and an overwhelming sense of community. The author’s empathy with the people she meets, the fascinating insights into Chinese life she provides, her ability to take the reader with her on the personal and private journeys she makes, all contribute to a story well worth reading.'

Pat Thwaites

Madonna Magazine, (Victoria, Australia) January/February 2010

'When we travel, says Jane Carswell, not only do we make the physical journey, we also make an interior one: our minds, our lives are changed. A teacher of music, she was encouraged by her husband to visit China. After a brief and beguiling visit to Beijing, opportunity later arose to do a year’s teaching of English in a foreign language school in Chongqing, a city in the south-west of the country. The book is an account of that year. While a music teacher in Christchurch, Jane had a number of Chinese children among her students, and she found herself treasuring ‘the bright red patches on my teaching timetable’. Something about the Chinese spirit drew her, and this was at the heart of her inner journey. Living away from family and friends exposed an inner unease and longing. The simplicity amidst poverty of so much living of living in China had an unsettling appeal. A visit to New Zealand from Benedictine Lawrence Freeman, head of the World Movement for Christian Meditation, revealed to Jane a new way of praying and thinking, and prompted a move into the Catholic Church, to the discipline of meditation, to the Benedictine Way, and to following Benedict’s Rule as a Benedictine oblate. Jane tried to explore what it was that drew her to China:"‘I wondered if my passion could possibly be Christ…what else but a passion can you call a hero who won’t go away? … What name can you give to the point at which your dreams converge and are held, and what to a light that spills more glory than you can bear to look at … I don’t know exactly who Christ was and is, but I know he’s connected to the truth about us." ’