Jane Carswell’s account of a year teaching in a Chongqing middle school combines an acute eye for detail with a succinct style that transforms ordinary sights into insights, eloquent and sometimes startling, even for those familiar with China. Her empathy with her Chinese colleagues, her enjoyment of encounters with strangers, her patience with difficult situations create a human story few could resist. Courageous interludes of self-revelation turn this book into the double journey of experience plus introspection that makes it delightfully unique.

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 a warm invitation to us all to risk a deeper kind of journey.

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, ever-foggy city of Chingqing to teach middle school for a whole year, Jane Carswell grapples with culture and technology, builds relationships among isolation, and sees the beauty and poverty of the world around her. She contrasts life in Chongqing to her home in New Zealand and begins to long for the country she left behind. Through a deconstruction of self, Carswell reveals her passions and anxieties, and explores her identity and place in the world. Patience and tolerance for China reward her with relationships and cultural insight. This book reminds me of Brian Johnston’s ‘Boxing with Shadows’, but is less dramatic travel writing and more a self-reflection. As a person who has also lived in China for one year, I feel that I already know her story quite well, but feel that she is showing me something new about China. I enjoyed this book and would recommend it to anyone who feels the urge to travel overseas.

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 by a Christian school to teach English in China, despite begin no evangelical. She took one Bible, for her own use. When she found in China was hard work, culture shock and a spiritual sea change. In the midst of an atheist, alien land, she turned away from the material, finding the space to write and reflect. The cult of the individual became less important. There are many travellers’ tales published, and equally stories of self-discovery. This book combines both in a very different way. It is unselfish, interesting even to non-believers

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 for a year. Her reasons for doing this are not clear to herself, but as she teaches she learns and when she returns to New Zealand these lessons help her to find herself and a new inner peace. A fascinating account of day-to-day life in a different culture.

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 of to-be-read books on my bedside table. So, it’s a good thing I’m a reviewer or I would have missed this unexpected pleasure. Jane Carswell’s observations and insights are interesting, astute and amusing. In Chongqing she is confronted with cultural and personal contrasts and conflicts: she is seduced by the simplicity of life there, but knows she’d be unable to eschew privilege; despite always being a private person, she now revels in the sense of community and connection; and although she’s embarked on an external adventure, it’s the internal spiritual journey that finally gives her ease. In beautiful harmony with the world she describes, Carswell’s understated writing has a rare clarity and honesty, making this a gentle, graceful read.

Joanna Rix

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

Australian Community for Christian Meditation Newsletter, March 2010

I am always delighted when I receive invitations to attend exhibitions or such like, to view the creative works by a Community member. Apart from the privilege of being invited to share in someone else’s life and activities in this way, my pleasure also lies in ‘seeing’ most tangibly through the art or music, or in this case, the writing, the unfolding of being in the life of someone you know and deeply respect. It is the playing out of John Main’s teaching that ‘through the practice of Christian Meditation we become more truly the person we were created to be’. So when I learned of Jane Carswell’s newly published tale of her time teaching in a Foreign Language School in Chongqing, China about a decade ago, I went straight out to procure a copy. In Under The Huang Jiao Tree, subtitled Two Journeys in China, Jane explores both the outer and inner journeys of her experience in China. The book’s publishers classify it under three headings – travel, spirituality and memoir. Having known and cared for and been fascinated by, many Chinese students over the past fifteen years, I am very interested in her astute observations of these usually wonderful, hard working and resilient young people and their life. But my greatest interest lies in her very honest and open observations of her inner encounter with a very different culture of great paradox, mystery and expectation and the questions it raises for her life and journey into self understanding. Moments observed, such as the man under the Huang Jiao tree, from whom the book takes its name, are perceptively captured with an awareness of their possible multi-layered meanings and always with a deeply respectful openness and humility before more questions. Jane is now a leading member of the New Zealand Christian Meditation Community. Her journey on all levels in China prepared her to ‘hear’ the teaching on Christian Meditation when Laurence Freeman OSB visited Christchurch some time after her return to New Zealand. Her insightful writing on the practice of Christian Meditation and its impact on her life and her allegiances to two Christian streams could well serve as a reflection piece for Christian Meditation gatherings and hopefully encourage others to write deeply about the practice in their lives. But the book is worth reading for itself, it is very well written with a light touch, a gentle sense of irony and humour, but always with profound respect and compassion for others. And as I always find when I have the privilege of hearing others ‘inner journeys’, it helps me with my own. I recommend it to you.

Ruth Fowler