From the Bookshelf of Aussie Readers…

[close] No Chopsticks Required is Walkley-award winning journalist Katrina Beikoff's memoir of the year she and her young family spent living and working in Shanghai (after she and her partner accepted contracts to work at The Shanghai Daily). During their year, Katrina and her family witnessed a range of major events: a once-in-a-lifetime snow storm, a devastating earthquake which kills over 80 000 people, the Tibetan uprising, the enormous cover up of incidents at the Beijing Olympics, the melamine-tainted milk scandal and the crippling global financial crisis. These events were accompanied by a range of more run-of-the-mill situations: being scolded daily by complete strangers for not dressing her children in warm enough clothes, the struggle to find bread that looked like bread, milk that came from a cow and eggs that came from chooks, and the ability to cope with corruption and political spin in their newspaper workplaces. Written in a highly amusing and warmly appealing tone, Katrina's personal observations of daily life in contemporary China are insightful as they are as fascinating.