Reading and wandering

I have two books going. The first is Mountain Rain, a biography of James O. Fraser by Eileen Fraser Crossman. Fraser was an adventurous missionary who worked with the Lisu peoples of Yunnan province in the early 20th Century. Having spent 8 days in Yunnan in August, I find this early pioneer's work very interesting. The second book is Paperboy, a memoir by Tony Macaulay. Macauley grew up in the upper Shankill Road and writes about his experiences and remembrances from his childhood in the mid 1970s. The language is colloquial and can teach me how to have a north Belfast accent if I apply myself. These two thoughts are tied together by a funny blog my friend Dinah Chong just published. It is my same situation, so it is. Dinah has been at it since I met her in 1994 a Canadian born Chinese having moved to China to live and work. So it is hard to believe she still feels like she is at kindergarten level! Surely she exaggerates but it reads well and sobers my enthusiasm for when I put my own mind to learning putonghua, the language of China.