A story of personal growth through the challenges of life in modern day China

Frost Magazine is fortunate. The reviewing team sometimes receives a book for review that we fight over.

The Biggest City You’ve Never Heard Of by Dr Andy Wynn is one of these. Imagine this:

A new job, a new town. The thing is, the town is in China. It proved to be an eye opener for the author and his wife, Julie and in this memoir, written with verve, insight, humour and respect  Wynn reveals the day to day cultural experiences to which they had to adapt. Experiences which sometimes revealed uncomfortable (at first sight) norms which challenged their western concepts. Actually, delete ‘sometimes’, I think probably ‘invariably’ might fit better.

They were forced to look into themselves, accept A N Other and open their own world to the people of China, and step into theirs, living and laughing along with them.

As I read I found myself alongside Wynn, learning to swim and navigate through, and ultimately into the Chinese world,  peering, albeit second-hand, into my own inherited norms and culture, just as he did.  I realised that one is so familiar with the nitty gritty minutiae of one’s own life life: behaviour, manners, and humour that to sink into this difference is exhausting, challenging, and ultimately uplifting, and broadening. It creates  change within a person.

I found this turbulent, throbbing world fascinating, since my first and last view of China was reading The Small Woman by Alan Burgess, about a missionary, Gladys Alywood living in China in the 1930s and 40s  during massive upheaval. Indeed, she came to speak at our school, and was small, and impressive, and enthralling. You might remember the film, The Inn of the sixth Happiness. (Actually her hostelry was called the Inn of the Eighth Happinesses)

So it was high time Frost Magazine explored the changed Chinese world. So glad I bagsed the book.

Written with great thought, panache, an eye to detail, humour and above all imbued with honestly and insight  – this is a book to be savoured, enjoyed and one which will leave you pondering your own norms in this increasingly global world.

The Biggest City You’ve Never Heard Of by Dr Andy Wynn https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1081867035

Annie Clarke is the author of the Home Front Girls series. (Arrow)