Knee Deep in a Sea Breeze

This is a beautiful autobiography about a black girl from Texas who was adopted by a pair of white teachers from Exeter, Maine and therefore landed up as a black girl who was only one of three people from non white American backgrounds in a small village with the further isolation of a speech impediment and an academic background in a largely “blue collar” environment. It covers her journey from Texas to childhood in Maine to an English teaching job in Beijing, China. It shows the contrast in attitudes/xenophobia between the Americans and the Chinese to race and also vegetarianism. It is a great look at the Chinese mentality from a westerner’s point of view and in a weird way is an American take on Black By Design.by someone with a very different character to Pauline Black