My name is Joel Aufrecht. I live in Seattle, Washington. I like to watch movies, and Seattle is a good town to be a movie lover. We have a lot of good, old movie theaters, we have the biggest film festival in North America, and we have a lot of rain. After I watch a movie, I like to talk and think about it. One day I started writing down what I think, and emailing my thoughts to my friends. Soon, I had about fifty friends, family, and strangers on my movie review mailing list. One day, they got this message:

  From: joel@aufrecht.org
  Date: Sat, 4 Aug 2001 09:24:03 -0700
  To: joel-in-china@aufrecht.org
  hello and welcome to the mailing list

  I'm going to Beijing for a wedding Aug 13th.  Then I'm headed to
  Guilin (in Guangxi province, in south-central China).  In Guilin, I
  will teach English at Guilin Institute of Electronic Technology
  I expect to be there for at least 6 months, possibly a year or more.

In the event, I went to Guilin for a semester, came back to Seattle for six weeks, and then went back for a second semester. I laughed, I cried, I went to Shanghai. While I was in China, I kept a journal. That journal is the basis of this book.