The chapters of this book describe my life in Fuling, while the interspersed sketches focus on the local landscape, its history and the people. All of these sketches were written while I still lived there, and I<U+2019>ve used this structure to give the reader some sense of the two roles that a foreigner plays in a town like Fuling. Sometimes I was an observer, while at other moments I was very much involved in local life, and this combination of distance and intimacy was part of what shaped my two years in Sichuan.
