New Zealand writer Frank Beyer (who goes under the name F.E. Beyer) talks to John about novels featuring a much maligned creature: the Western English teacher in East Asia. Frank is something of a connoisseur of these stories, and his latest novel, The Crushed Can, adds to the canon. This fun page-turner is set in Shanghai in 2002, where a young protagonist called Kurt has just made his life more complicated by taking in his friend’s former girlfriend, a Chinese woman called Ronghua.Exploring the tropes of the foreign English teacher in China, Japan, and South Korea, Frank talks about: Tuvalu by Andrew O’Connor; White Monkey by Carlos Hughes; Foreign Teachers by Sam Wade, American Fuji by Sara Backer; and River East, River West by Aube Rey Lescure.Other titles discussed or mentioned include: Peter Hessler’s acclaimed River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze, which gets some good-natured ribbing (and is the subject of a running joke in The Crushed Can, where it appears as Lake Town by Paula Hess). Also mentioned are Hessler’s Country Driving (2010) and Other Rivers: A Chinese Education (2024).John mentions books he’s been involved in publishing: The Cuttlefish by Chris Tharp, Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside by Quincy Carroll, and Tom Carter’s An American Bum in China. He also praises John Dalton’s Heaven Lake.To learn more about or purchase The Crushed Can (and Frank’s first two works, Buenos Aires Triad and Smoko) visit Amazon. You’ll find some of his articles and book reviews at www.febeyer.com.

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“What did the council decide on item 42?” — answered with the speaker and the moment.

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