Shaun left in March for a spontaneous six-month voyage through the Orient. Six months later, he didn’t return. What did he expect to find by leaving everything behind?
Katie began working her way into Shaun’s heart in the weeks before he left, but she couldn’t hold him back. Would she ever hold him again?
This true story details a search for the significant questions of life that must preceed any meaningful answers. A search through beauty and love and adventure and loss for the wisdom to know when to hold on and when to let go.
Sometimes you must stare into the jaws of death to fully appreciate life. Unwilling to resist the siren song of first-hand experience, Shaun’s journey carries him into the salt spray of dangerously high seas, through frothy, typhoon-swollen rivers, and below shattered, crumbling mountainsides that come crashing down around his feet. Passion for living offered no alternatives.
This journey carries him on motorcycles through crowded city streets and wide-open tropical island beaches, on trains rolling for days across the world’s most populous country, starting over again and again and again, discovering what it truly means to live, and what living truly costs.
Shaun's engaging writing style will pull you straight into living the adventure yourself. Gather a lifetime of experience in 168 action-packed, heavily illustrated pages.
Sometimes it takes a journey of 20,000 miles to finally arrive at one’s own heart. Find your ticket to the journey inside An American in China: starting over.
Order from www.UniversityofLifePress.com
Check out Gone but not Forgotten, also by Shaun Roundy.
Or order from
Front & Back Cover
Inside Front Cover
Page 9
Page 44
Page 57
“Much,
much more than a mere travel memoire. An American in China is a novel, a romance, an
adventure, and a life guide all wrapped into one captivating package.”
“Shaun Roundy breaks all the rules and turns a profound, inspiring, intimately-told
story into surprisingly enjoyable reading.”
“WARNING! Contents may make you want to throw caution and convention to the wind. A
must-read for all travelers and everyone who has ever wondered how it might feel to ignore
your inhibitions and live spontaneously.”
“The engaging descriptions and abundant illustrations sweep you directly into the
heart of the adventure. You will feel like you’ve just climbed off a plane on the
other side of the world. When you close the book, you will remember the story as if you
had experienced the journey first hand, falling into typhoon-swollen waterfalls, wandering
the Great Wall of China alone, riding your bike through the crowded streets of Beijing,
finishing and starting over and changing your life forever.”
From Tom Romano, the professor of the graduate English course where An American in China began as an 80 page book:
"You made 'Starting Over in China' into a book
and I'll tell you that half way in I stopped reading as a teacher and was reading this
interesting cultural prose, wanting to get more and more inside the narrator's head.
I found this exuberant, ironic, funny, poignant, and sad....
"I reacted strongly to your last meeting with Kihn. Your
deep sadness that lasted only a few moments was replaced spontaneously by gladness and
thoughts of the future....
"You have written something far more important than a paper here.
You have captured the sense of wonder and adventure, much learning. This will
be very good to reread in the days ahead....
"A for the paper, A for course...."
Beauty in Life, Beauty in Pain
"The book was realistic and beautiful all in the same turn. It prompted me to
stash my fear and plan a trip to England!
"In the book you do what you want and not what you think you
should do. I love that. You have a very optimistic view tinted with the
reality of growth. You find beauty in pain. I have started really looking at
life and realizing just how beautiful it is, with *all* it's colors.
"At the end I didn't feel so much that I needed to go to
China to grow but that I just needed to really live. I kept trying to hold back the
impulse to run outside and look for beauty because I wanted to finish the book."
-- A Reader from Provo, UT
From Amazon.com:
Great story, great style!, January 17, 2002
Reviewer: mouken
(see more about me) from Spanish Fork, UT United States
The story is moving, entertaining, interesting, exciting... And I love the format: a
series of vignettes from the author's experiences in Taiwan and China and reads like a
journal of how it all felt, only better than a journal. Every other page includes a
photograph (or 2 or 3 or 4...) that really help to communicate the flavor of the people
and places you encounter in the book.
