EVERYWHERE BUT HOME

More than the usual travelogue.

Just out of San Diego State, Rosen decided to head for Asia. But it wasn’t a typical gap year. He had a leg up in Hong Kong, where his Chinese mother was raised, having extended family there and speaking Cantonese, so it was easy to get a job teaching English (to kids as young as 3!). On vacations, he planned to travel, test his independence, and see if he could be a writer. He fitted in visits to South Korea and Taiwan, the Philippines and Indonesia—even Spain and Germany. Some revealing and quirky chapter headings: “Mr. Pill” (his young charges had trouble with the “ph” diphthong), “My 5-Year-Old Guru,” “What We Can Learn From Nostalgia,” and “A Meditation on Travel Writing.” Rosen took to teaching immediately, though he has harsh things to say about the draconian expectations that Chinese parents lay on their children. Rosen does prove a promising writer. His word choice in sometimes peculiar (“American roads are ensconced [?] by a reasonable set of traffic laws”), but he is often capable of the aphoristic metaphor (“Perspective is malleable, and culture is the hammer”) that sticks in the mind. Cultural differences are a mainstay of travel writing, and the author gets a lot of mileage out of his being a laid back, middle-class SoCal kid landing in places where the language is the least of his problems. Determinedly open to experiences, he often succeeds in getting beyond the usual travelogue clichés. He is sometimes prone to the sententious but less so than most 23-year-olds and doesn’t take himself too seriously, which makes him a truly likable, fine host. “Mr. Pill” is now headed to grad school in journalism.

Rosen draws readers into his peripatetic life with wit and sensitivity.