Doors Cracked Open

"""To read this highly ethnographic memoir of teaching English in the closed city of Luzhou in the 1980s is to have a window on the tensions and contradictions inherent in being a 'foreign expert' in a place both eager to engage the world and wary of doing so. Martens Friesen and Zehr approach their subject matter with humility and humor, thoughtfulness, and respect."" --Laura Hostetler, professor of history and global Asian studies, University of Illinois at Chicago ""The authors provide a marvelous ringside seat to the efforts of two young American teachers in the 1980s to break down walls with students in China as the long-isolated country was beginning to open up to the outside world. Their moving stories are a reminder that people-to-people exchanges could again serve as a roadmap to boost connections between Chinese people and Americans today as suspicion and rivalry poison ties between Washington, DC, and Beijing."" --Murray Hiebert, author of Under Beijing's Shadow: Southeast Asia's China Challenge ""As the only foreigners living in Luzhou during the 1980s, Martens Friesen and Zehr witnessed the initial, tentative opening of post-Maoist China. Along the way, their years there teaching English also opened doors in their own lives, revealing questions and possibilities of identity, faith, and friendship. In Doors Cracked Open, they offer the gift of stories--insightful, entertaining, vulnerable--of cross-cultural encounters and self-discovery."" --Steven M. Nolt, director, Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies, Elizabethtown College ""Animating this book is the authors' large-heartedness: large enough to encompass grace for their younger selves chafing against restrictions, and grace for their Chinese students, colleagues, and 'handlers' struggling to assess how quickly and far barriers to formerly forbidden connections with foreigners had been moved. Americanness and Chineseness undeniably shaped these encounters, but the real and timeless story is how forces like family, faith, and individual temperament determine the risks we take to understand and befriend each other."" --Ann Martin, former East Asia director, Mennonite Central Committee"