There Goes English teacher: A Memoir, by Karin Cronje

On a ‘considered’ whim writer Karin Cronje packs up her life and flies across the world to teach English in a small Korean village. The result is a poignant, heart-achingly funny, scandalous, and deeply moving account of incomprehension, awe, dislocation, belonging, the sticky business of identity and the loss of it, sanity, and the loss of that . Characters like Dae-ho, her guru man, who reminds her to breathe; dazzling Mae and her bar, Goldfinger; Leona with her rattle snake tongue, and all the others she can’t understand are now the people in her life. Back home is her son who has fallen in with a suspect character and her friends who now seem like dung beetles each rolling their own ball of muck. They, together with the tip of the African continent, are about to disappear into the sea. She has only herself. And that sure as hell feels inadequate. With her inimitable voice Karin Cronje shocks and delights as she digs deeply into the full catastrophe of being human.