This book is a collection of ten short stories about China. Before reading it, I thought that the short stories might become a bit repetitive since they are all about China. However, after reading it, I was sorely mistaken. Each story has its own characters with their own flaws and character traits. The stories are not particularly action-packed, but the way that the author wrote them just makes you want to keep reading. Some of them were just about one or two people, while other stories focused on whole cities or regions. My favorites were probably Beautiful Country and Gubeikou Spirit. Although it was probably hard to get the true essence of Chinese culture in an English language book, the stories were peppered with words in Mandarin that helped to preserve the meaning a bit. I didn't have much knowledge of Chinese culture before reading this, but the stories were still very easy to understand. All of the stories in this book were beautiful, and I would definitely recommend it.