Review of "Such a Small World!: My Years in Shanghai" by Georgia Noy

 At one point in her life Georgia Noy was looking at a career change - she was thinking of becoming an event planner - and instead of endorsing her plan, the career psychologist that she went to see suggested that she become an anthropologist. Reading this book it's not hard to see why; she's such a good observer of the little details that define a culture, and the way that such details can be markers and boundaries between one group's experience and anothers.

There's lots to enjoy here. It's partly a historical document, because she tells what it was like to be away from home, and in a very specific place, in the years just before the internet and the web made the experience of being anywhere in particular much less specific. Now she'd be able to order stuff online, consume media from her country of origin, keep in touch with friends and family back home with Zoom and Skype and social media...in some ways there's a big divide that runs through the life of our generation (well, I'm a bit older than her) - the time before all that, and now. If you moved away before, you wrote letters - maybe you typed them, perhaps even on a computer, but you still posted them afterwards.

Some of the narrative is about what it's like to be an expat, living as part of a relatively small and enclosed community that is separate from the life of the host country. She writes about the lack of curiousity of the Americans in her compound, and I can testify to the same thing in the group of Americans that I worked with in the early 1990s in Hong Kong...I learned more about the place in three weeks than they had wanted to do in three months.

But she's not just an expat, she's an expat Israeli, and she's exploring what she has in common with - and in what ways she in different from - other Jewish expats in the community. There are lots of things that she never had to think about before...do the kids take Yom Kippur off from school, even though she's not religious? Which seder to attend, the Jewish community one or the Israeli consulate one.

This is a really enjoyable read, with some bonus chapters about the quest to find tombstones from the now-destroyed Jewish cemetry in Shanghai, and her husband's reflections on how it was to set up a subsidiary of a foreign company, and work with local staff and clients, in early C21st China.