A great, funny book by a great, funny lady.

A book review of Ni Howdy! by Desi Downey

I think all expats ask these questions in the beginning.  In Belize, I had an outhouse, the worst toilet I’ve ever had. Even European toilets have their weird things.  Germans have what can only be described as a “poo shelf”, and French toilets are operated with a button on top instead of the handle, not to mention bidets (which I haven’t encountered yet).  Everyone misses some food when they leave their home country, from peanut butter and Cheetos to liverwurst or stew chicken, depending on where “home” is.  And before you learn at least a bit of the language, it’s easy to feel paranoid, and feel that everyone is watching you. Everyone knows that you’re an expat, a foreigner. You don’t belong.  And you just want to go home. “To Nebraska”.  Or wherever home is for you.

It’s worse when you’re a first time expat, and when you haven’t ever traveled outside your home country before, the culture shock can be overwhelming.  But in hindsight, when you’ve learned a little, experienced a little, it can be funny to look back and see what a naive little tourist you were.  But what’s even more fun is to laugh at other people’s stories, and the new expats that you can poke a little fun at before directing them to the only store in town with Snickers bars and hair conditioner.

Ni Howdy! took me down memory lane, which is surprising since I certainly don’t have memories of China, never having lived there.  But so many of Downey’s experiences are similar to what any expat would go through.  OK, OK.  The squatty potties are a bit extreme.  Definitely nothing I ever had to go through.  They make the Belizean outhouse look like those heated vibrating toilets with golden handles.  But her frantic trip though the Mai cai desperately looking for some packaged gravy mix, campbell’s soup, or even recognizable vegetables?  I can relate to that.  At least where I’ve traveled there have been regular grocery stores with labeled, packaged food, even if the labels were in another language.   European languages aren’t even that hard to read.  I wouldn’t know where to start with Chinese!  She’s one tough chick.

I love Downey’s description of the other American expats there.  The corporate wives from the city who constantly talked about their interior decorations and what was happening on CNN.  The consulate people who told her that her personal experiences didn’t happen and her opinion didn’t matter.  And the newbies who told Desi her own hospital story, only half-believing it, not knowing that she was the one it happened to!  I ran in to some of the rich expats in Belize, and they made me feel just awful. Their uppity attitude, their American-style houses. Their air conditioning.  Pah!  They didn’t know anything about Belize – cold showers, tarantulas, riding the non-express bus.  I was experiencing the real deal.

I feel that Desi has experienced the real deal.  She comes across as a genuine person, down-to-earth, funny as hell.  Living in the muck of true existence, but able to look at what’s going on around her and see the irony and humor in it.   That’s cool.  I had a Canadian friend in Belize who helped me do that, but many expats are thrown to the wolves if they can’t get along with the elite expats and they can’t communicate with the locals.

More than anything, Ni Howdy made me laugh.  At Desi, at myself, at all newbie expats who jump in with two feet without checking how deep it is and end up changing their lives.  I told Downey this, and she replied:

I am so glad you laughed your ass off because that is exactly
what Ni Howdy! was designed to do: make people laugh,
especially when those people are expats so frustrated with
life overseas that they just can’t see straight and all they
want to do is cry, cry, cry (and hurry up and go home).

I like to think that while fellow expats are laughing til
they cry they are learning something about culture shock and
adjusting to…and reveling in…life in a foreign country,
too.

I’ve often said that every American should be forced to live in a foreign country, and especially a “3rd world” country for at least a year.  You come back with such a realization and appreciation of all the great things we have there.  Yeah, yeah, freedom, democracy, and all that.  But also the truly great things: Cheetos, peanut butter, washing machines and flush toilets.  These are the true pillars of civilization.   If traveling is not an option for you, nitty gritty expat stories like Ni Howdy! are a wonderful way to get an idea of what life is like in other places.  If you are an expat, or have been, Ni Howdy! will feel right at home, even comforting.

You can buy Ni Howdy on Amazon using the link below or directly from the author on her website.  Be sure to let her know you read about her book on TheNewsBase.com