Our first break in introducing Beautiful Su involved access to local media, specifically the city's main daily newspaper, Suzhou Ribao. Ms. Cai Qing, a bilingual reporter and editor of the paper's once-weekly English-language page, Suzhou Review, interviewed me at length on our first meeting. Her article, published on May 16, was previewed on the paper's first page and printed in full on Page 4. The headline reads: "American Big Uncle Writes Beautiful Suzhou". Big Uncle??
The very next day, we were contacted by a news reporter from Channel 1, Suzhou Broadcast System, resulting in a one-minute report that same evening. The following Monday, May 15, Cai Qing published a second story, this time in English, for that day's Suzhou Review section of the Ribao.
On Saturday, June 10, I gave the first two of more than a dozen book talks on Beautiful Su. Both were held on the same day, the first one in the afternoon at Zuo Wang Shu Fang bookstore in the SIP, and then in the evening at the Suzhou Bookworm in Shiquan Jie. Despite it having been a rainy day, all 35 copies we had at hand were sold out by that evening. To my surprise, more copies were sold to Suzhou-resident Chinese than to Westerners, a pattern that would continue throughout the summer.
As news spread about the foreigner who had spent eight years researching and writing a general history of Suzhou, and being the first one to do so in over one hundred years (since Reverend Hampden DuBose's pamphlet "Beautiful Soo" in 1911), I was delighted to arrange more book talks around the city. Most were at book shops of various kinds, but others took place in coffee shops and even in English-language-learning centers and clubs. Remarkably, a number of book copies went to parents, who told me that they hoped their children would enhance their English skills by reading a book that challenged their language knowledge while addressing a topic -- their hometown -- that would be of directly personal interest.
Around mid-summer, I was contacted for an interview by a local journalist named David Ramirez who writes for OPEN Magazine, an English-language monthly out of Shanghai. David's Q&A with me resulted in a two-part series published in successive months as his regular monthly column in OPEN.
So many other wonderful things happened this summer because of Beautiful Su. To name just a few of them, I led five different history-oriented walking tours, each one attended by anywhere from a dozen to twenty individuals, focusing respectively, and in order, on Shantang Jie, Xumen Gate / Wannian Bridge, Confucius Temple (Wen Miao) / Canglangting Garden, Panmen Scenic Area / Japanese Customs House, and Twin Pagodas / Tongdeli Alley / Chai Yuan garden (new Museum of Education).
Copies of Beautiful Su were formally donated to the local historical archive office and to the main branch of the Suzhou Library, where the book can now be found in the Library's online catalog. Our six months in Suzhou closed with a guest lecture to China Studies faculty and students at Xi'an Jiaotang-Liverpool University (XJTLU) in the SIP, leading since then to an invitation to contribute an opening chapter to a multi-authored, XJTLU work planned for 2018, tentatively titled China's Urban Transformation: Suzhou in Transition.
We are planning to return again to Suzhou for the spring and summer of 2018, continue presenting Beautiful Su to interested readers, leading more walking tours, and hopefully speaking at additional venues, including educational institutions as well as book shops. I am particularly hopeful to speak more with high school and college students and introduce them to Suzhou's fascinating and important history.
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