The world outside America's borders is a dangerous place. In fact, it's almost as dangerous as the world INside America's borders! This book chronicles all the times Louisiana-born Texas transplant Robert Harris learned that the hard way in his ten-year sojourn abroad. From cluelessly sipping cobra venom with Chinese gangsters in Guangdong Province to nearly losing his leg in a Beijing hospital, from courting a Russian ex-model to fighting against the Russian army, and from scratching out a living as a freelance tutor in Shanghai to owning a private school in Kharkiv, this rags-to-riches-and-back-again memoir takes aim at more than one country's pretensions of grandeur and is not shy about pointing out that there are emperors on both sides of the Pacific who have no clothes. Like the expat life it depicts, it is filled with shenanigans punctuated by moments of sheer terror, and features the constantly-rotating cast of misfits and oddballs one only encounters in the semi-nomadic life of those who have bid their homeland farewell. In the end, when the laughter dies away, it dares the reader to ask the same question that the author confronted. "Is America really 'The Greatest Nation on Earth' as we've all been taught?"
