So Happiness to Meet You: Foolishly, Blissfully Stranded in Vietnam
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Original price
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Original price
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Original price
$16.00
Current price
$14.99
$14.99
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$14.99
Current price
$14.99
SKU 9781938849978
“A lighthearted memoir of new friends, delicious food, and culture shock . . . A brisk chronicle of a family’s (mis)adventures in Vietnam” (Kirkus Reviews).
During the 2008 recession, Karin Esterhammer was laid off from her job as a travel writer for the Los Angeles Times. No longer able to afford their comfortable lifestyle, she and her husband sold everything they had, rented out their house, and took their young autistic son to Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam. They thought that teaching English and living cheap for a year would help get them back on their feet.
Boy, were they wrong . . .
So Happiness to Meet You is the funny, inspiring, and eye-opening true account of one family’s quest to regain their financial footing while living anything but the high life. Esterhammer tells of her family’s trials, adventures, and victories in adapting to a foreign culture, overcoming the language barrier, and enduring the kind of heat and humidity that could drive a soul insane. She also paints an endearing portrait of neighbors who unabashedly stared into windows, kept cockroaches for luck, taught Karin how to shop and cook, and ultimately helped her find joy without Western trappings.
Full of love, laughter—and a surprising amount of barbecued rat—this is a “loopy adventure and charming cautionary tale for anyone who’s ever dreamed of packing it in and starting over somewhere new” (Mark Haskell Smith, author of Naked at Lunch and Baked).
During the 2008 recession, Karin Esterhammer was laid off from her job as a travel writer for the Los Angeles Times. No longer able to afford their comfortable lifestyle, she and her husband sold everything they had, rented out their house, and took their young autistic son to Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam. They thought that teaching English and living cheap for a year would help get them back on their feet.
Boy, were they wrong . . .
So Happiness to Meet You is the funny, inspiring, and eye-opening true account of one family’s quest to regain their financial footing while living anything but the high life. Esterhammer tells of her family’s trials, adventures, and victories in adapting to a foreign culture, overcoming the language barrier, and enduring the kind of heat and humidity that could drive a soul insane. She also paints an endearing portrait of neighbors who unabashedly stared into windows, kept cockroaches for luck, taught Karin how to shop and cook, and ultimately helped her find joy without Western trappings.
Full of love, laughter—and a surprising amount of barbecued rat—this is a “loopy adventure and charming cautionary tale for anyone who’s ever dreamed of packing it in and starting over somewhere new” (Mark Haskell Smith, author of Naked at Lunch and Baked).
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Book details
- Author
- Karin Esterhammer
- Imprint
- Prospect Park Books, an imprint of Turner Publishing Company
- Published
- Pages
- 256
- Formats
- Paperback
- Subjects
- Travel › Essays & Travelogues
Travel › Asia › Southeast
Biography & Autobiography › Memoirs - Topics
- Ho Chi Minh City · expat life · family memoir · culture shock · living abroad · travel writing · parenting a child with autism
- ISBN-13
- 9781938849978
About the author
KARIN ESTERHAMMER is a travel writer whose work has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Baltimore Sun, Christian Science Monitor, Orlando Sentinel, and The Standard—China’s Business Newspaper, among other publications.
Esterhammer won the grand prize in a romance essay contest for Harlequin Books. Her diary-style article in the Los Angeles Times about moving to Vietnam drew more letters to the editor than any travel story the paper had previously published. She has also had essays published in the Chocolate for a Woman’s Soul series.
Karin lives in Los Angeles.