FOREIGN DEVIL GIRL IN HONG KONG is Released
By: Christina Mancuso May. 09, 2013
In 1959, ten years after the Chinese Communist Revolution put the country firmly behind the Bamboo Curtain, a young American missionary, Ruth Epp, landed on China's very doorstep-the British colony of Hong Kong.
In Foreign Devil Girl in Hong Kong, Epp details her first four and a half years in the colony. Beginning with her journey by cargo ship to Hong Kong, Epp narrates her adventure of answering God's call to China.
Illustrating the difficulties of fulfilling missionary work as a lone "foreign devil girl," Epp explains life surrounded by poor working-class people, mostly early refugees from China, whose language, culture and life experiences were different from her own. Struggling to learn perfect Cantonese to the challenges of answering difficult questions about God, Foreign Devil Girl in Hong Kong combines life-threatening danger, laughter and loneliness for all ages to appreciate.
Welding vivid pictures of the people whom she knew into the memoir, Epp presents her story in an upfront, humorous way that lets readers see a real God at work in a collection of lives.
"Few other westerners spoke Cantonese without an accent and lived where they did," says Epp. "I was close enough to see and care about the effects of their poverty, the strain of a sudden huge influx of new refugees from China, and their very real fear of a Chinese invasion of the colony."
Foreign Devil Girl in Hong Kong
By Ruth Epp
ISBN: 978-1-4624-0308-0
Pages: 168
Price: (SC) $13.99
Available at http://www.amazon.com and http://www.barnesandnoble.com
About the author
Ruth Epp, née Smith, went to Hong Kong as a missionary in 1959 and made her home, until 2005, among the grassroots people of whom she writes. Her first book, Countdown Collage: Hong Kong in Transition, published in1997 when Britain handed Hong Kong back to China, was a unique portrayal of the many ways in which "The Handover" affected grassroots people. She was married in 1964 and has three children and ten grandchildren. She and her husband, John Epp, are currently based in San Pedro, CA, from where she returns once every year, continuing her work in Hong Kong.
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