故事动人。但是中间的细节可能让你笑破肚皮。中国女人的缠足与埃及女孩的割礼一样不人道。

我写了一段放在英文博客LinkedIn。

Chinese traders in Egypt.

          Stuck at home, I was depressed to read stories about US-China trade war and Covid-19, until I read chapter 18 of Peter Hessler’s The Buried.

Two uneducated lingerie traders from Zhejiang, China, built a profitable plastic-bottle recycling factory in Asyut, Egypt. It employs 30 locals and has reduced landfill waste. A huge success story.

I laughed the whole time I read the chapter: the Chinese migrant workers’ poor command of Egyptian Arabic, their lack of understanding of local culture, and an Egyptian bride’s shopping for lingeries with the assistance of her mother, fiancé and teenager brother - all in the presence of three shop workers and a male foreign journalist.

I was moved by the story of a tragic accident which had almost killed the Chinese man, of his toughness and of the migrants’ funny interactions with locals.

Peter lived in China for a decade. And he wrote about the contrast. “The Chinese practised their own fetishistic equivalent of female genital mutilation, breaking the bones of girls’ feet and keeping them painfully bound throughout adulthood.”

My 87-year-old mother was one of those girls in 1943. The Communist banned that practice, but six years too late for my mother.

英文书：The Buried: An Archaeology of the Egyptian Revolution.

By (author) Peter Hessler.