A Jaunty Descent Into Expat Hell

Had Chris Tharp titled his fictional travelogue / prison memoir / food diary something along the lines of, say, Locked Up in Asia: A Journey to Hell and Back, or, conversely, The ESL Movement: A Continuance of Colonialism? it could very well have scraped the lower rungs of a 2025 bestseller list. From Midnight Express to Locked Up Abroad, everyone and their mother seems to love hearing about obnoxious Americans or Brits getting locked up for decades off the back of their bad behavior in foreign lands. Similarly, the internet seems automatically suspicious of ESL teachers in Asia, tagging them as fringe characters who couldn’t succeed in their homelands with either careers or women and, more often than not, as no-jury-needed sex tourists. But the fact that Tharp resisted the agent and publisher who were no doubt in his ear about this, instead naming it after the East Asian island penitentiary so lavishly detailed in his tale it ends up functioning as a main character, is just the first in a long list of things to admire about this waywardly entertaining novel.