Somebody Moved My Chi: A Midlife Crisis in Asia

by Holly Davis Rao

Though I am the wife of an Indian immigrant and the mother of an adopted Indian daughter, I have always found Asia just a little intimidating. As such, when I felt my life needed a good shaking up, I asked my husband to take a one-year sabbatical in Asia. Somebody Moved My Chi: A Midlife Crisis in Asia, satirizes my determined search for my "chi", the Chinese term for the special sort of life energy that flows through us.

My book chronicles the life defining journey of a middle-aged woman who is traveling with a lot of baggage; namely a risk averse husband who insists on correcting her pronunciation of foreign words, two small children, who subsist throughout on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, a lively Filipina helper, who her daughter insists on calling "mommy", and an ungrateful feral cat named Mao.

Written in the tone of a Bill Byson's In a Sunburned Country, my story explores Asia from Tai Chi to Tai Tai, from a houseboat on the Kerala backwaters of India to a mining camp in the northern mountains of the Philippines. I ponder philosophy, from Taoism to Hinduism to Asia's newest religion, commercialism. Though largely a satire on the trials of chasing a dream with a family in tow, Somebody Moved My Chi includes many oddball historical and cultural notes about a fascinating part of the world.

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