WMRA's March Books & Brews will feature Mary Ann Zehr, discussing Doors Cracked Open: Teaching in a Chinese Closed City.
Tuesday, March 11, 2025 at 7pm.
Our conversation will take place live at Pale Fire Brewing Company in Harrisonburg, and will be available to watch later on WMRA's Youtube Channel and on Facebook.
Signed copies of Door Cracked Open will be available at the event and online at Stone Soup Books - https://www.stonesoupbooks.net
WMRA's Books & Brews is made possible thanks to our series sponsor, Gaines Group Architects. The Gaines Group has offices in Charlottesville and Harrisonburg.
About the Book
In their memoir, two American Mennonite women share stories of how they connected with students at a medical college in Sichuan, China, in the mid-1980s. Their host city, Luzhou, had been designated a "closed city," which meant that foreigners could not visit it without special permission. Fran and Mary Ann were initially escorted whenever they left the campus. Even though they eventually were able to roam the city, their interactions with Chinese people were always scrutinized. Still, by hosting English conversation parties, taking taiji lessons, interacting with students in the classroom, meeting people on walks, and going on outings, the teachers made meaningful connections. Educational, cross-cultural exchanges such as the one Fran and Mary Ann participated in suggest a path forward for easing tensions between the United States and China today.
About the Author
Mary Ann Zehr has been teaching writing at EMU since the 2019-2020 academic year. She teaches first-year writing and also directs EMU's writing and communication program. Her research has focused on how students engage with sources in first-year composition. For her dissertation, Mary Ann investigated the research and writing processes of multilingual writers. Mary Ann was a journalist for 14 years for Education Week and then an English, history, and ESL teacher in public high schools for eight years. She and a friend taught English at a medical college in Sichuan, China, in the mid-1980s, and in 2024 they published a memoir, Doors Cracked Open: Teaching in a Chinese Closed City, with Resource Publications, an imprint of Wipf and Stock. Mary Ann has written essays and feature articles for the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics, Anabaptist World, and The Harrisonburg Citizen.