The wife of a veteran British diplomat combines antic sketches of dogs with sayings from Confucius and Lao Tzu in her latest book. Mike Peters reports.

Her husband is a longtime British diplomat in Her Majesty's Foreign Service. She's in her mid-50s with a passport that sings of embassy postings, starting with China in the early 1980s. If the picture in your mind is a stodgy matron with a stiff upper lip, you haven't met Cherry Denman.

An illustrator with a quick wit and quicker laugh, she delights in drawing a quick moustache on a sketch of her queen, and she's fascinated by the sudden rush of middle-class Chinese to pamper pets, particularly dogs.

That phenomenon inspired her latest book, Way of Dog: A Canine Guide to Ancient Chinese Wisdom, in which she pairs antic sketches of pooches with sayings from the likes of Confucius and Lao Tzu.

"Suddenly, dogs are everywhere," she writes in the introduction.

"Dressed in designer couture, carried around in bicycle baskets and monogrammed handbags, they rule the stylish roost that is the new China. They are an essential accessory to an increasingly status-conscious world."

She says her sketches came about from doodles of her observations during her current sojourn in China, a three-year stint she and husband Charlie are about halfway through. Dogs are just one difference she sees a quarter-century after her first visit, this time without her two children under her wing.

The most eye-opening change, she says, is the young Chinese, who have so much independence (and money) compared to their parents in their youth.

"Last week I saw a gay guy in a glorious camp outfit and makeup hailing a cab - with a dog - and I was just amazed," she says during a dim-sum lunch in Sanlitun. "Unimaginable in Beijing in 1985. The kids are amazing - I just love them."

In one of Denman's previous books, Diplomatic Incidents: Memoirs of an (un) Diplomatic Wife, she learned that illustrating is more fun than writing, she says. In that book, she merrily recounts the challenges of living abroad - from finding a holiday turkey in 1983 Beijing to sharing an overnight sleeper on the train to Xi'an with an ancient Chinese general and his interpreter. She admits that her efforts to learn Chinese have been a total loss, but blesses her first language tutor for teaching her to love Cantonese film-gossip magazines (Where else can you read: "She's the richest girl in China, but she's been locked away for eating her own baby"?)

That 2010 book is an intimate narrative, sometimes gossipy and sometimes Advice From Aunt Cherry. ("Storage is for sissies," she writes in an ode to ruthless packing.) With her cheerful irreverence about toilets, packing, almost anything French and multicultural Christmas Eve Mass ("Rubbeesh, they are rubbeesh," an African choir member mutters as Iraqi carolers belted out Adeste Fidelis), you'd think the British Foreign Office, which took a look at the book before publication, would have collectively gasped and fainted at the regular appearance of phrases such as "snotlike" and "naked Ukranians".

"They were great," she says of her husband Charlie, the first reader, and his bosses. "They pointed out about two small things that might have been taken the wrong way, and that was it."

In the book, Denman presents herself as borderline forlorn upon arrival in China as a proverbial trailing spouse. "Overnight I felt as if the word 'appendage' had been tattooed on my forehead. Anyone who has seen Lost in Translation will recognize that emptiness of being alone in a foreign country when your husband or wife goes off for their first day at work. It always takes a few months of marking territory and renegotiating borders before the status quo is re-established. Even so, after 25 years the feeling of trotting behind your husband on a lead never quite goes away."

The next weekend at a Christmas bazaar, however, it's Cherry who's out front at a booth crammed with artwork, books, holiday cards and aprons emblazoned "Old Dragon" across the chest, while Charlie stands in the background with a smile, ready to lend a helping hand.

In fact, once the initial strangeness of Beijing eases and the first bout of homesickness is fended off, the young Cherry's native self-confidence reasserted itself. Whether addressing a fire dispatcher as a "supercilious cow" or her own doubts about where her masseur's hands might be going, the author plows through her tale of expat life while raising two children with fearless good humor.

Meanwhile, she's stayed busy as a professional illustrator. Her books include a collaboration with Chinese writer Hong Ying on a bilingual children's book, The Girl From the French Fort. Denman also included many drawings within Diplomatic Incidents, from the arrival of her children's nanny "wearing nothing but high heels, a very short skirt and a black, lacy bra" to her "home-help from hell" cook - sketched with a witch's hat and grasping a pop-eyed frog by the throat.

"But I charge double if someone asks me to draw a cat," says the author of Way of Dog with a grin of delicious malice.

"I hate them."

Contact the writer at michaelpeters@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily USA 12/17/2014 page9)