My websites are nancypine.info and nancypine.com. It’s a long way from the log cabin in the woods of New Jersey where I grew up, to husking corn in a Chinese village many decades later, but it has been a great adventure! After I had traveled hundreds of train miles, had long conversations with friends and shivered in university hostels for many years in urban China, I was introduced to a hard-driving, stubborn Chinese reformer. Since I had a deep desire to understand life in the Chinese countryside, I eventually joined a teaching project in his village. So began years of interviews, traipsing through unknown villages and out of the way rural areas. The results - One in a Billion: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey through Modern-Day China. My more boring bio? Nancy Pine has travelled and studied in China for decades. She holds a PhD in education and is one of the leading American experts on Chinese early childhood education, which led to her book, Educating Young Giants, published by Palgrave Macmillan. She has taught everything from kindergarten to graduate school, and founded the Bridging Cultures US/China Program. At Mount Saint Mary’s University in Los Angeles, she has advised the administration and faculty on China. Nancy Pine gives talks nationally and internationally and has won numerous awards including a City of Los Angeles honor for her cross-cultural activities. Her current book, One in a Billion: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey in Modern-Day China, carries the reader into the heart-wrenching, and ultimately uplifting story of one outspoken man who illuminates the souls of a billion ordinary Chinese citizens. Val Zavala, an award-winning KCET journalist, says: “In One in a Billion, the complex history of a complex country unrolls with the ease of a deeply textured Chinese scroll.”
