The famous English author Rudyard Kipling once wrote :” East is east , and west is west, and ne’er the twain shall meet.”

But Kipling never read “From Beijing to California” written by Wang Rui, a young Chinese write who claims to embody the best of both worlds. “I want to grasp the essence of both Eastern and Western cultures,” said Wang, who has been in Beijing for the last two months promoting her new book.

“Form Beijing to California” is a collection of 82 poems, essays, drawings, dairy entries and short stories Wang has written over the last 10 years. Most of them are about her observations of life here and in the US. Wang was a student at the University of California at Berkeley and alter worked for various US companies.

The first part of the book has pieces titled “Campus life,” “Adventures in society,” “Spiritual home,” “Profiles of Americans” and “Local manners and feelings.”

When depicting the lives of ordinary Americans, Wang reveals her radical patriotism.

“An American old lady accused China of practicing female infanticide. I knew instantly that she had read about this from ‘Pearl S. Buck,’” writes Wang. “Then I asked whether she had been to China, and she said no. I said ‘how can you behave like a Chinese expert if you even haven’t been to China?’ she shut up immediately. “

Readers can feel Wang’s sincere love for China between the lines.

The prose piece titled “That is your Tibet” is about a painter who goes to the United States. Here Wang examines what happens to people when they leave their cultural roots. She asks bluntly: “Will you lose your Chinese part when you find the other part? Will you know everything but lose feelings?”

Wang has long been interested in the essence of culture. As a student at Renmin University, she wrote the novel “Love errand” about an affair between a Chinese girl and a foreigner. But beyond the portrayal of an emotional relationship between a man and a woman the book was also a story about human existence vividly conveyed in the descriptions of poetry stricken rural China.

“From Beijing to California” also has excerpts from conversations Wang had with foreign friends and other Chinese students. The topics ranged from freedom to relationships between the sexes.

The second half of this 500-page book is mainly autobiographical, tracing Wang’s growth from a 12-year-old girl to a career woman in three parts, namely: “reporting career,” “High middle-school life ---- summer kingdom with flowers in my hair” and “Junior middle-school --- what I need is simply pure.”

Some of her dairy entries such as “Raindrops” reveal a teenager’s sudden realization of the immense world stretching before her.

“What I feel is only the raindrops. I am walking along with summer. Sixteen, I am 16.”

Wang poured her passion into writing as a young middle school journalist. Her style here is fresh and has had critics arguing over its merits.

Whether she is writing as a young teenager, or recounting life in her hometown with her grandparents, or describing poor children in the countryside, Wang does it all with her acute journalistic sensibility.

Even articles written in her childhood possess the typical sense of humor of the Beijing dialect recalling the style of Wang Shuo, a famous Beijing novelist.

Even modest Wang said:”I must come back to China as frequently as possible. Because I need to keep up with all the latest slang.”

Although she now counts as part of a generation of overseas based authors even younger than the famous Chen Yanni, writing for Wang is not a serious mission but a fun thing to do.

“From her book we can see that what Wang Rui asks from life is colorful experience rather than comfort,” said Yang Shaobo, a literature critic from People’s Daily.

On the cover of this latest book, Wang writes:” I am running to chase the sun. My strength may be limited, but my intelligence and perseverance will never stop the journey.”