Tale is flawed, fun

Please not be spitty at writer making China people talk funny. He a silly bird, so put feet high, eat tomato chips and drink cock on ice and ha ha at his goosey book.

Pardon me, but you'll have to endure passages rudely similar to that if you want to enjoy Daniel Asa Rose's medical thriller, love story and travel epic. He defends himself in an author's note, saying his literal quoting of Chinese English is newly fashionable and "meant to transmit the spirit of modern travel -- equal parts charming and alarming."

That's a fair way to describe "Larry's Kidney: Being the True Story of How I Found Myself in China With My Black Sheep Cousin and His Mail-Order Bride, Skirting the Law to Get Him a Transplant -- and Save His Life." It alarms me because I can't help but suspect much of it is not exactly literally true. The dialogue is so intricately astonishing that the author had to have carried a hidden recorder -- or reconstructed it beautifully.

It charms because its life-or-death mission is undertaken by two pathetically endearing characters, adrift and stumbling in a foreign land, warming to each other as we warm to them.

The failing Larry is a high school dropout, a marginal mobster, a diabetic on dialysis who lives off Girl Scout cookies he packs in his luggage. He feels shortchanged by his family, but after a 20-year estrangement turns to his closest relative with a plea for help in snagging a Chinese kidney. He's low on the U.S. list for a transplant, but knows that China transplants plenty, mostly from executed criminals.

Dan describes himself as an "investigative memoirist." He visited China a quarter-century earlier, ending up in jail for reasons we never learn. He grudgingly agrees to shepherd his sick cousin through a medical system that neither understands.

The main challenge for the awkward pair -- apart from language, smog, culture and cluelessness -- is that kidney transplants to Westerners are prohibited in China. But as one Chinese professional advises them, that's "only true so-so." They prove that forecast correct in a series of madcap encounters and misadventures, interspersed with long, fuzzy get-to-know-you conversations.

Larry carries with him everywhere, as a handy tool, a plastic spork from KFC. Dan roams the streets at night, connects fleetingly by phone with his family back home and falls chastely in love with a helpful Chinese lovely. Meanwhile, Larry waxes and wanes over an inscrutable would-be bride he seduced stateside on the Internet. She tends to him in a hospital room where he languishes for weeks with nothing more erotic than pistachios.

You'll laugh. You'll cry. You'll be sorry when the adventure is over. And you won't forget these two, or those funny-talk China people.

Susan Ager is a former Detroit Free Press columnist at susan@susanager.com.