About the Book: A snobbish French executive arrives in Shanghai with his expensive shoes and ties, expecting a short career-boosting posting before returning to Paris. Instead, he ends up deep in China’s manure-soaked fields, buying and selling vegetables, all because he has convinced himself that he can single-handedly drag Chinese agriculture into the 21st Century. It didn’t work out as he planned. The Lettuce Diaries is a revealing and humorous memoir of entrepreneurship, doubling as a primer for all seeking to do business in China, and explaining things the French executive, Xavier Naville, learned the hard way — like humility and listening to people.
