The Cuttlefish

by Chris Tharp

Armed with a finished memoir and a hotshot agent, aspiring writer Zach Sullivan is convinced his big break is just around the corner. Until then, he takes a job teaching at the Bichy Bee English Institute in the East Asian island nation of Sukhan. Between bouts of relentless savaging by imps in the classroom, he navigates the kaleidoscopic side streets of the capital, Paigan, along with the strange ways of his newfound home. Zach spends his carefree days and nights in a manic blur—cruising on his 100cc Zhiwoon Super City Chipmunk scooter, downing dumplings, watching the Paigan Cloud Bank Bugbears baseball team, and carousing with his fellow degenerate expats, all while awash in an ocean of Beer Lai Lai, Sukhan’s national brew. However, just when he thinks he’s perfected the art of misbehaving abroad, things go south, and he eventually finds himself banged up in Sukhan’s toughest National Correctional Facility Number 4, nicknamed “the Cuttlefish.”

A comic adventure packed with attitude and verve, The Cuttlefish skewers the excesses of ESL expat life while also poking fun at the paint-by-numbers sin and redemption story of getting locked up abroad.

“The Cuttlefish is by no small measure the best novel about ESL teachers in East Asia. In fact, it is probably the most engaging, perceptive, and realistic depiction of life as a Westerner in Asia for several decades. Tharp has set his novel in a fictional country, yet he has captured life in a certain part of the world so well that it very nearly gave me PTSD. The schools, bars, restaurants, streets, and even prisons he writes about are depicted with an astounding accuracy, yet somehow infused with comedy and empathy. It is a world that has long deserved the fictional treatment and finally we have it—a must-read novel for those who know and love (or are merely frustrated by) the strange life one leads in this beautiful but chaotic part of the world.”
— David S. Wills, author of High White The Rise and Fall of Gonzo Journalism

“Incredibly vivid and very funny.” — Brian Aylward, standup comedian

318 pages, Paperback

Published May 29, 2025

About the author

Originally hailing from Olympia, Washington, Chris Tharp has called Korea home since 2004. He's a regular contributor to National Geographic Traveller UK as well as Asia Times. His award-winning writing has also appeared at Matador Network, The San Diego Reader, Green Mountains Review, and Foreign Literary Journal.

Chris has written two books, "Dispatches from the Peninsula: Six Years in South Korea" and "The Worst Motorcycle in Laos: Rough Travels in Asia," both of which are published by Signal 8 Press out of Hong Kong.

He lives in Busan with his wife and a fluctuating number of animals.

Reviews

[Ray · Rating 5 out of 5]

As an American living in Asia for over a decade, and a writer at that, I have read my fair share of “expat” books. This term refers to those privileged Westerners who move to generally poorer countries, which differentiates it from the typical immigrant story. I’ve read many memoirs, by men and women who have traveled the world and gotten into various bizarre or disastrous situations, and written my fair share of that sort of thing as well. More often than not, these sorts of books are about young white men (often English teachers) with similar attempts at bouts of literary hedonism, sex and drugs in the Far East and so on, some more shocking than others, with a wide range of quality writing.

Although these aren’t necessarily typical experiences, this has become something of a cliché—at least in the circles I’ve been a part of. Honestly, I get it already. If you’re willing to give up everything, it’s a surprisingly easy path to just show up in a nonwhite country and suddenly have access to an extreme lifestyle that is far more interesting than the boring drudge of Middle America. This was very interesting to me, back when it was new. But by now, I’ve just read too much of it.

In the first few chapters of The Cuttlefish, I was admittedly worried this novel was going to be more of the same. But as the story developed, it became a page-turner with unexpected twists and turns which took a sharp mind to come up with. Like many such books, the writing is about being a writer: the protagonist is Zach who is an aspiring writer. One wonders how much of it autobiographically corresponds to Chris Tharp himself. Zach is a bit of a loser teacher, a young American phoning it in at his overpaid English classes abroad while drunk or hungover half of the time. It’s a cynical take, and also hilarious. He works at Bichy Bee English Institute, at least for a while, where the children call him a pig and fantasize about murdering him. He gorges on oily streetfood dumplings, strikes out with women, there’s a bit of a romance as well, and he feels jealous over the more successful writers he comes across. If the character is autobiographical in nature, it’s definitely the self-deprecating kind.

But then it gets more interesting. One reason the novel works so well, is that it isn’t actually about a real country. It takes place in the fictional city of Paigon on the island of Sukhan, and this gives the author freedom to imagine anything without having to pinpoint any one real place. It becomes more universal this way, and Sukhan becomes a fascinating setting. This Southeast Asian nation is both modern and backwards, full of chaos and corruption and speeding scooters with traffic laws barely followed. It seems to be a mix of the Philippines and perhaps Taiwan. Maybe some Vietnam, and/or Indonesia in there as well? It’s traditionally Confucian, but also Catholic. It used to be a dictatorship, had a bloody civil war in recent memory, is currently under the threat of a Chinese invasion, and is also wealthy enough to have once had the world’s third-tallest skyscraper. And it is very, very hot (it opens during the “fire” season of the year).

Almost like a fantasy novel, there is much world-building. One chapter is devoted to the complex political history. It feels like there is a real culture referenced, with locals spouting proverbs like “You must wear the medal that the general pins to your breast,” or “like a shark’s greedy mouth.” Very clever. There’s another infodump chapter about baseball, with just as much detail, being that sports fandom matters plenty to a culture. Baseball becomes particularly central to the plot later with the introduction of a celebrity pro player in Zach’s cast of characters. The only thing that’s missing in the book is one of those high-fantasy maps on the last page, the kind that used to be so fun to pour over for readers of Lord of the Rings and it’s derivative paperbacks.

As much fun as Sukhan is, one of the most interesting parts is when Zach travels to Thailand. For the purposes of drug trafficking, by the way. Chris Tharp’s descriptions of a real place, which many of the readers attracted to this kind of novel have probably been to, are written with authority and feel eminently familiar. It’s still comedic, mostly, and the dark underworld aspect works well in the narrative.

By the midpoint, Zach gets arrested. This is when the novel gets even better. Ostensibly, he does this on purpose for the literary credit in this goal of one day selling a powerful memoir. A narcissistic, unsympathetic decision for a fool who gets what’s coming to him? Or, a cautionary tragic circumstance by a desperate artist who doesn’t deserve the overblown punishment from a cruel system? You decide. Either way, Zach’s arc shows tremendous growth as a person over the course of his journey.

I don’t think it’s a spoiler that he ends up in “the Cuttlefish,” the maximum security island prison, being that it’s the name of the book. He ends up there due to a prison break attempt, which shows how exciting the story gets. Zach’s new life as an inmate is fascinating, showing a whole other side of life which is not typical at all for the usual expats slumming it. The climax is likened to a sports movie, with a high-stakes game of baseball—prisoners versus the guards—and descends into a fantastical and satisfying ending which I shall not spoil.

The Cuttlefish is perhaps overwritten at times, but also often poetic, with lines such as: “He could think of nothing more dramatic, brutal, or absolute than being ripped apart in a feeding frenzy of ravenous crocodiles. There was something beautiful in the natural violence of it.” The crass sense of humor is one side of the writing, and then all of a sudden stunning prose comes in out of nowhere: “On the morning of May 1st, the sun rose over the Pacific like a bloated tangerine, pouring its rays over the dappled waters and bathing the rocky outcropping known as Nangki Island in a brilliant, golden light.”

The Cuttlefish is published by Plum Rain Press based in Taiwan, and is a book I’d recommend above all to the English-speaking world within Asia. It’s also a highly entertaining yarn for readers anywhere in the world.

[David Babin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Laced with spot on depictions of the slacker teacher in East Asia, Chris Tharp paints a vivid portrait of expat life in Sukhan. Through a well-paced story capturing so many quintessential experiences of those who find their way to East Asia to teach, Tharp introduces us to the laugh out loud journey of Zach Sullivan. We are transported through the sights, sounds and smells of the streets of Paigan. Smelling of shanki and soaked in beer Lai Lai, we meet our hero stumbling his way through a life filled with comfort and devoid of purpose.
A perennial failure, Zach scarcely finds himself in a predicament he can't make worse. Through a combination of misadventure and bold stupidity he finds himself high and dry in a world of trouble. The story's climax comes as a twisting and turning route that introduces a cast of both the usual suspects and completely unexpected characters. Zach world gets a good shake and we have the luxury of following along.

[Jake Rubenstein · Rating 4 out of 5]

Trying not to see too much of myself in the main character (O.O)

Because that would be missing the point. Zach is definitely a parody of the liberal-arts-educated aspiring writer who finds themself awash on the shores of a foreign country simply because they can't think of anything else to do and they want to feel some adventure in their cushy, coastal life. The tragedy in Zach's story makes his terrible choices a lot more sympathetic, and judging by the very specific cultural references, I think Tharp might be engaging in at least a little self-deprecation.

The plot was secondary to the description of expat life, for me. Definitely captures the "what the fuck am I doing here" and "did that really actually truly happen" feeling that you can only get abroad. Tharp world builds pretty well—writing a fictional East Asian country is hard enough, I really enjoyed the history and politics injected into the mix that could very plausibly have actually happened. If Sukhan existed, the Japanese would definitely have tried to take them over.

Yearning for something that gives me as much joy as a box of shanki does to Zach.

[David Frazier · Rating 3 out of 5]

The English teacher in Asia deserves a good satirical novel, and at the start of this one, author Chris Tharp dives straight into the heart of the matter:

"Do you even have an MA?” “Nah, mate, I just walked into that interview and when they asked me, ‘What are your qualifications?’ I looked at them and said, ‘I’m tall, and I’m white.’ They hired me on the spot.

The plot follows an American teaching in a cram school in a fictional, East Asian nation called Sukhan, which is based roughly 60% on South Korea, 25% on Taiwan, 10% on Laos, and 5% on rest-of-Asia. (My guess is that Tharp did not want to offend the often xenophobic Koreans, as he's lived there since 2004.) It's an absurdist take on English teacher life, where a crisis of aimlessness, alcoholism, and a creeping sense of displacement become compounded by the author's personal failure to become a published author. This dream––though the author doesn't necessarily say this––is about gaining validation from "home", which is to say the Western metropole, for who else would read and praise his writing? Success would prove those voices wrong (mostly local women) who repeatedly call him "a complete loser" who is living a "life without consequence"; and say that by leaving home he has only displacing his loser-ness in a place where he can delude himself by enjoying a healthy dose of "white priviledge." But a book deal, now that would validate everything––it would not only give him status back home, it would also cement his position in this weird Asian frontier. In other words, he'd have his have his cake and eat it too.

This half-assed crisis of meaning pushes our English teacher anti-hero into the wonderful contrivance of a truly hairbrained scheme, smuggling drugs in the hope of getting busted. This would then provide him with what his literary agent says would give him the needed "life experience" to write something sellable. I loved this. It's a smart and pretty bonkers parody of all those surviving-Thai-prison memoirs that hit bookshelves in the late 1990s and early 2000s: The Bangkok Hilton, etc.

As for the plot of the Cuttlefish, I'll stop there to avoid spoilers. I'll just say that Tharp is a good comic writer and kept me cracking droll smiles throughout. But as the scenarios become more imaginative, the novel unfortunately devolved into the literary equivalent of an Adam Sandler movie , i.e. full of cliches and about a protagonist who's impervious to any sort of deep transformation. (Think of Sandler in his "Oh geez" moment in Happy Gilmore 2, after he's pissed away his fame and fortune.) In a few ways, the book reminds me of Gary Shteyngart's Absurdistan or DBC Pierre's Vernon God Little, two other absurdist adventures, in which Joe Schmoe heroes hit rock bottom, then "figure it out" and proceed to win the game of life with nice tight endings you can wrap a bow around. In other words, The Cuttlefish never reaches the deep and trenchant ironies of something like Cyril Conolly's The Rock Pool, which, if you've never read it, is an early masterpiece of expat lampoonery.

Be that as it may, Tharp's opening on English teacher culture is pretty masterful when it comes to capturing the characters, dialogue (he's particularly gifted here), and comic absurdity of the life. For that alone, I can heartily recommend this––it's a fun, breezy read and especially worth it if you're into expat fiction.

[F.E. Beyer · Rating 5 out of 5]

This humorous novel successfully combines two of my favourite sub-genres:

1. The misadventures of a slacker English teacher in East-Asia.

2. A locked up abroad story.

Our antihero, Zach, is an American English teacher in the East Asian country Sukhan, which lies somewhere in the East China Sea. Sukhan has something of its own flavour given the geography and history author Chris Tharp creates, but it’s also clear which nation it’s a fictional stand in for. As East-Asian countries can be sensitive about how they are represented, it’s understandable why the author created Sukhan. Tharp has taken the time to lovingly describe the cityscapes of Sukhan with their neon lit, traffic clogged streets.

Like many English teachers drifting through endless classes with kids who view them as a pet bear, Zach has vague dreams of a career in the arts. In his case it’s writing. Trapped in a cycle of cultural shock, binge drinking, and self-loathing, Zach becomes desperate and goes to extreme lengths to try and kick-start his writing career. While most readers will be unsympathetic to Zach’s struggles. I found some pathos in them because his lifestyle isn’t a million miles from one I once experienced. At one stage, a young Korean woman tells Zach what a loser he is in no uncertain terms.

Supporting Zach is a large cast of dodgy characters. I had a couple of favourites. One was Buck, the Vietnam vet selling weed in Thailand. He’s lonely enough that he invites customers to his house to enjoy a home-cooked meal. Mr Schwa also cracked me up. Schwa is Zach’s loaded private student whose dad started manufacturing artificial limbs when Sukhan was a war-torn nation and hence made a mint. Mr Schwa is a good old school conservative, calling out the moral degeneracy of the younger generation while shouting Zach booze and hookers.

The book becomes something of an action thriller, but isn’t without deep insights about the kind of life Zach and his ilk lead. Adding an action-based plot, filled with baseball and restrained violence, to the struggles of a Westerner with self-esteem issues in a strange land is a winner—and should get the novel a wider readership.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was lucky to get a pre-publication copy of this book and I enjoyed it tremendously. I lived in South Korea long ago and even though this book is technically not set there (it takes place in a fictional country), I was instantly transported back to that strange land. It was, in fact, a huge dose of nostalgia. Tharp has depicted that country and described the experience of living and teaching there incredibly well. However, this is not a navel-gazing meditation on the expat experience. It is a fast-paced story that moves well beyond the classroom and into events you'd more likely associate with a thriller or disaster story.

[Gina · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have been a fan of Tharp's travel writing since he published his first book back in 2011. It was a joy to read his first work of fiction. The book kept me fully engaged and I read it very quickly. There were several times I laughed out loud and the climactic ending was super satisfying! I highly encourage anyone to dive into this novel and check out his other books.

[Violinpatrick · Rating 5 out of 5]

As an expat, I've known people like these characters. The kind of people I never would have met if not for being an expat.
Fun read. All of the pieces fit together in unexpected ways.
The dialogs are especially strong. The author develops characters effectively.