"If you're reading my book, I'm gonna consider you my friend. It ain't like you gotta meet me 'cause I'm kind of a bad influence, but if you keep me at a distance you could probably be my friend."

Buffeted by this cheery attitude, Gertie McDowell, a naif from backwoods Kentucky, pens her diary--a series of bizarre misadventures that begin when she goes to Hollywood in search of movie-star fame. Arriving in Holywood, she meets the Nose, a local eccentric who convinces her to star on his foot fetish site. When Gertie balks, the Nose convinces her that Meryl Streep, Audrey Hepburn, and Charo all got their start the same way.

Eventually disenchanted with the Nose, Gertie abandons her foot-fetish "stardom" and returns to backwoods Kentucky. However, her misadventures only accelerate. She is imprisoned for muling powdered meth after "trusting the wrong sort of fella." She stirs up a prison population when she makes a frock for the cross-dressing warden. Released from prisom, she is pursued by hitmen from a Merxican drug cartel and takes refuge in the Witness Protection Program. Advised by the FBI to keep a low profile, she hides out in San Francisco where is pursuaded to ride a leather-fetish float in the Gay Pride Parade. Gertie concludes that "where keeping a low profile was concerned, I weren't doing a very good job."

After conspicuously seeking the ping-pong championship of San Francisco's Chinatown, Gertie gets kidnapped by white slavers and barely escapes the auction block. She manages to retreat to Texas, where she hopes to live peacefully, but in Texas she meets Armadillo Slick, a wiley hustler who convinces her to hustle bets as a mechanical bull rider.  

Reviewers describe The Ping-Pong Champion of Chinatown as a zany yet tender book that will have you laughing out loud. 

Manhattan Book Review gives it 5/5 stars. https://manhattanbookreview.com/product/the-ping-pong-champion-of-chinatown/