Tractorboy is about one year in the life of an idealistic, middle-class, church-based, country boy in his late teens who, due primarily to the paucity of volunteers willing to work for virtually nothing and his church connections, lucked into working for the United Nations as a civilian employee in post World War II China before the Communists had taken over the country. The story is told mainly through the letters he wrote home to his parents and immediate family about his adventures, mis- and otherwise, along with occasional contemporary comments and information supplied from memory to fill in some of the blanks. Within a few weeks after his sojourn began, out of nothing more than laziness, he gave up writing a parallel journal and let the letters serve that function.