I received a chatty e-mail from Jennifer Sept. 19.

She brought me up to date about their “little rental home” in Oakland, Calif., the teaching she and her husband Dan are doing and their three kids — same number as us.

Jack turned 14 this summer, like Logan. Cece attends the University of Michigan. Kate graduated from U of M and is serving with City Year Detroit, a division of AmeriCorps.

Jennifer? Not my classmate Jenny Leets or my niece or the one on the wall you call at 867-5309.

Not Jennifer Aniston or J.Lo.

Not even the actress Jennifer Runyon, though I felt Up the Creek trying to place the Jennifer in question.

All was revealed within a few paragraphs because this Jennifer has a book dropping. Granholm, our former governor!

Sure, I interviewed her one-on-one when she visited the Pokagon Band at Rodgers Lake and schlepped around with her entourage when she spit pits at Treemendus, stopped by the diner in Marcellus and toured K&M in Cassopolis, even interviewed her husband, First Gentleman Dan Mulhern, on mentoring, but we were never on a first-name basis.

Their book is called “A Governor’s Story: The Fight for Jobs and America’s Economic Future.”

“It’s a story that takes place on at least three levels: the stories of middle class Michiganders trying to find their way in the new economy; our own personal story of the extraordinary challenge of leading in these times; and, we believe most important, a story of where the country needs to go — all drawn from Michigan’s experience as the poster child state for the changes in the nation’s economy.

“The current challenges facing President Obama and our nation are, on a large scale, what we experienced first in Michigan. The upcoming budget debates in D.C. and the impending presidential election will be hugely important for our country, and we believe the ideas in A Governor’s Story can provide insight for the nation …Many of you lived this story with us; your friendship and love for Michigan essentially helped us to write it.”

See www.agovernorsstory.com.

A current elected official forwarded me NBC’s heartening report of evidence that amid mounting Chinese costs, jobs are beginning to move back to the United States.

Ian Williams reported from Dongguan, southern China — an area once tagged the workshop of the world.

Williams says of Bill Green: The thuds, bangs and sparks of the factory floor were the same; the metal cut, twisted and welded in the usual shower of sparks. It had all become very familiar from five years of visiting factories in China, outsourcing his production of industrial cabinets, chasing lower costs. For years he had generally been happy with the results, but no longer.

“If they don’t sand the stuff down, that will come back through the damned paint and we’ll have an issue here,” he said, running his finger along the edge of one unfinished cabinet.

“None of these problems are hard to fix,” Green said. “We work to these standards all the time in the United States.”

Green owns a metal-processing factory in Mobile, Ala., where his workforce shrunk from 60 to just 25 as more work, on cabinets and also on lamps, was outsourced to China.

But after this trip he made a decision — to bring at least some of that work back home.

“Everybody knew you could get anything made in China, and make money on it back in the United States. But things are changing. Prices are going up, and its making it harder to import stuff from here.”

More than that, attitudes were changing.

“Used to be when you’d come over here everyone wanted your business. Now it’s harder and harder to get them to cooperate with you.”

Green is planning to shift the final assembly of cabinets back to Alabama, and will divide much of the lamp production between India and the U.S.

There are tens of thousands of factories, sprawling for miles from the Hong Kong border, their stained peach and white tiled walls lining motorways.

Laundry hangs in the windows of the adjacent dormitories that have been home to millions of migrant workers, the foot-soldiers of China’s export machine.

Due to soaring labor costs, many Chinese exporters are turning down orders from Europe and the United States.

“China as the world factory, the best time is behind us,” said Tao Dong, chief Asia economist with Credit Suisse.

Labor costs are soaring by 40 percent a year, as migrant workers are becoming pickier, since there are more job opportunities at home.

China’s one-child policy means there is no longer a huge pool of young, dexterous workers.

Bank lending is tightening and China’s currency is appreciating by around 6 percent a year against the U.S. dollar, not quickly enough for U.S. and European policymakers, but sufficient for factories on low margins to feel the pain.

This was reinforced Sept. 21 when I heard Kosciusko County Economic Development Director George L. Robertson from Warsaw, Ind., at Inovateus, the Cassopolis business center.

“Higher fuel costs — when you approach $4 a gallon gasoline — you mess up the economics of the entire global supply chain. That means things change. Companies are moving back to America because what they save in China they can’t make up for in freight to the West Coast by boat and then by rail or truck across the country.”

23: Percent rise in median pay of U.S. CEOs in 2010.

The median is now $10.8 million annually — 266 times the average U.S. income.