Big In China

by Alan Paul
 
A music writer, Paul travels to Beijing with his wife and their three children when she is offered a job as the Wall Street Journal’s bureau chief there. He works hard at the language, gets a driver’s license, enjoys the food, writes columns, and becomes the stay-at-home parent in the foreigner’s compound, complete with servants. With a new perspective and perhaps more time on his hands, he takes up guitar again and hangs out in music clubs. After being called on stage and performing a few classic rock standards, Paul thinks he’s found a winning formula and soon puts together a band with another ex-pat and three Chinese musicians. After extensive practicing and touring, this band is named "Best New Band in Beijing" – a rather stunning feat in a usually fairly insular culture that gives no quarter to foreigners.

This is a fun, witty book about how one man’s enthusiastic embrace of the new led him to revitalize his passion for music, and to change the music scene of Beijing itself. I was bowled over by the enthusiasm and positivity in this book, something that is lacking in many Westerner-in-China memoirs. Where almost every other visitor and ex-pat dwells on the honking and crush of traffic, Paul sees it as an escapade. The exotic food, the language barrier, the culture clash – all is opportunity or adventure for Paul, not a challenge or hardship. Granted, his viewpoint could be called insular itself; as a member of a working ex-pat family and not a tourist, he probably didn’t deal with bureaucrats or xenophobes as much as some visitors. But regardless, his positivity and equitable understanding are refreshing and contagious traits. Whether it's attending to his young children's culture shock, his ailing father, his quiet and serious bandmate, or his tutor's worried vacillating about the life path he is meant to take, Paul focuses on human connections, not differences. Musing on the changed landscape and displaced people in the constant reinvention he notices in Beijing, Paul notes only, and very wisely, "everyone's view of ‘normal’ starts the moment they arrive" – he wasn't about to fret about what Beijing was "becoming;" he was too busy being involved in what it was. This is an inspiring and very unusual tale.

four stars

American Shaolin

by Matthew Polly

As a high school student in Kansas, Polly discovered the intellectual world and began to apply himself, getting into Princeton, where he became enthralled with martial arts and Chinese studies.  After reading Mark Salzman’s Iron & Silk, Polly became determined to go to Shaolin to study kungfu.  This was in 1992, when there was little information available on Shaolin, and no World Wide Web to initiate global contact, so it took a bit of courage and a bit of temerity for Polly to fly to China, without an introduction or appointment, and ask to sign up for kungfu classes at the legendary temple – but that is exactly what he did.  Arriving in Beijing, he discovers that even the Chinese are not sure if Shaolin still exists, but he presses on anyway, and to his credit, he manages to arrive.  Not understanding the Chinese tradition of haggling (or extorting the foreigner), Polly agrees to an outrageous price to be taught kungfu at Shaolin, and his journey begins.

The account of Polly’s time in Shaolin is both hilarious and informative; it’s a coming-of-age story blended with a travelers-abroad tale.  Polly experiences all the shocks that China gives the Western traveler (I was interested to see that he describes his personality as splitting in two, an American Matthew Polly and the dopey, grinning Chinese version, always struggling to process what was going on – a phenomenon similar to that described by Peter Hessler in River Town; he also describes the same resentful, helpless feeling in the face of emotionless, unspeaking, staring crowds), but takes them in stride.  Eventually he is quite at home in Shaolin, distinguishes himself in kungfu tournaments, meets a few wastrel and pretender Westerners who follow in his footsteps, and even does the unthinkable: he dates a Chinese woman.  Polly’s memoir is a terrific read, but it’s also valuable in two main ways.  One, it documents the training process and some outstanding martial arts techniques studied at Shaolin, such as the Iron Forearm or Iron Head or Iron Dong (they all involve focusing qi through breathing and then punishing the specified body part daily until it is as tough as steel), which are fascinating.  Two, in addition to all the cultural mores that Polly diligently records (the little rituals of polite language that I find enthralling), because Polly revisits Shaolin ten years later, he is able to document how China has changed – not just in the ease of transport or shopping opportunities, but the emerging confidence and higher expectations of the Chinese people.  It’s an insightful, first-rate memoir.

five stars

River Town: Two Years On the Yangtze

by Peter Hessler

A volunteer for the Peace Corps, Hessler lived in Fuling, a little town in Sichuan province, on the delta of the Yangtze and Wu rivers, for two years teaching English. As one of the few Westerners in the town since World War II, Hessler becomes the focus of not always kind attention in town, but as he learns more Chinese and more of the Chinese way of doing things, he sees his place more clearly and almost, at times, seems to fit into the daily life there. Of course, nearly everything in China is political: the literature he teaches is used by his students as a springboard to analyze their own lives, even as Hessler learns how hard it is to broach certain subjects in a culture where everyone is brought up to believe the same things.

Written in calm, meditative prose, this is an excellent entry into the annals of the Westerner-in-China body of memoirs. Hessler is wise beyond his years, and his China (or rather, his Fuling) is never of the sadly typical “oh look how foreign everything is” variety. He recognizes full well how foreign he himself is, and even during his lowest points of cultural contact – when men try to pick fights with him simply because he’s a Westerner – he reports with a detached and reflective eye. He learns rather quickly how to deal with some of the illogical bureaucracy – I enjoyed his clever face-saving solution when confronted with the lie that he was required to get a chest X-ray to participate in a foot race, for example – but he is troubled and bemused by certain other aspects of Chinese culture. He cites the lack of empathy and collectivist thinking that he saw in Chinese crowds, and the disturbing lack of fixed individual values in a culture where “wrong” thinking can become “right” as easily as it takes for an authority to say it. In his own small circle of students and friends, he hears of two deaths, a suicide, and a kidnapping (of a woman to become a forced bride). Near the end of the book, he muses that he can only brush against “the slightest sense of the dizzying past” that informed the values and behaviors that he encounters. His Fuling is, as he says, “a human place,” and that puts his memoir in the top ranks of its kind.

five stars

Every Day In Tuscany

by Frances Mayes

Not a cohesive memoir so much as a personal diary of the author’s time in Tuscany, now twenty years on since her bestseller.  Perhaps because this is her fourth volume of Tuscan ramblings (I have not read anything else by her), she does not take the time to introduce characters but rather just drops their names – is Ed her second husband?  Third?  Common-law live-in partner?  Is her grandchild’s mother her daughter, or Ed’s, or what?  Who are all these neighbors, and their relation to her?  It’s not terribly important, perhaps, but a nagging distraction for those who have just picked up this one book.  In a similar vein, she drops the names of such things as “DOC wines” without explaining that this is an official quality assurance label.  In this sense the book is, ironically, very off-putting and exclusionary, since she is trying to write as if composing letters to close friends.  It’s very poetic, adjective-drenched, sensual language, light on events and drama, and even lighter on chronological sense.  It’s predominately the scents of food and vibrant colorful flowers and thick soft warm cloths, mountains and wooden furniture and Renaissance paintings and fireside sing-alongs.

There is a brief point at which something approaching a conflict of interest or drama approaches.  She is caught up in local politics, and – and after a build-up that makes it seem as if a loved one will be tortured in front of her – she relates a slightly unpleasant event that shook her up a bit.  Her fear soon passes without further incident, as does her telling of it, and after a few pages musing on the bad things that happened to people she’s known, it’s off again with menus, museum tours, shops, flowers, page after page after page about paintings, apparently cribbed from museum tour guides or books on art history – to me the absolute pinnacle of boring reading.  All this, with no particular progression or thought to build up a coherent narrative journey: near the very end of the book is when she chooses to ramble about her struggles with the Italian language – why then? – and of course then switches gears abruptly, droning about what might have been if she’d stayed in Georgia – which can be of no interest to anyone but herself.  All this museum-visiting and garden-planting and wine-tasting and restaurant-lingering and pasta-making and house-renovating is perhaps fascinating stuff to those who read to live vicariously, but it is not for me.  In the end, Mayes’ personal prose style says very little about Tuscany itself, and quite a lot about what a wealthy woman writer from Georgia enjoys doing all day.  That, to me, is not what travel writing is all about.  The final chapter is pseudo-metaphysical pretentious nonsense (“is the universe – at some distance – shaped like the bones of a cranium?”). Boring.  Utterly boring. 

one star

A Cook's Tour: Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisines

by Anthony Bourdain

The star chef, given a TV show after his book becomes a hit, goes on a globe-trotting tour in search of the best local cuisines have to offer, attending feasts (and getting quite drunk) in Basque country, off the beaten track on Vietnam, Cambodia, coastal France, Spain, Portugal, Japan, Scotland and at fine restaurants in San Francisco.  Like his previous book, it’s a very well-written, wry, intelligent, witty look at food and culture.  The chapters on Vietnam, veering from hedonistic overdose to near shock at the squalor there, are particularly compelling reading, as is the account of having a whole lamb cooked by Tuaregs, with a “sensational, delicious, delightful” testicle as the crown jewel, as it were, in Morocco.

From a decadent and orgiastic taster’s menu at the French Laundry in San Francisco to the infamous “evil”-tasting cobra bile he manfully swallows in Vietnam (“this will make you the strongest”), Bordain savors all he can get out of life.  Brash and opinionated, he shares his iconoclastic views with relish, whether praising “bad boy” Gordon Ramsay (whom Bordain admires as a chef and a hard worker) or deprecating a vegan meal in the harshest terms (“the knife work was clumsy and inept… the vegetables were uniformly overcooked, under-seasoned, colorless, and abused”).   Bourdain is more than a food writer; he’s got the travel writer’s deft touch, bringing the essentials of a culture and people to the surface without a lot of purple prose or soul-searching.  A very enjoyable, terrific armchair journey.  

four stars

[read twice: 6/25/02, 12/5/12]

Lost on Planet China

by J. Maarten Troost

[subtitle: The Strange and True Story of One Man's Attempt to Understand the World's Most Mystifying Nation, or How He Became Comfortable Eating Live Squid]

Troost, in no way a China expert but a veteran traveler, spends several months in China, from Beijing to Hong Kong, from small villages to Ferrari dealerships in Shanghai.  Troost does his homework and gives a good account of some of the history behind the places he visits, such as how the Yongle emperor, Zhu Di, exterminated his enemies’ families “to the tenth degree.”  His own personal observations, such as just how pestilential the polluted air of China’s cities is, are of more value than statistics about China’s carbon footprint.  Troost is a highly amusing and empathetic writer and has produced a very good resource for someone’s first book on Western travel in China.

If, however, if it is one’s tenth or twentieth travel book on China, this book offers mostly the same old same old: the language uses ideograms instead of an alphabet; Chinese people have no sense of personal space; they hack big nasty loogies on the street; they eat dogs and cats and live octopus; they drive at unsafe speeds and never stop laying on the horn; they don’t form orderly lines.  And so on.  Troost has no understanding of the Chinese language and at one point gives misinformation on how dictionaries are used.  It’s hard to imagine that anyone would go to, say, Poland knowing nothing about it and come back confident enough to write an entire book, starting with such wide-eyed ignorance as “their language has a lot of k’s and j’s and l’s!”  Yet this is exactly what every new Western traveler to China does.  This is a well-written and often funny book, but a non-essential addition to the endless parade of “China sure is foreign” books. 

three stars

Kosher Chinese: Living, Teaching, and Eating with China's Other Billion

by Michael Levy

The author recounts his experiences as  an English teacher sponsored by the Peace Corps for two years in China’s heartland, the city of Guiyang in the relatively poor Guizhou province.  Until then a vegetarian who kept a kosher diet, he soon realizes that in order to get the full experience, he will have to eat as his hosts do: fried bugs, maggots, lizard wine, and maybe even dog stew.  Of course, he also adjusts to the culture shock in a variety of other ways, mastering squat toilets, understanding guanxi (arranging favors for influence), working in an education system that favors memorization over interpretation, and maneuvering around (and sometimes slamming up against) the blind assumption that authority grants validity.  It feels like home eventually, though he never joins in the ubiquitous smoking, or that particularly Asian predilection for cruelty to animals (one scene in which Levy confronts a man who is punching a bag of puppies is particularly memorable).

Written in a conversational, easy style, the book highlights all the absurdities of modern Chinese culture, trying to balance between old Communist ideals and the new capitalism.   All of Levy’s references are to pop culture (Jor-El, TRON, Carrie Bradshaw), which grates after a while and makes him seem rather simple at times, but he’s an honest narrator, examining his own assumptions and beliefs and giving real thought to how absurd his own ideals might seem to his Chinese students.  From his student who names herself “Shitty” in English because she likes its sound, to young girls who must leave school and work long days due to a lack of a few dozen dollars, this is a funny, informative, and even touching memoir. 

four stars

Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory

by Peter Hessler

The author, a journalist and old China hand, describes life on the road in a rural China that is rapidly developing, with new roads and factories being built every year.  At 420 pages, the book’s scope is much wider than the simple comedy of renting a car in a heavily bureaucratic society that nevertheless has a vibrant under-the-table economy, or the perils of driving in a country where most people behind the wheel have had very little training and eschew wipers and lights.  Hessler rents a house in a village, and describes one family's gradual rise to political and financial success.  He follows the Great Wall, visits an artist community in Lishui, and follows the creation, rise, and struggles of a bra-ring factory, and the workers who live in it.

So the title is only partially descriptive of the book, but so what? Hessler’s breadth of knowledge, empathy, sense for the human side of the story, and clear, witty writing make all his subjects interesting.  He unfolds the drama of an ill village boy, and the disjunct between his own Western eyes and China’s traditional medicine coupled with xenophobic doctors.  He shows the great cultural divide between East and West (citing “group impulse” twice to explain some Chinese behavior), but also zeroes in on the emotions and frustrations that all humanity share.  He keeps encountering a sort of superficiality in Chinese economic life, where appearance is more important than content, and where bribes and lies are a part of life, but explores the deeper currents that motivate the players.  Hessler is a gifted reporter of cultures, and this is a thoroughly fascinating look at a modern but still changing China.  

four stars

Cork Boat

by John Pollack

The author, a former speechwriter for a Congressman and Clinton, quits his job to build a boat made out of 165,000-plus corks held together by rubber bands, which he then sails with friends down the Douro River in Portugal.  It sounds like a fairy tale, and it almost is, a heart-warming true fantasy story of childhood dreams and adult sacrifice and priorities and adventure.  Pollack is, of course, a gifted writer, adept at spinning a tale and interweaving personal reminisces, anecdotes and a few strands of history here and there.  But it’s Pollack's determination and optimism, though, that make this such a sweet tale.  After the descriptions of camaraderie, community, despair and dedication, I felt like cheering along as they pulled into Porto on the final day.

Round Ireland With a Fridge

by Tony Hawks

The author, a comedian, hitch-hiked around the coast of Ireland with, as the title suggests, a small fridge in tow on a trolley. It was done for a bet, or on a whim, or just to write the book — it’s not too important. The main thing is that Hawks did the feat, and writes about it with self-effacing wit and pointed observation of the eccentric characters along the way.

In fact the book at times is utterly hilarious; Hawks is a shrewd observer and has comic pacing to spare. There’s very little “travel book” material here, in part because Hawks doesn’t delve into cultural or social differences much, and in part because most of his time is spent in pubs and inns. He’s a people watcher, not a nation watcher. His description of an impromptu sing-along, for example, is full of admiration. Hawks clearly loves the Irish people, who embraced his mad quest with true affection, and he shows the sympathetic, fun side to the Irish well. 

four stars

Walking the Bible: A Journey by Land Through the Five Books of Moses

by Bruce Feiler

As the subtitle suggests, the author retraces the Pentateuch as best he can, Bible in hand and affable expert in tow.  Mostly a disappointing book, I’m afraid.  First, Feiler is a rather laborious writer – the 424 pages are packed with rather stilted purple prose at times (his imagery is wild and uninformative: mountains resemble pies, “a drip castle,” “sweet potatoes,” “rancid hamburger meat,” or bizarrely, “melting dinosaurs” [!]).  Second, Feiler is one of those travel writers who feels the need to make every single thing an epiphany: this is okay for places like Mount Ararat, or the possible site of the burning bush; but I counted at least ten places where Feiler recorded a soul-shaking discovery (Egypt isn’t the bad guy in the Bible!, The actual spot where things happened doesn’t matter! “The desert was part of my own geography”! The desert gives you confidence by showing you how small you are! Etc etc).  By the way, he feels fear of that inner geography ebbing away not once, but twice.  Third, Feiler is a rather naive scholar.  He tries to get at the “truth” of the Bible by asking stupid questions about the context of the stories: yes, they really had birthrights that could be sold, for example.  Well of course: the stories don’t take place in a fictional universe, they’re products of their time!  It’s like approaching the “truth” of Dickens by triumphantly showing that people really did talk like his characters in 19th century London.

His naivete is deeper than that: “I basically believed there was a unified notion of God,” he writes.  What?!  He never considered that God differs in Islam, Christianity, Judaism, even within the Bible itself?!  Is he really the best person to write this book?  Obviously not.  There’s a lot that’s very informative and interesting in this tome – ruminations on and possible explanations for manna, Moses’ name, the location of the Sea of Reeds, even the abundance of quail during the exodus.  But there’s too few gems to justify slogging through this mountain of banality, really. 

two stars

The Man Who Walked Through Time: The Story of the First Trip Afoot Through the Grand Canyon

by Colin Fletcher

Fletcher, supposedly the first man to walk the length of the Grand Canyon, below the Rim (seems unlikely), wrote a book about it.  I must say I’m sorely disappointed in the result.  It’s horribly repetitive and boring, to begin with.  But my main objection is that Fletcher was determined before he left to have some sort of “break” with his old self, to become a new man, to have new heights of understanding.  So every time he had some new impression of the Canyon, he would go on and on about how “now I had finally escaped the trivia of everyday life.  Now at last I no longer needed to scrutinize the wildlife; I had become part of it,” and so forth.  And each time he would then begin to scrutinize the Canyon and have another grand Moment, and repeat himself about escaping the trivia again.  All very tiresome; still there are some good scenes here, and his final chapter, consisting of his ruminations on Man, is pretty interesting.  I just wish we had more of a memoir of what it was like to walk and live in the Canyon, not a diary of forced mystical epiphanies. 

two stars

From Heaven Lake

by Vikram Seth

As a graduate student in Nanjing University, Seth used his vacation to hitchhike home to Delhi via Tibet.  The result is a wonderful book, full of witty observations, good, clear prose and profound meditations on India and China.  It’s a fresh and interesting perspective to this American reader: there is very little comment on the lack of cleanliness or crowded conditions, as travelers in the West often harp about.  Also, Seth is happy to give the Chinese political system the benefit of the doubt: where an American traveler assumes the flaws and reports the good, Seth assumes that China works and treats the flaws as unavoidable as with any system.  He is as angered by the bureaucracy as Western travelers are, but at least he made it to Tibet.  His descriptions of that region are revealing and hopeful: the people seem happy when he talk to them, but great evils are in the very recent past, and they have not forgotten.  A rich, fascinating book.

four stars

Blue Highways: A Journey Into America

by William Least Heat-Moon

The author, an English teacher of Sioux descent, loses his job and his wife, and decides to tour the small towns of America.  The blue highways, as he calls them, are the back roads, compared to the red highways on maps (that’s changed now, of course).  Taking along nothing much, he sleeps in his truck, talking with the people about their lives, the past, their local history, their philosophies, etc.

Quoting Whitman and American Indian creeds every few pages, he makes his own views pretty clear: progress brings loss as well, military buildup is tragic, burger chains are boring as well as bad, etc.  He reports at great length the conservationist tirades of old folks and local lore experts, but doesn’t stop to talk with people with whom he disagrees, letting their brief unbidden comments about those maniacs in Moscow represent their thoughts.  All of which would be off-putting enough, but the book is way overlong at 420 pages. I realize it was a long journey (the circumference of the continental USA), but about three quarters of the way through I’d quite gotten his point about treasuring the past and traveling in order to find oneself.

two stars

Iron And Silk

by Mark Salzman

The author, a graduate of Yale in Chinese language and literature, went to China for two years to teach English and study martial arts.  This account is presented as a series of episodes, each with its own life lesson.  The book gives a clear picture of the variety of experiences he had, from the unsympathetic, even vicious, foreign-hating bureaucracy, to the incredibly open hospitality of those who had the least time to give.

The culture gap (and gape) is made readily apparent, in the student who thinks Americans must be cruel just to think up something like the Shirley Jackson story “The Lottery;” in the family of fishermen who wash and brush their teeth in the same river they use as a toilet; in the intellectual who calls The World According To Garp the most “unsuitable” book he’d ever imagined, then asks to keep it; in the man whose greatest wish is to eat and sleep well, saying Salzman’s dreams, to be liked and to excel, are easily attainable, but to eat and sleep well are beyond one’s control...  A beautiful, clever, unassuming book. 

five stars

India: A Wounded Civilization

by V.S. Naipaul

Naipul explains India, sort of.  A horribly critical book, quite racist (in the sense of making broad, derogatory generalizations about an entire people, using small amounts of evidence or even just hearsay), bordering on the vitriol of a KKK pamphlet.  And yet, a lot of what Naipaul points out seems correct.  He's an extremely sharp observer and doesn't have to make a big production out of how absurd some Indian policies are; he makes their absurdity come across by just describing them.  So he does make his point, and yet he does it so smugly, so self-assured, without reservation, that the criticism comes too hard.  The section where, for example, Naipaul is comparing individual Indians' thought to children's thought, on the basis of what some Uncle Tom of an Indian psychiatrist has reported to him, is repugnant.  But when Naipaul tells about an Indian attempt to "modernize" the bullock-cart or peasants' tools, he makes it clear why he called that chapter "A Defect of Vision."  He must have had a bad time in India.

three stars

Slowly Down the Ganges

by Eric Newby

Supposedly a tale of how he and his wife traveled down the Ganges in a variety of boats.  More like how he and his wife traveled along the basic course of the Ganges in a variety of buses and trains.  A very patchily written book, at times it would be fascinating – whether describing ancient history, the author's own reminisces, or the events of the voyage (which were also at times hilarious) – and at times it would just be page after page of pure description of ruined forts or the banks of the Ganges (cliffs, forest, silt, sandbars, ho hum).  The last chapter was particularly boring, being in toto a run-down, a bare litany, of all the landmarks on the Ramganga down to the Bay of Bengal.  Too bad; it had a lot of potential. 

three stars

Mississippi Solo

by Eddy L. Harris

In his first travel adventure, Harris goes down the Mississippi, from Lake Itasca to the sea, in a canoe. It was very good, although not up to par with his later two books. The style was patchy and the narration overall was barer than Native Stranger's – less description, less musing and philosophical reflection. Nevertheless, an engrossing and exciting book, if only because of the description of the feat itself.

three stars

South Of Haunted Dreams

by Eddy L. Harris

Another travel book by Harris, a black author, this time about a motorcycle trip through the U.S. South. I thought it was almost as good as Native Stranger. It was told with the same poetic description, the same raw honesty. He shows great skill as a writer by arranging his experiences and thoughts in such a way as to form a novel-like construction, with buildup, climax and denouement, even though it is (for the most part, certainly) non-fiction. The pure honesty of Harris' presentation & the depth of his thought made this book no disappointment.

four stars

Native Stranger: A Black American's Journey into the Heart of Africa

by Eddy L. Harris

The author, an black American, travels through Africa. It is a triumph of superb writing and philosophical reflection. Quite possibly the best non-fiction book I have ever read. It is a travel book, but so much more – not as much about Africa as people, skin color, race, generosity, need, pride, and everything else that makes people human. The description was incredible: I could put the book down for long periods of time, and when I started again was transported instantly back to where Harris was, with no gap in the experience. It is about the generosity of people who have nothing, the patient endurance of people who have been conquered. Finally, Harris' honesty was astounding: he described his neuroses about germs, his anger, his sadness, his happiness in South Africa which astounded him, the tyranny of black officials, his moments of luxury amidst poverty – all this without flinching, clearly and calmly. A perfect travel book.