Ma Jian's "Red Dust", one of the few pieces of travel lit by Chinese writers to find a Western audience. The 50th anniversary of On the Road this week has inspired a flurry of Kerouac- and road-trip-related articles. Apparently Kerouac has quite a few fans in China as well. Eric Abrahamsen writes in the Chinese lit blog Paper Republic that "there are readers who wouldn’t know Hemingway’s beard if it turned up in their soup, but by god they could point out Vesuvio Café on a SF street map."
In an article last week in the WSJ on driving along the Silk Road, Gordon Fairclough writes about China's growing hunger for road trip literature. He mentions Liu Yilin's '"Go the Distance Now," a book chronicling five years spent traveling around China by car." Abrahamsen in Paper Republic adds:
In which I recap all the books I've managed to read in the past month. This month: 4, because we were leaving New York and had to make the best of the time left, and because getting rid of an apartment full of stuff is very, very, very exhausting.
On Beauty, Zadie Smith - Both hilarious and empathetic, this novel's all-too-human characters fall victim to surface beauty in both direct and indirect ways. Smith effortlessly vears from one character's thoughts to the next, personifying uppity British academics as successfully as young inner-city black males.
The Disappointment Artist, Jonathan Lethem - In this series of linked essays Lethem expounds on his cultural influences from his early teens to the present, including Kubrick, Godard, Cassavetes, Philip K. Dick, Raymond Chandler, Don Delillo, The Talking Heads, David Bowie, and many others. Rather than just name-dropping, the essays reveal that submergence in art was a way mold himself into a writer, to cope with his hippie upbringing, and to forget his mother's illness and subsequent death during his most formative years.
"Increasingly of late, and particularly when I drink, I find my thoughts drawn into the past rather than impelled into the future. I recall drinking sherry in California and dreaming of my earlier student days in England, where I ate dalmoth and dreamed of Delhi. What is the purpose, I wonder, of all this restlessness? I sometimes seem to myself to wander around the world merely accumulating material for future nostalgias." ~Vikram Seth, From Heaven Lake: Travels Through Sinkiang and Tibet
Sonya Larson wrote a funny short entry on Grub Street's blog entitled Toilets and Literature, on why short stories aren't more popular in America despite our ever-shrinking attention spans.
Since visiting other uncultured toilets, with many sighs of disappointment, I’ve wondered why not every household toilet has a Best American Short Stories propped up on the tank. Why don’t people read stories on the subway, or in line at the bank, instead of the novel they complain to have been reading since 1998? In short, why aren’t short stories more popular?
Indeed, it does seem that we prefer our other literature to be shorter and shorter. A recent Slate article estimates that the average Washington Post story is 25% shorter today than 30 years ago. Many glossy magazines nowadays are so photo-centric that words themselves are merely decorative (ironic, no?) An editor at a magazine where I had interned said articles slated for a feature can become shortened to a well article if the photos aren't good enough, and a mediocre tiny blurb can become bigger features if the photos are amazing.
No, these aren't quite beach reads, but neither are they 500-page tomes by Dickens or Hardy you had to read during your high school summers.
For anyone thinking about visiting or moving to China, it doesn't hurt to read up on the country via literary non-fiction. Some of my reads from the past year:
River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze, by Peter Hessler (2001) Peace Corps volunteer Peter Hessler spent two years in Fuling in Sichuan Provice teaching English. His account of his experience is more observant, introspective, and humble than almost anything you're likely to encounter.
Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China's Past and Present, by Peter Hessler (2006) After teaching in Sichuan, Hessler moves to Beijing and becomes a freelance correspondent for a number of US publications. He interweaves a story of oracle bones excavated in Anyang province with the lives of 2 former students and a Uighur money trader, all migrants who are, in their own way, searching for better lives against China's rapidly changing climate.
The PEN World Voices (NY Festival of International Literature) was in town a few weeks ago. I had decided to buy tickets for a panel discussion called "Voyage and Voyeur: Travel and Travel Writing"; the speakers included Alain de Botton and Ma Jian. Whenever I plan to go hear a writer speak, I like to prepare by reading at least something he/she has written. Thus I bought and started reading Ma Jian's Red Dust.
Mother Jones called it a "Sino-beatnik travelogue" and Time Magazine said it was "the Chinese equivalent of On the Road." As much as I like Kerouac, Red Dust is one of those books that captures the need for escape and the sublime freedom of travel, without the ego of many of the Beat and pseudo-Beat writers. Ma Jian was a Beijing artist who faced political persecution, and decided to escape to China's interior. For three years he walked and hitched through some of China's harshest and most remote regions, including Sichuan, Yunnan, Guizhou, Tibet, and Inner Mongolia. After he escaped to Hong Kong, he wrote a book on the experience, long before he had even heard of a genre called travel writing.
