Lost on Planet China - J. Maarten Troost [0]
Title Page
Dedication
Author’s Note
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Acknowledgments
Further Reading
Also by J. Maarten Troost
Copyright
For my parents
Author’s Note
One day, inside a coffeehouse, the author turned on his laptop and confidently typed the words Chapter One. Now what, he thought. He was supposed to write a book about China. This, after all, is what he had told people. So what are you working on now? they’d ask, and he’d casually mention that he was working on a book about China. Really? they’d say, and stagger back in admiration. Surely, it requires fluency in Mandarin to write a book about China. But the author is not fluent in Mandarin. He can say hello in Mandarin Chinese, but not in Cantonese Chinese. He can, however, count to ten in Chinese, albeit with his hands. Well then, surely the author was at the very least in possession of vast amounts of scholarly knowledge about China—perhaps he had a Ph.D. in Chinese History from the Oriental Studies Program at Oxford, for example. After all, Chinese civilization is more than 5,000 years old. Only an expert could write a book about China, right?
The author wishes to acknowledge that he is not an expert on China. His academic expertise, such as it is, lies more toward Mitteleuropa than the Middle Kingdom. He does, however, know the difference between the Ming and the Qing dynasties and of this he is quite proud. But should you meet him, please do not ask him anything about the Song Dynasty. Or the Tang Dynasty. Or the Wu Dynasty. Please.
How then can this author, who neither speaks Chinese nor has any particular expertise regarding their history or culture, write a book, a biggish book, about China? This is the question that the author mulled inside the coffeehouse that day. He pondered the matter, turned it over, approached it from every angle. And finally he decided that there was only one way to do it. He would write honestly about China. He would write from the perspective of a guy who neither speaks Chinese nor has all that much knowledge pertaining to things Chinese, a guy who spent month after month just kind of wandering around this massive and rapidly changing country, without a plan, learning and experiencing life there.
The author does not read many travel books. True, he has sometimes been accused of being a travel writer. He has written about faraway places. But he was living in these faraway places, so technically, it wasn’t travel writing; it was domestic writing. From his perspective, he has never done much travel writing—at least not the kind you find in glossy magazines. In his experience, these magazines prefer to hear about the sunsets on some distant tropical isle, or how said island is an antidote to all the stresses of the continental world, rather than about how the author contracted typhoid while he was there (true), or how the island’s young men are all signing up for the war in Iraq because their job prospects are so poor. The author doesn’t like this kind of travel writing. He’d rather call it like it is. And so, since this is his book and he can do as he wishes, he has tried to write honestly about China. And he hopes that by writing honestly, that by sharing his experiences, readers might, in fact, get a sense of this vast and complex country. Because it’s important. We need to understand China. Really. You’ll see. So there will be no fucking sunsets in the pages that follow.
1
There are two kinds of people roaming the far fringes of the world: Mormon missionaries and Chinese businessmen. I know this because for a long while I lived off the map, flitting from island to island in the South Pacific, and invariably, just as I arrived at what surely was the ends of the earth, I would soon find myself in the company of Elder Ryan and Elder Leviticus,