What Troy Parfitt comes to sound like, consequently, is a bad traveler, an insensitive loud-mouth ranting on about the absurdities of life "abroad." As his epigraph he quotes a sensible sentence from Samuel Johnson that points out that travel allows you to modify fantasy by exposure to the real thing. The assault on Asian ways of life that follows - and the same treatment Taiwan receives is handed out, at lesser length, to the other Asian countries the writer visits - consequently comes as an even greater surprise.
I felt some unexpected sympathy when I came to a chapter attacking the Mormons in Taiwan, but by now Parfitt's style had begun to seriously anger me, so I was left wishing only for a more congenial ally in an old distaste.
Among the many people and attitudes maligned, Vice President Annette Lu (呂秀蓮) is called a "poor, misguided soul," whose book on feminism is, according to Parfitt's informants, "extremely effective in combating insomnia and propping up wobbly tables." The novel she wrote while a political prisoner (on toilet paper because there was nothing else available) is, Parfitt says he's willing to bet, "little more than attractively bound toilet paper now ... ." He hasn't read that one either. At the end of the chapter he switches tack and says he respects her, if only because she's so unpopular in Beijing. But it's too late. Parfitt has already established his credentials as someone who has all the appearance of foul-mouthing others just for the hell of it.
What follows includes the impossibility of Mandarin as an international language, Vietnamese as "painful to listen to," the lack of English-speakers in Taipei banks, heavy-handed irony ("Taiwan, you see, is an environmental disaster"), and more in the same vein. The book concludes with a journey down the length of Vietnam. By then I'd had as much as I could stomach, and more.
It doesn't take long for this kind of writing to become wearying in the extreme. It veers between the would-be outspoken and the plainly outrageous. Readers are probably intended to murmur admiringly that here is someone who really speaks his mind. My feeling, however, is that most of them are likely to fling this book down out of sheer embarrassment. I certainly did.
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