In early editions of the Lonely Planet Taiwan travel guide from the late 1980s and 1990s, the entry for Taitung County is suspiciously short. It describes Taitung City as little more than “a departure point for many interesting trips” and the surrounding luscious coastal area as “likely to remain a relatively quiet backwater for a long time.” The author, Robert Storey, has since retired into that relatively quiet backwater — which is also one of the most staggeringly beautiful scenic areas in Taiwan — and one suspects that Storey hopes it will stay that way.
It’s now been almost 40 years since the first Lonely Planet, and 30 years since the first Rough Guide. These travel syndicates helped define the era of the backpacker and perhaps the modern traveler, Westerners who roam from one scenic, third-world bungalow to the next, living seemingly permanent vacations funded by their good luck to have been born in a rich country. The guidebooks have also helped blaze tourist trails and facilitated a touristic variant of cultural imperialism that has brought great changes in Asia, not all of them welcome.
Guidebook writers have long been conscious of their role in changing Asia’s cultural landscape. Chris Taylor, author of Lonely Planet Guides on China, Tibet, Japan and Cambodia in the 1990s and the first features editor at the Taipei Times, looks back on this era in his debut novel, Harvest Season, a racy, chemical-fueled parable of party travelers who push things too far in tourism’s latest frontier — China. Like Alex Garland’s The Beach, it’s about Westerners on a deluded search for paradise, except the writing is better and the premise not nearly as cheesy. Though still light enough for hammock reading, Taylor’s story is a wiser, more poignant portrayal of where the endless backpackers’ party might be headed and the wayward souls who are taking it there.
Taylor has in recent years spent a great amount of time in Dali, a gorgeous high-mountain village on the lower Himalayan steppes of western China. It’s not too far from the supposed location of the mythical Shangri-La, and Taylor repeatedly invokes the irony of this pre-labeled paradise, much in the way one might invoke the reality of the Easter Bunny. The novel is set in the guesthouses, bars and other expat hangouts of a fictional variation of Dali — Shuangshan. The season is late fall, when an endless stream of ganja flows down from secret patches in the nearby mountains.
If you’ve ever stayed in a hostel or guesthouse in southeast Asia, you already know the cast of characters. There are the expats — though “long-termer” in Shuangshan could mean just 10 months — who include a couple of foreigner-friendly Chinese from metropolitan cities, a core of pragmatic Westerners who always seem to be sipping another beer or rolling another spliff, and the Chinese women they date. Taylor’s protagonist Matt, also a former guidebook writer, declares this tribe to be “refugees from the bullshit, the phony democracy, propaganda parading as free speech, surveillance cameras, the war on fucking terror. We feel freer here than we do in the so-called Free World.”
They are also refugees from “the trail,” Asia’s extended backpackers’ party circuit, which includes Bali, the full moon parties of southern Thailand, Bangkok’s Khao San Road, Manali and Goa in India, and various other outposts in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Nepal. (I’ve also heard this trail jokingly referred to as the “banana pancake trail” after one of the dishes you find on guesthouse menus throughout.)
But in the end, “the trail” catches up to these benign first-wave travelers. A piss-and-vinegar-filled Australian arrives ready to import the party scene from Thailand and Laos. Hippies and a new age cult come in tow, upsetting the delicate local balance.
Taylor doesn’t let us forget that China, after all, is not Thailand. One techno rave at a time, a conflict builds between the young Turks of the party crowd and the conservative local community, before finally exploding in a nervous showdown of violence. In the process, Matt and the other long-termers are caught between their shallow-rooted desires to remain, involuntary instincts to shield fellow Westerners, and the moral abyss of giving in to
pure pragmatism.
By the time things come to a head, it is too late for any easy outcome or good decisions. Though not overly dark, Harvest Season is a cynical novel, with the barbs directed at both travelers and travel writing alike. You can get a dose of the flavor from one character’s swipe at the Peter Mayle memoir A Year in Provence. He pronounces that in “A Year in Shuangshan,” you “get wasted, end up with the wrong woman, watch paradise go to the dogs — that’s life, that’s the real world.” It’s a bleak fate for a die-hard traveler, and a warning of what might happen if the permanent vacation truly fails to end.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby