In common, I imagine, with most residents of Taiwan, I feel no pressing urge to make a leisure trip to China just at the moment. Travel books, however, are primarily written for the benefit of those who never plan to go to the places described. So this new travel book, Green Dragon, Sombre Hero, about China is as welcome as ever.
It proclaims at the start that traditionally China was described as lying between the Green Dragon of the East, the Scarlet Phoenix of the South, the White Tiger of the West and the Black Tortoise (otherwise known as the Somber Warrior) of the North. When in addition you read that the book is "a journey around China's symbolic frontiers" you're naturally led to expect something all-encompassing, a trip right round the periphery, perhaps (such as Paul Theroux managed both for the Mediterranean in The Pillars of Hercules and for the UK in Kingdom by the Sea). But no.
What you get are trips to four places at the four extremities of the People's Republic. This is initially a little disappointing. But still, you think, the style, as Flaubert said, is the man. Everything depends on how it's written. It could turn out a masterpiece of hilarity and scholarship mixed, as you'd get from Redmond O'Hanlon, or of incisive outspokenness and sardonic observation such as Theroux himself could be counted on to serve up.
Being positive ...
Let's look at the good things first. Brown doesn't only describe his four cardinal points -- he describes the places he travels through in order to get there, albeit sometimes impresionistically. The book follows the usual procedure for travel writers.
You travel around the area in question, making notes assiduously on everything and anything that occurs. Conversations with ordinary people often make good copy, as do the views from the train or bus window. What may be ordinary to the point of boredom to locals is certain to be far more exotic to readers on the other side of the globe.
And then you splice in digestible sections of background history -- in Brown's case of things like the origins of Taoism, the history of Hainan island, and the stories of the Uighurs and Manicheism. The book also covers interesting areas in the topics discussed. The author talks about Mao to an educated man in the soft-sleeper waiting room on Chengdu station, and evaluates religion in the People's Republic with a temple guardian in Guangxi.
He not surprisingly has many caustic observations on the means of transport he employs. The ferry over to Hainan bears no relationship to the luxury liner depicted on his ticket, though the sunrise he watches from the rail is glorious indeed.
China's trains have been frequently depicted and Brown doesn't offer any new insights, though his descriptions are many. And he rents a bicycle to reach the outskirts of Kashgar. As for the "standard service" bus, he encapsulates that experience as sitting on a urine-stained bench while the driver plays pop music to drown out the noise of caged cats fighting on the back seat.
The time of his visit to Hainan coincided with the downing of the US spy plane there. The local response, he discovered, was generally good-natured. One worker remarks that the only reason his colleague is upset is that the government didn't employ him in the search for the lost Chinese pilot.
Brown is honest enough to admit he never quite reached his easternmost point, the frontier post of Ulugchat. (Other writers would simply have gone back and changed their intended destination in the first chapter). Instead, he is content to view the ruins of Khocho, the 9th century Uighur capital, in moonlight.
There is a sting in the tail of the book, however. In its last section the author visits the site of Japan's infamous Unit 731, at Pingfang, south of Harbin. His account of the experiments in biological warfare performed there on Chinese prisoners in the 1930s and 1940s, as revealed in the modern museum, is matter-of-fact but nonetheless devastating. Bubonic plague pathogens, for instance, were developed, and bombs of porcelain made for their delivery. These were then tried out on men and women tied to stakes, with their subsequent deaths closely monitored by military doctors.
After this, the author's trip to the Russian border and the modern environmental destruction he observes, is mild indeed. This is on the whole a readable book. The problem with it is that there are no highs. Nowhere does Brown achieve an ecstatic moment, see or hear anything fantastic, become enthralled, overjoyed or even angry.
... and negative
Instead, he's phlegmatic and equable to a fault. Nothing moves him excessively. Imperturbability may be a virtue in difficult traveling situations, but in a writer it tends to make for bland reading. For example, Brown invariably opts for the middle ground. "You can't replace religion with science," he sagely but un-world-shatteringly concludes. And Mao was 70% right and 30% wrong, he hears, acknowledging the view as all but proverbial in China. You can almost see him nodding in approval at this agreeably balanced assessment.
You can imagine Theroux, by contrast, blasting his interviewee as an idiot, and demanding to be told of a single instance in which Mao made a right decision. It seems apt that the book Brown takes to read on his journey is Hardy's, Far from the Madding Crowd, a novel about English rural life during the Napoleonic wars. Theroux, on his train trip round China, characteristically read a classic of Chinese eroticism that was banned in China at the time.
This, then, is a somewhat prosaic record of a long Chinese journey. Brown has done his homework, dutifully traveled by the means the ordinary backpacker has to travel, and recorded his impressions honestly, if with no marked flair.
This is the author's first book, but it has to be said that it is no brilliant debut, and Liam D'Arcy Brown a little less than a classic travel guru in the making.
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