After the publications of his earlier works, The Sex Lives of Cannibals and Getting Stoned With Savages, travel writer J. Maarten Troost is back with his most recent adventure, Lost on Planet China. Having exhausted the possibilities of living and roaming around Southeast Asia, Troost has decided to take his readers into the Middle Kingdom. Despite his inability to speak the language, he manages to not only survive his three-month sojourn to China, but report--in detail--his own unique findings there.
Troost is unafraid to share his own inadequacies and false starts on his first trip into the People's Republic of China, as shown in his telling of his first night in Beijing. Upon discovering a restaurant that details its menu in English, he eagerly orders what he believes to be the grilled chicken, only to find himself faced with a quivering serving of sheep's intestines. His adventures--particularly with food--only become more colorful as his travel tales progress, including the one time where a visiting friend dares to order a hamburger in China.
The anecdotes that Troost provides in Lost on Planet China are enjoyable, but there are some gaps in his experience that the reader must keep in mind. For example, while he does interact with the locals in a given city on a daily basis, his interactions very rarely go beyond haggling for prices and fending off offers for "special messagee", even once he's left the bigger cities. While the sections detailing his time with old friends adds another level of amusing incomprehension on the foreigner's part, it would have added some depth to his otherwise light tales if he could have shared more experiences with the Chinese he met on his journey.
Also, due to the theme of the book, Troost makes very few attempts throughout the story to come to terms with what he identifies as "strange". While on one level, this can provide fellow travelers with a chance to relate to their own experiences abroad in equally bizarre situations, refraining from reconciling between what Troost experienced and what he may have wanted to may read as shallow to some.
Overall, Troost's travel book is a very light read, rife with relateable tales about a man finding himself in a place so strange to him that he may as well be on another world entirely.
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Very interesting book. I would have probably portrayed his friend daring him to eat a hamburger after the intestines incident. The titles of his other two books seemed intriguing too. These might be some books I would consider reading whenever I get a chance. Sounds really interesting, and putting the quotes in helped a lot to catch my interest.
ReplyDeleteHmm. I remember you recommending it. My draw to this would be my experience with China, but it might be precisely the same reason I don't pick it up.
ReplyDeleteThere's a tendency (and I can't figure out whetehr it's among Westerners writing about China/India/etc or among travel writers in general) to emphasize on the hilarity of the incomprehensible. But that's not all there is, especially in China. There's a great deal more, and so making everything into a giant joke may be funny for a few pages, but hard to stomach for an entire book.
EG: the thing about sheep intestines is actually a pretty standard story-type. I've heard that kind of thing from a lot of people who've gone to China jsut for its exoticism. I haven't, however, heard it from people who go to China in genuine interest - mostly because mistakes aren't blamed on the country, but on the mutual confusion between languages and cultures. That, I think, is okay. Holding up a country as "funny things happen here!" - notsomuch.