I had previously written about my displeasure with the fact that J. Maarten Troost’s Lost on Planet China called my hometown, Guangzhou, an urban cesspool. I just finished the book, and despite that transgression, I found Lost on Planet China to be an entertaining travelogue.
Troost pulls no punches in recounting his trip through China, including his admission right in the introduction that he is no expert about China. He even wonders aloud how someone who speaks virtually no Chinese and knows little little the country can write a “biggish book” about it. He then proceeds to do what he said he would — offer an honest account of what he saw and what he felt during his trip, and his irreverent and self-effacing style makes him a terrific travel companion.
Troost undertook the journey through China as a scouting mission to determine whether he should move his family there (since he’s still living in America, I guess his conclusion was “no”). Thus begins the quintessential fish-out-of-water, laowai-in-China story. Troost starts the trip in Beijing, where he is immediately overwhelmed by the immense mass of humanity, terrified by the chaotic traffic, and astonished by the air pollution. Speaking nary a word of mandarin, he has to be chauffeured around China’s capital city, either by an old friend or by a “take-out girl”/student his friend hired for him as a translator.
Despite the language barrier, however, Troost soon adapts. He leaves Beijing alone and commences his exploration of the rest of the vast country. He learns how to bargain and by the end of the book he had wised up enough to be able to shame a taxi cab driver into actually charging him honest fare. He discovers locals who know enough English to converse with and get some explanation for the sights and sounds he was bombarded with. He even comes off as a grizzled China veteran at times while leading his “professional Republican friend” around southern and western China. It all makes for a often-hilarious and sometimes insightful read as he stumbles in and out of a brothel in Hangzhou, a gay bar in Xi’an, tourist traps everywhere, and the awe-spiring mountains of Tibet.
While Troost gained an increasing comfort level during his trek, he never lost his laowai perspective or sensibilities. He never stopped being astonished by the bad air quality, and he never, as he said many suggested to him during his trip, took off his glasses to see things from the Chinese perspective. It’s no surprise that he was most content in Hong Kong — which offers more Western culture than anywhere else in China — and the relatively sparsely populated areas of western China.
In some ways, Troost’s retention of his Western viewpoint is both the book’s biggest appeal and its greatest shortcoming. It’s appealing because it enhances the book as a travelogue of an experience in a totally foreign environment. Often, Troost is doing what your typical foreign visitor to China would be doing — seeing the must-see sights, being bused to destinations designed to fleece laowai visitors, gaping at the sight of people unleashing gobs of phlegm on the sidewalks. The fact that he retains his foreign point-of-view makes the book easier to relate to for his fellow laowais.
The same quality, however, is a shortcoming in that it prevents him from truly understanding the “why” behind the “what”. While the book was never intended to be an in-depth analysis, it is still nevertheless a tad annoying for someone like me, a native-born Chinese, who knows the “why” and does understand the Chinese perspective.
There’s a Chinese saying: “Looking at flowers while galloping by on a horse,” referring to seeing only what’s on the surface while rushing by, and Troost was definitely rushing through China as he was constantly on the move, going from one place to the next on planes, buses, trains, taxis, camels, and ships. While he draws some keen observations about the people and the places from these passing glances, they still often come off as lacking real insight, and he gets a number of wrong impressions. For instance, he observed that no one in China seems to participate in sports for recreation, which it’s just flat out not true, as I vividly remember the crowded ping pong tables and badminton courts of my childhood and seeing people play pickup basketball on my trip in 2008-09. And then of course, there’s the whole “Guangzhou is an urban cesspool” thing, which I shall try not to dwell on again here.
While Lost on Planet China may slightly aggravate Chinese readers like me, it is nonetheless a terrific travel book, offering an entertaining look at what to expect when you visit China, even if it’s wrong about as often as it’s right.