Chris Taylor

On not ticking the boxes

Thu, 28 Jul 2011 00:15:00 +0800

Comparisons with The Beach were inevitable, and I suppose at first I encouraged them. But, I think at this point, it needs to be pointed out that Harvest Season is a very different book than Alex Garland’s debut of 15 years ago. For a start, one of the reasons Harvest was widely rejected by the agency system in London and New York was because it wasn’t enough like Garland’s book – "The only precedent for this is The Beach," wrote one London-based agent, "and so you have to tick all the boxes." I refused, reasoning there was no point in writing a simulacrum of a surprise bestseller set in the backpacker milieu that has yet to inspire another of its kind.

I’d be lying if I said that I hadn’t at times hoped that Harvest might have shared at least at least a little of the success enjoyed by The Beach, an idea that now seems fanciful. Perhaps the London agent was right, after all. But I have no regrets about not ticking the boxes; indeed, I had no choice. Harvest Season mostly wrote itself inspired by events that I witnessed close at hand in Yunnan province, China, and it was always doomed/destined – whichever you please – to be a more "knowing" novel than The Beach. And that, for me, was the point.

That point I’ve written about elsewhere (here is a truncated version courtesy of a 2004 Time special travel edition). It's that The Beach is about the nostalgia – "You should have seen it twenty years ago" – that haunts the contemporary traveler, and the anxiety – "Get there before it’s too late" – that inspires adventure. In Garland’s novel they amount to a premonition that all attempts to secure a slice of paradise are doomed. There’s much banter on the evils of guidebooks, but the brooding threat throughout is other travelers. Obviously, the Beach’s days are numbered from the moment the central character, Richard, arrives with his map. And if the community had been smart they would have voted to either disperse or start charging for the bungalows there and then. The guidebook writer would have turned up in due course – probably around the time the second or third commercial guesthouse opened, and a regular ferry service was up and running and the dope farmers realized they had a ready market on their doorstep.

The one thing the Beach community is unanimous about is that the guided masses are not cool – they may as well never have left home. But the inhabitants of the Beach are not travelers either. They are utopians, a community under siege: from other travelers, from guidebook writers and from the locals – especially the locals. They are a reminder that the modern travel experience is a communal phenomenon, less a personal journey of discovery than about being with the right kind of people in the right kind of places – and what is that but a form of elitism? In other words, perhaps, in their extreme forms, there is less difference between travel and tourism than we generally admit. At its worst, the travel ethos of The Beach is a paranoiac quest for exclusivity, a journey into the wasteland – the wagons drawn up in a circle on the prairie – while the exclusivity of tourism is simply its day rates: if you can afford them, welcome to paradise, sanitized, home to the right kind of people, the unruly local world kept at bay by the security guards and the fences.

The crucial divergence between Harvest Season and The Beach, in other words, is that the characters in Harvest mingle with locals, they know that their tiny slice of paradise is under siege and they are aware that they themselves are as much agents of its destruction as anything else that threatens it. In Harvest, I wanted to write something that reflected the reality of the long-term travelers’ scene, with its refugees from the phony freedom of the West who both welcome its coming collapse and hasten its local arrival through their rootless complaisance. So far this has struck a chord with Harvest’s small readership – and that will have to do for the meantime. The box-tickers denied the book a place in the mainstream and the niche, China-focused publisher that took Harvest on was afraid to announce its agenda too brazenly for fear of attracting the attention of the Chinese authorities. (For a glimpse of what might have been, Ben Owen-Browne’s cover design is above left.)

Don't feed the locals

Sun, 24 Jul 2011 13:55:00 +0800

When I was last in Bangkok, I met with writer and freelance journalist Tom Vater. I hadn’t realized until then that Tom had also written a novel set in the milieu of the long-term travel/backpacker scene – The Devil’s Road to Kathmandu. I will save some words of praise about Kathmandu for another post, because there was something that came up in that conversation on the Middle-Eastern dog-leg of Soi 3, Sukhumvit, over chicken curry, dal bhat and naan, that I’ve thought about several times since. We were comparing threatened getaways. Tom mentioned a couple of spots in India; I parried with a few of my own in Yunnan. I said I was pessimistic about where it all was heading – that just as there was a sense that everywhere was being invaded, there was simultaneously a sense that the glory days of individual travel were over, that it was all going to the dogs and we’d all end up having to go "home". That, I added, was in part what my novel Harvest Season was about.

Tom flashed a cheeky grin and demurred: "No," he said. "I just think there’ll be a lot less people traveling and those that do will be the adventurous ones who started it all in the first place. You’ll retreat to your getaway somewhere in China, and then someone else like you will turn up. And that’s when it will get interesting."

I thought this was a wonderful idea – and still do. I mean, MSN Travel – somebody forwarded me the link – just listed Thailand as No 5 among the most dangerous destinations in the world. Imagine if they all stopped going – "more than 14 million … in 2007, more than 800,000 of them British", the article tuts at the reader. Yes, a serious cut back would be terrible for the Thai tourism industry and probably for the Thai economy in general, but for me and Tom (and anyone else who might be reading this) it would be just like the old days.

Except I don’t think that’s what’s happening. I didn’t while I was writing Harvest Season, and I think so even less now. A literal reading of the novel might lead you to think that there are valleys in Southwest China fighting off hoards of hippie backpackers. There aren’t. It’s part of the delusional conceitedness of the players in Harvest that they imagine themselves to be more of a threat than they are. The real threat, and it’s alluded to vaguely in the novel – I wonder now whether I shouldn’t have stressed it more – is the development that’s overhauling off-the-beaten track destinations for domestic consumption, and I have written about that recently here and here.

If I ever really thought of Harvest Season as documenting a kind of last gasp of the backpacker era – which arguably began with the launch of Tony and Maureen Wheeler’s Across Asia on the Cheap in 1972 – it was because I’ve felt for some time that the erstwhile rich world is running out of time to wander around the fast-developing poor world at bargain-price leisure. The tables have turned and the locals are reclaiming the paradise at their doorstep.

The beach

Fri, 08 Jul 2011 20:00:00 +0800

ONE OF THE BASIC rules of creating a tourist attraction in modern China is not holding back due to a lack of obvious tourism touchstones: if there's no culture, invent it; if there are no historical attractions, build them; and in the case of the Sunshine Coast, in the mountains of Yunnan, import some sand and plonk it next to a lake. Hey presto, instant beach.

I’ve been visiting the Sunshine Coast, around 120km southeast of Kunming, regularly for a couple of years – less for the beach than for Solitude Island, or Gushan Dao (pictured above and which I will write more about later). But the beach, with its shop-front row of fish restaurants and outlets for floaties, gaily colored swimsuits and straw hats, has an old-school, folksy charm about it. If there were donkeys and Punch & Judy shows, it would be rather like being transported back to Weymouth or Brighton circa 1965 – except with far better weather. In fact, at around 2,000 meters above sea level, Fuxian Lake probably has a better year-round beach climate than the country's premier seaside destination, Hainan Island, or the so-called Hawaii of the East. And there are no Russians here ... yet.

So far, Fuxian has been spared the five-star invasion that ruined Hainan, but that can't be far away. A sprawling monstrosity called the Kowloon Scenic View is under construction about a kilometer from the beach and the Banyan Tree group have an Angsana Resort and Club up and running on the northwest corner of the lake. The nameless lodge that has been my home on every previous visit now has a name – Shuixiang Yuan, or something like Water Village Courtyard – wireless internet, refrigerated Snow Beer and a mahjong room. In other words, it's time to find another lodge – no doubt, in a mountain village that does not yet have a beach.

Sacred Skin

Sun, 03 Jul 2011 17:10:00 +0800

WITH THAI ELECTIONS taking place today – and the pro-Thaksin Pheu Thai poised to seize a parliamentary majority – it seems appropriate to talk about Tom Vater’s book, Sacred Skin, photography by Aroon Thaewatturat. What’s important about Tom and Aroon’s book is that, in part, it cuts to the quick of the contradictions that are at the heart of the Thai political dilemma. Of course, these elections are a face-off between new money (former CEO prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra) and the old guard – the military and forces broadly loyal to the monarchy. But the dividing lines of this election are also equally urban/rural, which amounts to a geographical divide between Bangkok and parts of the South – which has its own divides – and the North and Northeast, or Isaan.

In this sense, Tom and Aroon’s book is a document from the other Thailand, and it's a welcome antidote to the "Land of Smiles", "Temples of Thailand", etc, pictorials that many of us end up leafing through at Suvarnabhumi international airport and at Asia Books in Bangkok. This is because the subject of the book is sak yant, which as the book explains is "a Sanskrit word derived from yam, which means control or restraint, and tra, which means freedom or liberation." Far more than simple tattoos, sak yant are "a conduit for cosmic energies, effective only if accompanied by incantations, meditation and trances, and a visualization of a mantra, a prayer."

In a recent interview with CNN Tom talks about the origins of sak yant in India and in Cambodia and explains, "The wearers believe that it stops bullets or knives and has miraculous effects." Dismissed by many among the Bangkok urban elite as pure superstition, it is the wearers of sak yant who make up a large part of Thaksin's support base, and if the military decides to void the elections the "sacred skin" look poised to win "the wearers of sak yant" will likely be back in Bangkok and dodging bullets again.

Bad Monkey, good brew

Tue, 28 Jun 2011 15:20:00 +0800

LAST WEEK I took a trip up into the foothills of the Cangshan mountains in Dali with Carl and Scott of Bad Monkey fame to visit their brew house. For anyone who remembers the Bad Monkey of old – the bar’s been running some seven years now, with a massive overhaul and change of location two years ago – it’s a fantastic achievement: half a million RMB in investment and a current capacity of 500 liters of brew a day.

The Monkey is currently only licensed to sell Bad Monkey Beer at the bar, so the brew house is running at output of around 50 liters a day, or around 100 glasses. But the idea is, having got this far, to get the operation pumping out ale at full capacity – which will likely require finding a licensing partner.

As Carl Oakley puts it: "I'd rather have a small percentage in a very, very big business than a large percentage in a very small business."

Until that happens, the brews come in nine varieties – ranging from a classic stout to pale ales, with some unique offerings like the orange and coriander thrown into the mix (everything is in experimentation stage and we're not giving away any secrets). For the moment, they're served in a rotating basis, four varieties at a time at the bar. Among the selling points, apart from the all imported raw materials, such as hops (largely from Germany) and state-of-art brewing equipment, is the quality of the spring water from which the beer is brewed.

The Yinbo Quan spring, claims the Li family, who own the approximately four-acre estate, has been bubbling for more than a thousand years fed by waters from the 4,200-meter-high Cangshan mountains. It's hard to imagine a more idyllic spot for a brewery, and if you can get enough people together the attached restaurant can cook a whole lamb on a spit for you.

The Drunken Monkey Pale Ale is currently riding at No 1 on the Bad Monkey Beer hit list, though the stout – popular with Chinese drinkers – is a close second. All beers are Y25. Carl and Scott are continuing to experiment with flavors, so you can expect some interesting surprises in future.

Changes lakeside

Sat, 25 Jun 2011 23:10:00 +0800

I’D PUT OFF returning to Shuanglang – just under 40km northeast of Dali, on the far side of the Erhai Lake – because it meant so much to me before and during the writing of Harvest Season. In fact, it was an inspiration for the town of Longdong, and I actually wrote the lakeside scenes of the novel sitting lakeside in the evenings drinking Dali Beer at a desk the owner of the Bishe Guesthouse provided for the "foreign writer". The setting looked something like the picture to the right.

Well, it didn’t look quite like that, although the view is almost exactly the same. That’s because the Bishe, which I must admit was a shit-hole besides the view, is under renovation – along with the rest of Shuanglang. The picture above is taken at The Bay View, a new-generation lodge that has been around for around a year-and-a-half, and is very similar to a couple of dozen other homey lakeside lodges that have opened in the last year or so. Two foreign-run cafes have set up business – the pizzas at the Flying Turtle Coffee are recommended – and I bumped into Zhang Yan of Dali Bookworm fame yesterday as she was getting her new bookshop in order next to the French-run Amigos.

Change rarely happens this fast anywhere and nobody saw it coming. I certainly didn’t. The road from Dali to Shuanglang was so bad – and continues to be – and Shuanglang itself was, until recently, an isolated fishing village so medieval that it seemed perfectly inured from the depredations of modern tourism. Despite this, almost overnight it has been discovered and almost the entire town is being torn down and rebuilt in the style of a forgotten but ancient jewel in the crown of the Dali valley. It wasn’t. The peninsular scenic area (entry Y20) in which the Zhao Ancestral Mansion and a time-honored monastery are being hastily thrown up by day laborers and hordes of Bai women straining under the weight of wicker baskets full of bricks on their backs was unpopulated before 1985 local friends tell me. The rest of the town, as I remember it as recently as three years ago, looked more like third-tier Nepal than a holiday destination in China. The truth is, until about two years ago, Shuanglang was a fishing village on the wrong side of the Dali valley.

No more ... and this is just the beginning. Within two months a railway station, 20 minutes north of Shuanglang, will be completed. A highway between Xiaguan and Lijiang – China’s No 1 domestic tourist destination – that skirts Shuanglang is scheduled to open within a year. Xiao Si, the artist owner of Shuanglang’s first in-the-know, getaway boutique lodge (Lady Four), which opened just over four years ago, told me this evening that she is already building her own getaway far away on the outskirts of town before the invasion really gets underway.

But in the meantime, Shuanglang lakeside is as beautiful as ever as the sun goes down and the jackhammers stop hammering and the tractors and trucks rumble out of hearing and you catch a glimpse of someone rowing a boat towards the shoreline.

China's expat 'rankers'

Fri, 10 Jun 2011 14:25:00 +0800

THIS RATHER ODD – perhaps even slightly psychotic – list of "exemplary expats" includes a famed womanizer, a forger, a self-confessed drug addict, a possibly murdered English teacher and me at No 9. The Chinese language image at the head of the list, the headline of which translates loosely as "Rebel foreign studies, mysteries within mysterious events", might be a clue to the rationale behind the rankings. But, unless tireless self-promotion is also one of the criteria for rating a mention, it’s difficult to see why the innocuous and largely well intentioned Peter Hessler is ranked at No 4.

Putting aside the question of whether the world really needs a list of "big in China foreigners", there is also the question of notable omissions – Jeremy Goldkorn of Danwei fame; the enormously prolific Paul French; and musician, writer and tech consultant Kaiser Kuo to name just three.

But, then again, this may well be a list many of the possible "rankers" are thankful to have been excluded from.

Next stop Paris

Thu, 02 Jun 2011 23:00:00 +0800

World Hum, which claims to be home to "the best travel stories on the internet", and actually does run some decent stories occasionally, has helped propagate this wonderful piece of comic banality by one Caitlin Rolls, originally put online at Thought Catalog. Rolls, you see, went to Europe for two months to escape her "disturbing ambivalence towards post-grad life", and it was, well, kind of a drag and not that much different from staying home, except you have to spend all this money on airfares and shit.

Travel’s not what it’s cracked up to be, despite the musky tents in Morocco and the paisley sarongs (Where can you buy one of those?), and most people are "afraid to admit that they came home exactly the same person they were when they left". Rolls certainly did – although arguably, even if she’s not quite aware of it, rather more cynical than when she left. But she did learn some things: she doesn’t like one-night stands, a lot of people overseas are as boring as the ones at home, sightseeing can get to be a drag … oh, and you’ll probably miss peanut butter.

It’s easy to poke fun at Rolls – check out the long queue of comments at the end of her piece – until you realize that she’s actually nailed something in a Holden Caulfieldish kind of way. The modern travel experience is not a life changing experience. As she puts it, the most you should expect is a few really good nights with the right kind of people "and even though you could all be intelligently analyzing the situation in Libya everyone has decided to just laugh and have a good time instead." And here’s the clincher: "It’s basically a really, really expensive trip to a really, really cool bar."

And that’s about it really. The "trail" has become thoroughly democratized and commercialized. It’s not the end of travel – travel is still possible – but most of the people who think they are doing it are simply on the road to the next really, really cool bar.

What's in a blurb?

Wed, 01 Jun 2011 15:00:00 +0800

I recently reread an essay on cover blurbs by Pico Iyer – ironically, it’s collected in Tropical Classical, which comes with a cover blurb from the Los Angeles Times proclaiming Iyer "a formidable talent … a pacesetter among a new breed of travel writers" – and it got me thinking about how many times I’ve cringed and even publicly apologized about the cover blurb for Harvest Season. "Chris Taylor" it alleges "knows China better than anyone". As the author, this reads more like a cruel joke – an invitation to ridicule – than praise. Of course, it’s patently untrue, but more than that it shouldn’t be there – and not simply for the obvious reason I’ve just stated.

For one, the blurb shouldn’t be there because it incorrectly categorizes the book – and me. Harvest Season is not a book about China, and I’ve never paraded myself as a China expert. The novel is about the travel scene, if it’s about anything, and it happens to be set in China because I came across several relatively unexploited places in southwest China that lent themselves to the themes I was interested in. Secondly – and with all respect to the author of the quote – if the publisher wanted to use some kind words from Simon Lewis (disclosure: we’re friends) on the cover of the book, he should have been acknowledged as the author of Go, not of Bad Traffic, Lewis’s venture into crime fiction. Go, along with The Beach, by Alex Garland, and Are You Experienced? by William Sutcliffe, were, after all, the three novels of the mid- to late-90s that seemed to herald a new direction in travel writing – travel literature that explored the ethos of the bargain-basement margins of the travel industry.

What happened to that "movement" – and I suspect it lost steam because the authors were all in their twenties and ran out of material to mine after their three seminal novels had whipped through the experience of being young and on the road in Asia for the first time – is a question for another blog. But for marketers and publishers the blurb poses a dilemma when a riposte comes along that attempts to paint the scene those books described in both more considered and broader brush strokes. Because the blurb – if it's not simply a glowing assessment of a writer’s promise and money-making potential ("Think Joyce meets JK Rowling") – is a marketing-placement job.

The theme of Iyer’s essay, "Perhaps the Best Article on Blurbs I’ve Written Today", is probably best summed up as "to blurb or not to blurb?" For Iyer, it is an act that "requires advanced degrees in politics, economics, and just plain manners", and this makes him sympathetic to writers who "have an unbending policy of just saying no". Iyer is also concerned with the blurb itself as a "subset of literature" and he concludes by wondering: "Can the day be far off when every book will be read only on its cover?" This, of course, is another way of simply saying that the blurb is here to stay.

That being the case, the onus is on authors to be sure that their cover blurb actually speaks to potential readers about the book and the realm – or marketing niche, if you like – it inhabits.

Theroux on travel

Sun, 29 May 2011 21:45:00 +0800

Paul Theroux, writing for the Financial Times (May 27), to promote his latest offering, The Tao of Travel (Hamish Hamilton), has penned a timely and thought-provoking riposte to a feeling I’m sure is shared by many contemporary travelers – that is, there is nothing new under the sun. Theroux’s subject is travel writing, not traveling itself, of course, but the notion that there is nothing new to write about is much the same as saying there is nothing new to see.

His suggestion, "try Mecca" – followed by the story of Arthur John Wavell, who "disguised himself as a Swahili-speaking Zanzibari, made the pilgrimage and wrote about it in A Modern Pilgrim in Mecca (1912)", a feat that Theroux claims has never been repeated – is perhaps overly ambitious for the average contemporary traveler. But his general observations on the many other destinations that are not on the map are a reminder that, despite our easy mobility and ubiquitous communications devices, the world is not quite as "explored" as we often pretend to ourselves.

Theroux signs off in his signature, irascible style with a list of exotic destinations that are anything but exotic should you have the misfortune of visiting them. But his inclusion of Kunming, described as "a huge, horrendous city", makes me wonder whether he has ever made the effort to explore the city. There is still a lot to love about China’s so-called Spring City – in my opinion, probably the only really livable large city left in China – and it is the perfect springboard for precisely the kind of travel that Theroux apparently would like to remind us is still possible – remote mountain villages and valleys, pristine lakes, many still untouristed. To be sure, they are not so easy to get to, but Theroux would have us recall that in the travail of travel all the best stories emerge. As VS Pritchett once said – and Theroux quotes him – "A large number of travel books fail because of the monotonous good luck of their authors."

The video promotion

Wed, 04 May 2011 18:15:00 +0800

My original idea with this video promotion was to do a reading with friends playing characters in the novel. But several people pointed out to me that it might not be a good idea to identify specific faces with characters, so Kris Ariel and I decided to simply read over images and video — images are mine, video is all Kris's.

Kris did some of the footage around Green Lake in Kunming, but most of it is from around the Dali valley — specifically, Dali itself and Shuanglang on the other side of the Erhai Lake. The images are all from around the Dali valley and date from around 2007.

Kris and I were aiming for a dreamy, drug-like, trippy effect with the video, and I think Kris did a good job in pulling it off — he did the music too.