Customer Reviews

Behind the Wall : A Journey Though China

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is a rather dated book about Thubron's journey through the Red China of the 1980s. The Wall he is referring to is the Great Wall and he visits both ends of it and meanders around this vast country. As a travel experience, Thubron treats his travel experiences by jumping around. First he tries to describe the countryside, with some flourishing descriptions and this tends to confuse the reader. Perhaps he is writing this for a British audience, but those of us on the other side of the Atlantic have a hard time digesting some of his wordings. He jumps from one experience to the next, so the flow of his writing is rather jolting. Some of his experiences make for good stories, but for the reader to mine this, he is in for an uneven read.
This is an average read because of the flow of the book. For those interested in Red China, this may be of interest. For those interested in travel, there are better travel books out there.

Colin Thubron is one of the most prominent living travel authors and his journeys through Asia are justly praised by fans of the genre. He has a peculiar approach to travel writing, by generally going to one country only and then trying to visit as much of it as possible while talking to the maximum amount of people, unlike for example Paul Theroux, who generally writes about travel across many societies. In this book, "Behind the Wall", Thubron takes us on a tour of China, and then I really mean all of China (except Tibet and Manchuria), as it was when he visited it in 1987.

The result is an interesting overview of Chinese society as it was just opening up to foreigners after the long periods of war and revolution. Thubron was by no means the first tourist to do a tour of China since 1949, but he did travel when European tourists were very rare and limited to expensive package deals and the corresponding upper class environment, be it by Chinese standards. He studiously avoids following in their footsteps, and instead tries to take the cheaper hostels, the lower class train carriages and so forth in order to get an impression of real Chinese society as the Chinese experienced it. The degree to which one can do this as a total outsider is still always limited of course, and as any anthropologist knows the very act of being an observant as a stranger can and will change people's behavior. Nonetheless, the rarity of a white foreigner in the places Thubron goes greatly aids him in conversing with a number of random Chinese he meets, and this leads to some interesting conversations and good insight into the diversity of the Chinese peoples as such, 'even' under Communism.

Thubron has been particularly praised for his good descriptive writing with regard to places and landscapes, and this is fully borne out in the book. He manages to be almost poetic about many of the remarkable sites he visits without either sounding over the top or like a travel brochure, which is quite a feat. His somewhat cynical detachment from the actual society probably helps in that regard. Nonetheless, this can get quite irritating too. Even though the year is 1987, he insists on asking every single person about the Cultural Revolution, obviously fishing for horror stories - and when a poor farmer tells him the Cultural Revolution for him meant an improvement, he simply refuses to believe it. Generally Thubron seems remarkably hostile to the society he is travelling in, not just politically, but also with regard to culture and habits. He is duly impressed by China's history and architecture, but seems to find most Chinese people he meets easily boring and backwards, and even helpful officials lazy and corrupt. There is probably some truth in this, in both the culture shock and the political cynicism, but it does make Thubron seem like a closed-minded conservative diplomat sent to some outpost of faded glory and poor manners.

Overall though, the book contains sufficient memorable descriptions of both famous and less familiar places and sites in China to make it easily worth the read. One could object that sometimes Thubron is so selective in what provides his inspiration that many a large city or 500 km trip passes by without much description, but he can be forgiven for this by the rule that a writer should be allowed to use only that raw material he can work with. And when he does it, he does it well. Much has changed in China since "Behind the Wall", and foreign travel will now not be so remarkable and lead to such friendly bemused responses among the Chinese as in those days, but perhaps for just that reason this book is a good portrait of a China that is past.

Very informative adventure/travel book about what life in China was like in the mid 1980s. Rare in the sense that the author can actually speak Chinese (Mandarin), so he's not as limited as to who he can speak with as some other travel writers. We get a pretty good cross-section of Chinese people--farmers, businessmen, city dwellers, homemakers, university students. Also of interest is the author's exploration of the generation that came of age during the Cultural Revolution, and that missed out on the usual educational opportunities. I like the details, like how eating an owl, feathers and all, is supposed to cure epilepsy. This is a great read if you are interested in learning more about such an important place.

This book is a record of a long journey the author took through China in the mid-1980s. Before embarking, Thubron took an intensive course in Mandarin back in his native England. This enabled him to converse with the people he met he met on his trip without having to resort to translators or guesswork. Thubron met people from all walks of life--professors, students, doctors, bureaucrats, and peasants. His trip took him from one side of the country to the other.

Thubron enjoys language, and seems to go out of his way to find specific descriptive terms for all he sees. Sometimes he goes a little too far out of his way, like when he describes some Beijing apartment blocks as "tundra-like", leaving the reader wondering what in the world he had in mind, or whether this was just a random choice of words. But for the most part, his use of vocabulary makes his descriptions come to life. Thubron was not greatly enamored with China; he is ready to find the bad along with the good, and his attitude at times can come across as a bit too negative. Nevertheless, the book provides an interesting glimpse of what a British traveler found in China some 10 years after Mao's passing.

The book is just wonderful, and it is written expetionally well. I've been to China and I can see that his descriptions are very true (I don't mean geography here).

After reviewing his excellent "To a Mountain in Tibet" (2011) and "Shadow of the Silk Road" (2007), I enjoyed this 1987 account of his 1985 Chinese travels. Thubron's unsurpassed when recounting the distance between foreigner and native, observer and participant in the passing scene. Without exaggeration, every other page of these three hundred could serve up an eloquent example of his prose and his perception.

I'll share a few of my favorites. He visits a Beijing classroom: as a teacher plays on a harmonium, the children chorus "like mechanical birds: vivacious and dead". (21) In Nanjing, interviewing a priest, he seeks to get past his persistent divide, as he "sensed that my questions were subtly irrelevant to them, my Western preoccupation with suffering and conscience merely a measure of my isolation, a sign of my not understanding." (98)

This struggle permeates his finely crafted narrative; he focuses on what he sees rather than who he is or what he's done (his books tend to be quite reticent), but he filters all he sees through his p-o-v, so we ponder what he does. It's not egocentric, somehow, but universal in his reflections on his fellow men and women. As with his Silk Road book (more than his Tibetan trek), he may annoy those readers wanting a less acerbic, or more romanticized view, but for me, cross-referencing this with Ma Jian and Gao Xingjian as native travellers at the same time exactly, their accounts align with his about his criticisms.

The lethargy, staring, constant scrutiny, relentless rudeness, noise and filth of China gain frequent attention. Dissimulation, helplessness, disdain, and catcalls follow his every move, it seems, over much of his ten-thousand mile journey, as "above the charming photographs on the identity badges of waitresses, the real faces are a rockery of sulks and scowls. Their lidless eyes have been invented for avoiding yours." (111)

In Suzhou gardens promising peace, he finds bad art galleries, shops, and photographers everywhere. "A glaze of cigarette stubs glazed the lakes." (135) Yet, in this same visit, he hears a young woman tell a blind man of what she claims to see: dragons writhing on the water, lions on their backs; lions roaring over the lake.

Similarly, he balances wit with despair, as in his woeful description of his meal of "braised wildcat" he must endure in Canton; he redeems himself later by liberating an owl from a horrific caged city market of dogs, cats, and birds as some recompense. He listens to those he suddenly shows up among, and he tries to hear their tales of terror, not long after the end of the Cultural Revolution. He also attracts attention, gawking, standing out as an alien before questioners who ask him how many children Charles Dickens had, or tell him that their father studied math at Cambridge.

He shows up in a peasant's rubber grove near the Mekong. "Momentarily I saw myself in his eyes--taller than anyone he had ever met, uncannily pale-haired, and fattened by the mystery called England." (222) Thubron's basic Mandarin allows him some deeper insight into common humanity. And, as a "foreign devil" he can sometimes hear what natives might not dare to say aloud. Later, a young lecturer opens up to him about a failing marriage and a lost love: "It would be like confiding in a star or a tree." (267)

Still, much of the beauty of this account lies in the distance in a crowded country, the scenes glimpsed as he passes. On a train into the hills of Fujian: "Beyond my window, as the afternoon wore on, the mountains unlocked isolated valleys which the falling sun varnished into the illusion of peace. Village roofs dipped and swung above the green stairways of their terraces. Whitewashed walls were bright and unreal in the silence. Momentarily I thought: how beautiful. And I gazed at them with the acquisitive longing of someone hunting a weekend cottage. But they were filled by a rude poverty, I knew: their people were here in the train, bellowing convivially together. So I would greyly discount these idylls, and return to my book. But in the next valley the dream would reassert itself, and the glimpse of a tiled roof under a white wall incite again a childish mirage of Elysium." (167)

That masterful passage shows Thubron's power. Read this journey across China to find out much more in similar scenes. Recommended from an acerbic but wise writer at the peak of his talent. (Compare my reviews of two others who wrote of the same year, 1985 or so, in China: Ma Jian's travels in "Red Dust," and Gao Xingjian's philosophical novel "Soul Mountain.")

If you want to know something about the geography, history, and culture of China in the mid-1980s, this is the book for you. Although many things have changed in the China of 2009, this book provides a wonderful foundation of information to better understand this emerging country. Colin Thurbron is a fabulous writer with an effective ability to weave in historical and cultural information in his memoir of traveling alone through China on public transportation. For those people who want to understand China, it's a MUST READ.

I try to read as much as I can about China, and Mr. Thubron's treatment (nicely updated in his recent 'Shadows of the Silk road) is the best I've read. More serious than Mark Salzman, more fluent than Rob Gifford's recent book, more interesting than Peter Hessler, and more insightful than Paul Theroux or Simon Winchester -- fine writers all, but none quite capture the place the way Thubron did. Most of these books cover the same themes, but this is the only one I wish had been longer.

Of the many people he meets and talks to on his journey, the story that sticks longest in my mind is of the statuesque young bride of an American he meets while visiting a cave. He paints a portrait of an absolutely indominatable woman, noting that her husband "didn't stand much of a chance." But the unexpected end of the encounter shows what a masterful writer he is.

If you can't read everything about China -- and who can? -- put this on your short list.

this book uber awesome. there is absolutely nothing bad i can say about it. i think every one should have a copy of this book. I have one negative thing to say about it though. it sucked, thats why i gave it one star. I hate the world!!!!