Customer Reviews

China

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

 

 

Leach offers a tourist snapshot of "contemporary China". His impressions lack substance and originality, give very little pleasure to anyone familiar with the country, and are of little use to those who aren't.
The title is most misleading, as this thin book mainly deals with Hong Kong and Taiwan rather than The People's Republic. Such a naïve traveler might have failed to notice that Taiwan is a separate country and Hong Kong's national identity is the subject of a heated debate in the former British colony.
Gutierrez & Portefaix have done a much better job, but a pocketbook can hardly do justice to their pictures.
In my opinion, this is the literary equivalent of a Nissin Noodle Cup.

Every so often a book comes along that is so bad, you wonder how it ever saw the light of day. How could serious people agree to publish this? (Especially in Hong Kong, where the publishers presumably know a bit about China.) Leach says he is giving a snapshot of contemporary China, arguing that brief, quick-fire observations can have their own quality. This may be so, but if you combine such observations with shoddy research and arbitrary references that have little to do with China, the result is a starry-eyed collection of short sentences that sound like they are written by a high school student who has decided he will be an artist.

The book jars sharply with the experiences of those who have actually lived in China or have studied the country. Much of Leach's information is simply wrong; a couple of the observations he makes are almost interesting, but he doesn't develop them. From his writing, Leach sounds like someone who has a little bit of knowledge about a number of things, as well as a lot of energy -- I'm sure he would be more impressive in person than he is in print. In sum, the writing is extremely useful to see how one should not write.

Some of the photos are okay, but are pretty typical of Western photography about China -- mostly construction scenes and some pictures of workers' faces.

If you want to get in contact to one possible lived experience of China, try this book. It's worth reading. You'll realize there is no such a thing as "China". China is just a composed image - be it an exquisite and shiny - mosaic-like one. What the author has tried here is one possible not-full-of-commonplaces point of view on China. In fact, the book is about a fresh contact with several major cities, the avant-garde of the explosive development that characterizes China today. Under the keywords "fast forward", what you may experience are just snapshots - in words and pictures. Like if China was some kind of puzzle - which is actually bound to stay undone, because some dark pieces of its immensity will always be missing. I liked the book especially for that: it is "true", open and impressionistic, like it was declared to be. No more, no less.

This fresh and unrehearsed little book on China is a collection of provocative vignettes: descriptive text juxtaposed with gritty images of contemporary China -- narrative, speculative and visual impressions that capture the aura of the place. It reads like the best kind of travel log or postcard collection where the reader gets both crisp, voyeuristic accounts and the author's unedited speculations about contemporary China. Beautiful passages in which, for instance, the author contrasts tearing down old walls of Beijing with less successful attempts to tear down persistent social structures, create a kind of corporeal theory based in the material world of China. A provocative question of whether the East has been a culture of conformity or variation arises from a narrative sketch of the Terra cotta Army. Speculations about the nature of the individual and the nature of the collective, posed through western impressions of rigid conformity are rethought, imploring the reader to reconsider such preconceptions. Leftover urban spaces, colonized temporarily then re-appropriated, suffuse the text like places from Calvino's Invisible Cities. A quick, breathless read full of whirling impressions whets the appetite and leaves the reader wanting more; it's like taking a tour from the shirt pocket of the author. One sees and feels the place, the people and the vast cultural divide. Not belabored, spoken from the gut, complimentary, open-minded and yet wielding an undeniable edge, each vignette captures a fleeting moment and reveals an ideological proposition by pulling aside the shroud of first impressions. A documentary in the true sense, this little book packs a powerful punch and asks the reader to join in speculating on China's future in the 21st century.