Customer Reviews

Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven

5 star:		(70)
4 star:		(32)
3 star:		(17)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I almost stopped reading this book after the first couple of chapters. Boy, am I glad I kept going! Susan Jane Gilman has written a memoir that begins in deceptively languid fashion but ends in an explosion of surreal and shocking events.

Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven starts off very slowly. If you're not paying close attention to what's going on, as I was not, the book seems like yet another "clueless recent college graduate with backpack" travel journal. Even the book's title is somewhat misleading; it made me expect a cobbled together collection of exaggerated, drunken adventures in developing countries.

I was wrong, very wrong.

Small, seemingly insignificant, things begin happening to Gilman and her traveling partner. As patterns emerge, the story begins to take on threatening, even malevolent, overtones and the pace quickens. What began as two innocent and idealistic girls taking an around-the-world trip turns into an uncontrolled descent into chaos, fear, and personal destruction.

Sure, this all sounds like a plot for a bad Roger Corman horror movie--especially that last bit!--but Gilman manages to make everything unfold in a mesmerizing yet believable manner. She writes in an engaging, flowing style that truly brings the story to life. Gilman's experience as a journalist has given her a talent for capturing key details of people and places, so that even the parts of the book that may have been embellished don't feel out of place or totally implausible.

The story also benefits from twenty years of hindsight. Gilman occasionally breaks away from the main narrative to comment on the things she thought and did at the time of the story, when she was twenty-one. In these asides, Gilman deftly skewers a lot of the self-serving beliefs held by the backpack-youth hostel-railpass crowd both then and now.

Bottom line: Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven starts out slowly but rapidly gains momentum as the author begins to realize that she has lit the fuse on a gigantic powder keg. When the big explosion finally happens, you won't be able to stop reading. Four stars.

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And now, some books I was reminded of by this book:
WARNING: this link is a possible spoiler
Bad Trips
A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail

What happens when two recent female college graduates decide to circumnavigate the world on a shoestring in 1986, starting in the tourism-challenged People's Republic of China? Let's just say that "Innocents Abroad" doesn't begin to describe it.

Gilman and her pseudonymous companion, Claire, are arm's-length friends when they embark on the adventure of a lifetime, inspired by the map on an IHOP place mat. At some point in our lives, each of has probably pursued a brash dream with someone we hardly knew, but in Gilman and Claire's case, the consequences surpass anything they and their apprehensive families could have imagined. Beyond their naivete and the sheer foreignness of the environment the two young women plunge into, at 21, Gilman increasingly finds herself forced to deal with her friend's rapid descent into psychosis (which, she points out in the afterword, may have been the product of antimalarial medication). Along the way, she encounters some unforgettable characters: a generous, English-speaking Chinese man who befriends them in the hope that they will help him defect; a clueless, lumbering German misfit; a free-spirited American mother and her two rambunctious sons; a Chinese waitress who prepares Western food for homesick backpackers; a German hunk whose kindness matches his considerable romantic appeal; and a Canadian nurse who rallies to her aid at her time of greatest need.

As compelling as the people she meets is her take on the country itself. The picture she paints of 1980s post-Kissinger China is rich and textured, frequently rendered with delicious irony and dark humor. The bravado with which she handles various encounters with Chinese culture, cuisine and government authorities is both unnerving and astonishing. (Her description of a rural hospital should be an eye-opener for anyone who hasn't traveled in the Third World.)

Part travelogue, part coming-of-age story, part memoir, this book is at once entertaining, revealing and insightful. As China's well-documented rise to industrial superpower inspires headlines (and dominates the U.S. national debt), this delightful, if occasional discomfiting book provides a vivid reminder of how far our largest creditor has come...and how impetuous, reckless and ultimately resourceful young people in dire circumstances can be.

Beware of making travel plans, what to do after college plans, any kind of plans based on the placemats at the International House of Pancakes. One night in 1986, fueled by post graduate giddiness and a large amount of alcohol Susan Jane Gilman and friend Claire decide to circle the globe, starting with China (newly opened to any type of tourist activity), one of the sites on IHOP's placemat. Making sure they have the necessities...the complete works of Nietzsche, an astrology love guide, endless optimism and visions of hostel travel the two embark on a romp that quickly goes awry. Were it not for the peril of venturing into areas of China closed to foreigners, the lack of funds, constant hunger, the threat of arrest and a general lack of awareness of the seriousness of their situation this might be a fun trip. Gilman manages to tell the story with wit and no small amount of hubris. If I wasn't so irritated by her devil-may-care attitude I might have enjoyed it more. Well written with great dialog and a keen eye for detail , but this book really rubbed me wrong even knowing it all ended well.

Two well-educated, intelligent young women decide in a moment of naivete and foolishness to travel to China together in the 1980s. They struggle in the communist country with language, food, hygiene, and other things we take for granted in the United States.

The author's friend at first seems a bit kooky but gradually becomes totally separated from reality. In other words, she loses her mind and becomes a danger to herself and others. The goal then becomes how to get her friend back to United States before anything too terrible can happen to her.

Although this sounds grim and depressing, Gilman has written it in the style of Our Hearts Were Young and Gay. It is at times hysterically funny, and I often read passages out loud so my partner could understand why I was laughing.

This is a wonderful book that proves that most people are decent and sweet. I can absolutely see it being made into a film.

Susan Jane Gilman sits in an IHOP with her Brown University friend Claire Van Houten, when Claire declares they need to take a backpacking trip across the world, starting with the only recently opened Communist China. The next thing Suzie knows, they are equipped and ready, and landing in Hong Kong. From Hong Kong, they take a boat to Shanghai, where they stay in the worst accommodations, (the cheap ones) recommended by their backpacking guide. After all, this is supposed to be a rustic trip, not tourism. Clair is mortified by the open toilets (often an enclosed trench) and open shower facilities. But its still not rustic enough for her.

They meet a German named Gunter, and a Chinese man who speaks English named Jonnie. Jonnie talks them into coming to his hometown of Dinghai, where no Americans have ever traveled. Reality crashes home here when Claire becomes sick and literally has to be "rescued" from a third world hospital with chickens in the reception room and rusty needles offered by misunderstanding doctors.

On to Beijing, The Great Wall, Guilin, and Yangshuo they travel through worse and worse conditions, eventually finding a rose petal named Lisa in Yangshuo who has learned to cook Western food.

During their travels, Claire, who starts out upbeat and the energetic enthusiast of the trip, slowly begins to slide into paranoia and hallucinogenic episodes. She's convinced she's being hunted by the Mossad, the CIA, and the FBI because "her father is a very important business man". She deteriorates daily, until its up to Suzie to find a way to get her insane friend back into the United States before Claire sets off any alarms in Communist China.

'Undress Me In The Temple Of Heaven' is not just an entertaining book but an important one also, one of the few ways you will "see" China as it was back then, before Western commercialism. These two young girls traveled there only ten months after tourism had opened, and all tourists and backpackers were suspect - and the traveling papers horrendous. The overwhelming goodness and decency of the poverty stricken inhabitants of China shocked the two young Americans. The Bureaucracy often confused them. The living conditions disgusted them. The food made them sick. The language barrier frustrated them. But you must read this book to travel along with them and feel each of these thoughts and feelings with Susan Jane Gilman.

Gilman is an excellent writer, keeping her memoir in a very engaging style. She tells the story with wit, enthusiasm, atmosphere, and believability. There are no "lags" in the memoir, its interesting from page one to the end. She has completely captured the heart and soul of travel. In the book, when Suzie is reluctant and Claire is still buoyantly urging her on, Claire says "All good writers have traveled". Perhaps that's true, because this book is extremely well thought out and expertly executed. Don't miss out on this amazing travel tale. Ten Stars. Enjoy!

This is a chick book. The two main characters are women. The backpacker-Earthmother savior is a woman. The Chinese talisman/object/touchstone is a woman. The men are shallow tokens, poorly developed, there for plot device and romantic diversion. The story is full of overblown feminine mutual adoration and support, with jealousy and recrimination following immediately, then instant forgiveness before it all starts again.

Synopsis: Two young, smart, energetic, confident and supposedly mature Ivy League grads full of uncontextualized Rand and Nietzsche set out in 1986 to be "hard core and authentic," to prove they are all of the above, with an around-the-world trip, starting in the People's Republic of China. They quickly find they are naive, clueless and completely unprepared for everything, with a seriously major mental breakdown and a breathless race to escape making things all the more interesting.

This is not a travel book; it's 1986 setting dates it too much. The title sounds cool, but this is a miniscule part of the book. Gilman swears it's a true memoir, but at times it seems a stretch.

Before these two set off, I knew it was going to end badly; it was just a question of where/when. Their prep was shallow at best, with no language study, just buying a Lonely Planet book and hopping on the plane. They bought batteries, backpacks and travel soap instead of studying destinations and routes. They had some kind of idea where they were going, but that was about all they did, apparently. It made my head hurt to read they'd put this massive trip together with no prior cogitation on exactly what they were getting themselves into. And when reality sank in, they cried and whined, unable to come up with any kind of plan that was going to fix the problems they'd created.

The sleeve notes this as a modern Heart of Darkness. No, not really. Conrad wrote of man's darker side (true nature) taking over where no Western (artificial) mores constrain, while this is a tale of bawling rookies whining how they aren't what they told themselves they were. The sleeve also says the book is full "humor, eroticism and enlightenment." Okay, I'll give on the humor, but not the other two. The promised eroticism is Susie's aching need for an over-imagined foreign romantic hook-up, and the enlightenment, which I take to mean learning something deep and meaningful that will inform future actions and decisions, doesn't really pay off.

The juxtaposition between the female leads--I can't call them heroines--was so perfect that it seems a bit contrived. Claire was tall and lean and athletic, with Susie shorter, svelte (I was waiting for "zaftig," but didn't get it) and unathletic. Claire had breeding and pedigree, with Susie the Eastern European mutt. Claire was the rich Connecticut WASP and Susie the New Yawk Jew. They were Oscar and Felix, with backpacks, in China.

The constant I'm-not-learning-from-my-mistakes vacillation drove me nuts. They're brave and bold, and then it's staying in the ratty hotel because it's hot outside and they don't speak Chinese. They're adventurers, then they won't eat the local food. They're tough and bold, and then it's tears and egregious wallowing in self-pity. They're independent, but they beg for help and rely pathetically and almost parasitically on a string of Chinese and other travelers. They're smart, but they don't think anything through. They're determined, but every plan changes, every time. This was infuriating, and in the end took away from my enjoyment of the story. I've done this myself, for over a month in September 1997 in central Sumatra. You don't cry, you don't freak out, and you will always manage to communicate, even if it's sign language or drawing pictures on the dirt; you'll be fine if you just make the effort. It's dirty, strange, wildly different, and scary-challenging, but that's what adventure is.

Beautiful Claire gets weirder and weirder as the story matures, and she eventually freaks out, leaving Susie to clean up the mess. There are a couple of implied possible explanations of Claire's breakdown. The main one is that their malaria medication may have been causing hallucinations; okay, but Claire wasn't really having hallucinations. The pure stress of having to abandon her protected and privileged rich-girl existence to live on the road in China may have been a factor in Claire's breakdown, and ample evidence of this is given. The one that I liked best, but which offered the leanest clues, is that Claire may have been working for the Government--whisper it with me, kids: CIA--and her breakdown was a result of the pressure to observe and report, in the oh so hostile and dangerous Red China. This is plausible, but it's tenuous at best. In the end, Claire's affliction is a mystery, as is her recovery (if there was one).

By the time I'd hit page 100, I was highlighting each instance of one or both ladies bursting into tears. My rough count has them crying, weeping, wailing, sobbing, etc. about every fifth page. They cry constantly, from doubt, fear, sickness, frustration, anxiety, homesickness, solidarity, happiness, beauty, loneliness, etc. It was a veritable nonstop lachrymal tsunami, and by the end of the book I wanted to slap them both and tell them to buck up and get on with it. It made them out as weak and without fortitude, with more capacity for self-pity than determination.

This book has got some salty language, and a few mild sex scenes, making it PG. I'd recommend it for readers age 16 or older. I definitely recommend this book to any young person thinking of setting out on a glorious backpacking adventure.

Bottom line: I'll take the sexist hit, but this book left me stressed. The ricocheting emotions, the vacillation between solid self-confidence and manic doubt and homesickness were infuriating. The story is well constructed, interesting and moves, but its main characters put me off.

Early in Susan Jane Gilman's memoir of her ill-fated 1986 trip to China, standing in a filthy Shanghai toilet, Gilman declares to her traveling companion, "We are two young, brilliant Ivy League graduates. If we can't use a public bathroom in the People's Republic of China, who the hell can?" Sadly, this episode is all too typical of Gilman's experiences in China.

To be fair, Gilman recounts her story through the eyes of herself as a young, naive college graduate. But I've certainly met more perceptive and sympathetic twenty-year-olds. I groaned at the younger Gilman's cultural observations of life in China, the limits of her worldview defined, apparently, by the boundaries of New York City--all this from an aspiring young writer and an honors graduate of Brown University. (And Gilman is positively eager to discuss her education and ascension from an upbringing she unselfconsciously describes as `underprivileged'.)

I picked up this book after reading some positive reviews--there's a glowing blurb from Alexandra Fuller on the back cover--but I have to assume that the reviewers were reading an entirely different book. In the introduction, Gilman attests to the authenticity of her story, but what follows is an endless series of thin, clichéd characterizations and petty melodramas, saccharine denouements. And, thoughtfully, Gilman provides all of her non-American characters with ridiculous accents. Germans include "yah" in every sentence, Australians "oi", and the Chinese never seem to get those R's or L's right.

Gilman wrote this book twenty years after the events portrayed, but is this really the best she could come up with? Is it possible to travel 8000 miles around the world and experience nothing much more unique or authentic than could be had from an armchair perusal of Lonely Planet's guide to China?


Postscript: If you're looking for a thoughtful and beautifully written travel memoir, also authored by a young college grad in China, please instead consider Peter Hessler's River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze (P.S.). For your hard-earned $15, I guarantee this book is a more worthy selection.

Fuzzy Wuzzy's Summary:
***** Highly recommended with warm fuzzies!

Having been previously entertained by Susan's Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress and having also previously visited China several times myself, I was keen on reading about her experiences in a China that was, during the 1980s, far more isolationist and "foreign-feeling" than it is today. Her travel memoir takes place during an interesting time period in 1986, at a time when China, under Deng Xiaoping, was slowly coming out of the sordid aftermath of the Cultural Revolution and just starting to open up and improve relations with the West (including the first port call in 1986 of U.S. Navy ships to visit China since 1949), but before the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 flared up and caused an international backlash. Her experiences may have been far more restrictive and different had she graduated from college and decided to visit that country 10 or 20 years earlier than 1986.

There are quite a lot of subtleties and nuances in the descriptions of cities, locations, and people incorporated into this travelogue that is based on memories and notes of her travel experiences from over 20 years ago, and I am impressed by the number of detailed observations that she includes along the way. Susan's phoneticized English pronunciation of all the Chinese phrases mentioned in the book are, as the British would say, spot on. If you have traveled around both the big cities and smaller towns in China, as I have, you will find from her descriptions of the environment that some things have changed considerably and modernized since 1986 while other aspects have not changed (for better and for worse).

My one nitpick is that the advanced pre-release copy of this book did not have any photos of both womens' time in China. But being that both of their Kodak Instamatic cameras broke during the trip, and that Susan's traveling companion, referenced as the pseudonym of "Claire", became delusional, crazy, and totally disappeared from Susan's life after they left China, I am not sure how many photos actually exist from that trip... especially since, as mentioned in the book's preface, Susan wants to protect Claire's identity and privacy.

My other nitpick would be that with a title of "Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven", the book cover's photo of what appears to be an attractive unclothed woman behind a backpack, and the front cover flap's wording of "What began as a journey full of humor, eroticism, and enlightenment grew increasingly sinister", I was initially expecting lurid revelations of some bodice-ripping Harlequin romance episodes in exotic foreign locations. I initially expected that, at some point in the book, there was going to be some kind of frisky liaison that happened at the actual Temple of Heaven building in the southeastern part of Beijing; but nothing happened at the Temple of Heaven. Erotic literature this is not. But the book is highly entertaining enough as it is without needing that kind of misleading "sex sells" advertising approach.

The "Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven" title refers to a quote that is briefly mentioned early on in the book, but perhaps it serves as a foreshadowing of what was to come later on during the trip as both women become progressively "undressed" and stripped, in a symbolic sense, of many things: stripped of everything that had been familiar to them back in the U.S., stripped of their preconceived notions of seeing themselves as adventurous globe-hopping seasoned travelers, and, in the end, perhaps stripped of some of their dignity and self-confidence. Instead of returning back to the U.S. after circling the globe to much fanfare, confetti, and champagne, they prematurely return bedraggled, tired, and worn out.

At times, I found myself laughing and shaking my head at the same time at the level of naivete that both of the traveling college companions exhibited, and Susan's descriptions of how quickly situations can transition from sweet to sour provide much insight into the levels of worldly ignorance that can prevail when one is pampered with a comfortable life and book smarts, but without street smarts or international awareness. (At least nowadays in the globe-spanning age of the Internet, one can acquire a bit of worldliness via the Web.) Ironically, Claire, who had the trust fund financial backing and Ivy League schooling, and who told Susan "I want us to be *travelers*, not pampered little tourists. No air-conditioned buses, no idiotic tour guides, no Hilton hotels", ultimately had the nervous breakdown and complete meltdown in the end, and one wonders if she had some degree of schizophrenia/bipolar disorder or hidden psychosis within her even before they began the journey together, or if it was a side effect of the trip medications that she was taking.

I see two morals in Susan's travel memoir for those who are encouraged by a similar thought of conquering the world after college before they get sucked into the 9-to-5 grind:

1) If you are going to travel around the world, do not make that your first foreign experience. Visit some places in Asia or Africa first where there are no American fast food restaurants, few modern conveniences, and the locals do not understand English.

2) If you are going to travel around with world with other people, make extra sure that you are all really compatible travel partners; this involves far more criteria and considerations than just being casual acquaintances or even best friends. The same could even be said for planning a shorter cross-country road trip.

I found this book a great read from the beginning; by the time I was a third of the way through, I couldn't put it down. It's an exciting, oh-my-god-what's-going-to-happen-next experience of a book. Instead of the usual let down after you finish, this book leaves you thinking. Gilman shows us our humanity. She has a message that's not in your face and she delivers it with her characteristic tough New Yorker wit. I laughed and I cried reading this book. Gilman's message is that we can survive even dreadful circumstances. As Gilman pointed out in Seattle on her book tour, in these times, even sitting in our own living rooms is being on unfamiliar ground. Faced with the stunning differentness of the world financial collapse and the challenge of potential climate disaster, we can take from Susan Jane Gilman's book a useful lesson: we are resourceful. We will survive.
I can't wait for the movie!

There have been other books about traveling with a mental case -- Hemingway's "A Moveable Feast" is perhaps the most famous -- but few have been so relentlessly grim as "Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven."

The title, to get that out of the way, is catchy but has almost nothing to do with the book, which is the tale of two fresh Brown graduates who decide in 1986 to backpack around the world, starting with China, then only recently open to such gallivanting. I confess, I picked up the book because I wondered just how stupid two Ivy League girls could be. Plenty, as expected, but there are more layers in this book than I expected.

One in particular raises "Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven" out of the common ruck of travelogues. Not too often in travel literature (aside from the explicitly political) does the author face and confess to a moral dilemma. It happens here, and it turns the book into an experience worth contemplating, which otherwise it would not be.

If it hadn't been for that and for the crisis of madness that overtook Gilman's travel companion, called Claire, this would have been a tedious tale.

The two girls had vague notions of experiencing the rest of the world, but since they didn't speak Chinese, their experience of China was trivial. Mostly they interacted with other backpackers, portrayed as a shallow and giddy bunch of layabouts that you wouldn't bother to know back home.

This knocking about and being continually repulsed by the living standards of the Chinese could, and does, get old pretty quick, and combined with occasional passages of too-purple prose made reading "Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven" a chore for the first 150 pages. The confession that "each day . . . we grew more acutely aware of just how coddled we'd been all our lives and just how foolish we were" was no surprise. I could have guessed as much before opening the covers.

Things improve -- that is, they go downhill catastrophically for the participants -- thereafter.

With the perspective of nearly 25 years, Gilman has some thoughtful things to say about her experience and about the Chinese, to the extent she learned much about them. "Everything I'd known up to that point about China was basically, a gross cultural stereotype." By the end of the book, she comes away with a different stereotype, equally at odds with reality, or so it appears.

The Chinese put up with a lot. Whenever I walk the aisles of a garden store and see the ranks of ceramic or fiberglass garden gnomes from China, I wonder what the former peasants who have migrated to the dark, satanic mills of the Pearl River Valley or Shanghai imagine to be the cultural characteristics of people who need so many garden gnomes. The few Chinese who encountered Susan and Claire couldn't have been much enlightened in that respect.