Why travel anyway?
Exploring our world, come what may
After rereading Peking Picnic, a 1930 novel by Ann Bridge, on my return from China last month, I picked up my water-stained copy of The House of Exile by Nora Waln, another book from the warlord period.
I’ve become interested in what was being written—notably, by women—about China a hundred years ago. The books are a pleasure, but I’m also trying to figure out why there was such a crop of them at that point in history. It also puzzles me that there are no recent novels and memoirs about China that have had similar success.1
By far the most successful is the novelist Pearl Buck, whose The Good Earth was published in 1931. Buck is striking not only because of her huge success and Nobel Prize, but because of her life-long activism on behalf of Chinese people and biracial children. The Shanghai public library—which is enormous and impressive—had an exhibition about Buck when I was there.
Nora Waln, like Buck and unlike Bridge, formed deep friendships in China. (Ann Bridge, for all her insights and charm, was a colonialist to the core, and wrote about the Chinese she met, both servants and officials, as alien creatures who happen to have created beautiful things.) Waln’s writing on Nazi Germany, where she lived for some times before World War II, was widely read and is startling relevant today.2
After spending 4 days in Yangzhou and seeing the modern Grand Canal—an impressive example of 21st-century infrastructure—I especially enjoy Waln’s description of winter travel on the canal in 1920:
We kept to the right on the frozen highway. On our left passed a continuous line of boat sledges piled high with coun try produce. Crates of chickens. Yellow-billed white geese. Brown ducks. Demure grey pigeons in wicker hampers. Rabbits contentedly nibbling at greens. Squealing black pigs protesting rancorously against carriage. Broad-tailed fat sheep. Heaps of eggs. Bushels of hulled rice. Red corn. Golden millet. Peanuts in hull. Trays of candied red fruit neatly terraced to a high ridge. Pickled mushrooms in salt- crusted tubs. Reed containers with their contents protected from the frost by wadded covers—one, blown off, disclosed celery, another lettuce, and a third beetroot….
Small boys and girls darted through the more serious traffic on small sledge boats, pushed forward in the same way as ours, miraculously escaping accident by fractions of an inch. Skaters pursuing earnest errands glided swiftly up and down the frozen highway. The leisured amused themselves by skating fancy figures in wayside bays. With care not to endanger the double-track sledge path, men cut ice for summer use. They stacked it in flat baskets woven of stout twigs, and hung each basket by its strong handle from the middle of a carrying pole. A man at each end of the pole carried the ice to the canal-side earth-mounds, where they buried it away for summer use, exactly as explained in the annals of Wei, written thirty centuries ago.
For years I’ve been wondering if we should be taking so many photographs. This question came to mind last month when I was discussing tourism with a comrade in Yangzhou. We were walking around a gorgeous hotel complex that was once a salt merchant’s home, and my friend observed wryly that PRC internet blocking (the “Great Firewall”) makes China a less appealing destination than it deserves to be because tourists in China can’t spend all their time posting to Instagram.
I took this video in the former salt merchant’s complex, where I would have loved to stay for a week. (The photos on Trip.com do not capture its atmosphere at all, but here’s the link anyway.)
To my mind, the big issue is visas. Under Barack Obama, the US and China agreed to reciprocal 10-year visas, available to many people. Today, getting a visa has become difficult and uncertain. As with all travel, friction is what determines our choices, if we have a choice. If commuting by train or traveling to a particular country is reasonably easy and pleasant, we’re far more likely to make that choice. I should note that citizens of some countries can make up to 30-day trips to China “visa-free.” But certainly not Americans!
“Third place” subscribers might enjoy Ray Oldenburg’s thoughts on visiting a new bar (or other establishment) when you find yourself in an unfamiliar town.
Here’s "Do the Righteous Rotation.”
Why Travel Anyway?
Originally published on the Berkshire blog.
The pear was beautiful, brassy gold flushed with crimson, and heavy. The skin began to give as my fingertips went round it. “They’re very ripe,” Julia said.
It was so ripe that I could smell the air in an autumn orchard, just verging towards alcoholic decay. I cracked the skin with the tip of my teeth and felt the liquor begin to spill out. “We don’t use paper napkins,” she said, “I’m sure you don’t either.”
Asking for a napkin would be a confession that I was not as green as they. I stared at the pear for a few seconds, then dived in. I almost choked on the liquid flesh and crisp skin and sucked on the core till there were only threads and the dark stem which I held between my sticky fingertips.
That was in 1992. A magazine in London had wanted a debate on travel, and asked me to write the “stay at home” column while bestselling author Julia Hailes wrote about the benefits of ecotourism. She then invited me to lunch at the new offices of SustainAbility, the company she and her coauthor John Elkington had founded.
… Lunch was designed to put me in my place. I still remember licking my fingers because I was damned if I would give them the satisfaction of asking for a paper towel. But at the time I did believe that “our mania for travel is a symptom of a fragmented society and not something to be emulated. We take holidays to “get away from it all”—away from the pressures, ugliness, pollution, and noise of the modern environment. . .Ecological restoration depends on . . . an active, participatory sense of community, and on knowing and loving our homes, neighborhoods, and regions. Staying put means facing the problems in our own backyard. It means shared commitment to repair and restoration. It means a real future.”
Okay, new converts are often intense, but the point I made has some truth to it, one that I am reminded of every time I hear someone start counting their trips to China or the number of countries they’ve been to, or when I see a stream of photos of someone posed against one landmark or vista after another. Did she ever turn around and look at the mountain or the minaret, I wonder? Do we only see the places we’ve been when we’re editing the photos to upload to Facebook?
… I left home when I was fourteen, running away to a commune in Oregon. At sixteen, I traveled alone, paying my own way, to Guadalajara, my first time outside the United States. At nineteen, I moved to England, and lived there for most of the next fifteen years.
When I got pregnant at twenty-seven, I went to Poland via East Germany. A month before my baby was born, I somehow managed to get on a flight for a weekend in Paris. I couldn’t bear Americans who talked about “Yurrup” or the places they’d “done.” I resented the word tourist.
I wanted, even as a child, to see my own world from a different vantage point. That’s what drives many of us to books: we not only want to visit other places and times, but to see our own place in the universe in a new way. Of course, a writer’s goal is to transport the reader to another place, another time, another way of looking at the world, and a gifted writer uses her imagination and knowledge to create the world of a book or blog. But I am someone who needs to see things for herself. I like to get my hands dirty. I love watching people’s faces as they huddle over breakfast in a roadside cafe, or squat on the sidewalk beside a glowing brazier, watching a set of skewers. I like catching someone’s eye when an argument is going on, sharing a moment of frustration that bridges language and culture. When I consider the value of travel, the first thing that comes to mind is that reassuring sense of shared humanity.
That was even more important when I finally went to China. “China is much more than it sounds, and the sight must be seen and not heard, because hearing it is nothing in comparison with seeing it.” This quotation comes from the first Western book about China, published in 1569. Today, nearly five hundred years later, vast amounts of information are available about China in books, journals, websites, blogs, television programs, and movies. But it’s still true that there is “nothing in comparison with seeing it.” I would never have imagined, for example, that Beijing is full of roses, even under blistering sunshine and in the midst of ugly smog. For me, that’s what counts as an authentic travel experience: not the grand sights, but the detail, the smells and tastes and sounds and textures of another place on earth….
… For many of us, food has to be tasted and smelled in situ, and eating is one of the most important ways to learn about a place and culture. Eating, in fact, is one of the tangible benefits of traveling the world. I often say that I decided to publish about China because I so utterly fell in love with the food on my first trip in 2001.
This is nothing new, either. Working with world historians has taught me that we humans live, and have lived for millennia, in a world in motion. While the majority of people in the past rarely traveled any distance from their birthplace, there have always been travelers, not just famous ones like Marco Polo or Christopher Columbus. The religion of Muhammad spread across Asia all the way to modern Indonesia in a remarkably short time. Chinese people have been crossing the oceans, and going home again to their laojia (hometown), for many centuries.
Cheap air travel, introduced in the 1970s, made it possible for the masses to see the world, and at the same time container ships were transforming global trade. Computers made communication faster and cheaper, and connected banking and financial systems. These technological developments made globalization possible, and we’re still catching up with the changes it has made to societies and economies, and to our families and our sense of personal opportunity.
A Norwegian think-tank found that families who made the greatest efforts to be green at home often undid those efforts by feeling justified in taking holidays abroad, traveling by air. As everyone who has taken a Footprint quiz knows, air travel guarantees that you aren’t going to get a good score. We are supporters of passenger rail, of course, but I travel more than I would like by air and don’t believe that carbon offsets come close to being a solution….
But this is a time in history when the benefits of travel have a heightened importance. The more powerful a nation is, the more its culture dominates other places, the less likely are its people—including its politicians and academic experts—to understand that there are other viewpoints. A global perspective doesn’t come from looking out over the world, surveying it from afar, but of being able to put yourself, as the Native Americans said, in someone else’s moccasins.
Travel should change us, make us better, more informed and open-minded and joyfully connected with our fellow humans. Unfortunately, people who travel a lot often seem to have little idea about what ordinary people around the world are like, perhaps because frequent travelers are such a privileged class.
It’s still important to do some of our exploring in books – not to be only an armchair traveler, but to ensure that when we go to another country we are doing something more than lying on a beach where the sand is a different color or taking selfies in front of famous sites. After seeing canals in Copenhagen, Hamburg, and Scotland in July, I started rereading The House of Exile, an account of living with a family in China in the 1920s, in which the young American author details traveling on the frozen Grand Canal, sledging along the ice wrapped in furs and blankets and watching skaters, traders, and warlords’ troops moving across China.
Nora Wahn, a twenty-something graduate of Bryn Mawr, describes seeing a soldier shoot a child for not handing over a goose. Her immersion in another place, and into a new and beloved Chinese family, gives her writing an astonishing longevity, and I find myself wanting to experience a similar sense of embeddedness when I go to China. (Of course I appreciate the fact that there are no marauding soldiers to contend with.)…
What do you think: should we stay home or travel the world? What do you think makes an authentic travel experience? And should we be taking so many photographs? (Full post at Berkshire Publishing’s blog.)
What is The Way We Live Now trying to accomplish? Read about it here. And who is Karen Christensen? Find out here.
Frogs travel, too. They found the pond in 2020, and have been breeding ever since. Once the tadpoles metamorphosize into tiny frogs (this has taken up to 3 years—they spend the icy winter buried deep in the mud) most of them leave on rainy nights, seeking other spots to spread their genes. Here you can see, at bottom left, the glistening spawn that reminds me of a beaded evening dress, and near the top one of the male contenders.
If I’m wrong about this, please let me know. There are some notable books, indeed, but nothing truly comparable to Buck’s success. I have quite a few book lists that I’ll be sharing, and adding the links here later as well as posting to Notes.
Beautifully written and thoughtful. I found this post really inspiring. Thanks for sharing.
If one can, then definitely travel! I hope to visit Yangzhou and that broader area some day. I am intrigued by the Grand Canal as well.