Thubron: Write This Way

This was a breath of fresh air. Inspiring and instructive. Engaging and thought-provoking. Thubron weaves his knowledge of China with his journey.

Thubron is an experienced travel writer, perhaps a master. He researched his destination, research which guided his journey, and he learned Mandarin beforehand, which allowed him to converse with the people and understand them - and they in turn asked questions about him and where he came from.

For example, near the end Thubron talks with an old friends who is unhappily married; he can't let go of a girl he loved in his youth. In this exotic and so-different country Thubron has found a story that we completely understand here in the West. It draws us closer yet farther away - since we realize how different his world is from ours.

There are a few people he plans to meet, but me meets many random people along the way. The one that stood out to me came near the end. An old man called Old Wang by a passer-by invites Thubron to his house and shows him a tablet for his three-months dead wife. Thubron sees the old man's grief:

"Suddenly his face was contorted by mingled sorrow and bitterness, held in by a heart-rending laughter. 'We Chinese have a saying: "All that is born must die". But that doesn't stop this...this...' - he turned his forefinger against his body, insinuating it between his torn jacket, drilling inside - '...this grief.'

"In the naked room, with the single bulb slung in its doorway, his imagined loneliness was unbearable. I wanted to touch him, but remained inert." (286)

Thubron's retelling of his time with the grieving old Wang is so moving it drove me to tears contemplating death and the afterlife. That is good writing.

Thubron wrote a beautiful account of his journey - beautiful writing - descriptions of the smoggy and overcrowded cities and of the forgotten temples and shrines, descriptions of the ugly and beautiful people (physical and character descriptions). He is so good at describing the people he meets in a few lines:

"Over this eyrie presided Hua's mother. She had been half paralyzed by a series of strokes a decade before, and she looked even older than her eighty-eight years. Her hand, when I took it, was a cold hook. Her hair was coiled in a grey pigtail, clipped to the back of her head by a huge iron paper-clip, and her nose sank so flat that its bridge completely vanished, and seemed to place her eyes on collision course...She settled watchfully on the sofa, smoking out of a box of two hundred cigarettes...[she] was suddenly, uncontrollably laughing. She rocked up and down on the sofa with short, guttural, mocking coughs. 'When I laugh I can't stop...I don't know why.' She massaged her throat. '...I just can't stop.'" (103-4)

Thubron also uses speculation well:

"Then [the man with no children] fell silent. For another hour, drifting down the canal, we went on peering into other people's lives in their kitchens: lives that seemed at once more humdrum and more mysterious than my own, and perhaps which appeared happy to him." (133)

I also enjoy that he tries to see himself as the people he meets see him. I think this inclusion shows me that he was much more than a traveler passing through, but a person trying to communicate with other people; I enjoy this personal contact (I wonder if Theroux will do the same in Africa). An example:

'Momentarily I saw myself in his eyes - taller than anyone he had ever met, uncannily pale-haired, and fattened by the mystery called England. Inexplicably I was in his rubber grove.' (222)

Then again, Thubron sometimes feels like a humorous tour guide. And his humor comes here and there, not over-done. For example, he gets himself into humorous situations - going to a public bath that is too hot for him, visiting a marriage bureau where they mistake him for a groom-to-be and meeting a doctor who shows him his wall of model tongues.

Perhaps the most humorous part was when he writes of the time his exhaustion played out in his partially-remembered conversation with an enthusiastic vet:

'Shack-es-peer is famous in our country. He wrote fifty plays...The Western languages all come from Latin, don't they?...We're new friends, aren't we?...Western history begins with Jesus...

''I relieved my fury by making faces at him in the dark.' (227-8)

As you can see, I have only good things to say about the book. I am inspired. If it was my intention to write a paper that aims to pinpoint what makes good -and bad - Peace Corps memoir, then I would surely write that writing like Thubron would make a great memoir.

I acknowledge that Thubron is an experienced travel writer and that comparing his work to that of first-time Peace Corps writers is unfair. Perhaps a first-timer can only dream of writing as well. But perhaps if this writer took note of what Thubron does well - his writing is well-researched, he seamlessly entwines history and the present, he sprinkles the book with humor and honesty, he describes the people and places well and economically and he makes sure he focuses on one-on-one, personal interactions - then s/he can produce something quite good.

I can only hope to come close.