3 comments about Shanghai Express: A Thirties Novel (Fiction from Modern China).

1. Don't buy this book expecting a fine and fancy piece of literature: that it ain't. Zhang Henshui was the Danielle Steel of early 20th century China, and this, one of his best known novels, has it all. Sex, suspense, intreague, betrayal...a page turner indeed.

   Shanghai Express is an enjoyable if not very edifying read. Like all trashy novels, its hard not to feel guilty for the expenditure of time and money, but its foreign-ness and time frame should assauge some misgivings.

   As 1930s pop literature, though, it does paint an interesting portrait of the manners and mores of its time. Ways of dressing, talking, eating, etc, present an unintentioned history.

   Be advised, though, the book has absolutely nothing to do with Shanghai. It is also unrelated to the American movie of the same title.




2. I would disagree strongly with the notion that this is a "trashy" novel. As William Lyell says in his afterward, just because this was a "popular" novel i.e. one intended for a mass audience, does not automatically mean it is trash.
   
   The story is told in simple and vivid prose, aided by the masterful translation of Dr. Lyell. The author obviously was a gifted story teller. He shows in this novel an ability for evoking the reality of his characters as he simply describes their actions. The story does not exactly evoke the profoundest human emotions but it does do so with considerable skill nonetheless, particularly at the end. In addition, the author's eye for details is quite profound; life on the trains are described with great precision, particularly life in and the denizens of, the train's third class car.
   
   About eighty five or ninety percent of the story takes place on the "Shanghai Express", a train going from Beijing to Shanghai. The novel takes place in the mid 30's, when it was first published. The story takes place over the several days of the trip and involves the eventually successful intrigue by passenger Hu Ziyun to get into bed, a young female fellow passanger, Liu Xichun. Ziyun is a very successful banker and Xichun claims to have married into the family of one of his friends.
   
   The novel is quite drawn out and, perhaps consciously intended for its popular audience, well into the book springs upon the reader, a major twist, relating to the character of Liu Xichun. After this twist is fully exposed, we jump forward about ten years and look at the very profound tragedy of what has become of Hu Ziyun. That evocation of that tragedy by the author is probably the most impressive part of the book.
   
   I was most bothered in the novel by some of the lengthy dialogues about their relationship between Xichun and Ziyun which sometimes seem a little unnatural and slightly abstrusely over-intellectualized. Overall, however, the novel is pretty impressive.



3. During the 1930s, Zhang Henshui (pen name of Zhang Xinyuan --ÕÅÐÄÔ¶) enjoyed the status of China¡¯s most popular author. Born in 1895, Henshui departed for Beijing in 1919 to work as a newspaper editor. His first major long work, Chunming Waishi (An Unofficial Tale of Peking), was serialized between 1924 and 1929. The smashing success of this series established him as the preeminent popular novelist of his generation. His masterpieces include Jinfen Shijia (A Family of Distinction--1927-32) and Tixiao Yinyuan (The Fates of a Marriage of Tears and Laughter--1930). In 1935, Shanghai Express was China¡¯s most read novel by her most popular author. Although Zhang Henshui is associated with the Mandarin Duck and Butterfly School, his later writing took a more serious and political tone. During the anti- Japanese war, he took a patriotic stand and published satirical novels such as Eighty-One Dreams. Always prolific, Henshui had penned over one hundred novels by the time he died in 1967.
   In Shanghai Express, a socially prominent and well-to-do banker¡ªHu Ziyun--falls for an alluring young woman¡ªLiu XiChun--while traveling from Beijing to Shanghai. Henshui keeps the reader constantly moving among the sights, sounds, and smells in all three classes of passenger cars, while allowing the tale to unfold. As the two protagonists move among the three classes of train cars, the author offers insights into the characters who populate the various cars. Through the story of Ziyun and XiChun, Henshui explores the boundaries between past and present, public and private, and self and community. Although Ziyun believes that he got lucky when he met XiChun, by the story¡¯s end he realizes the luck was all hers. Hu Ziyun has paid a heavy price for indulging his vanity, proving how fine the lines between the classes can be and how easily people can move or be moved among them.
   
   Shanghai Express provides an example of the ¡°Mandarin Duck and Butterly¡± style of sentimental social romance novel that was enormously popular during the 1920s¡ª1940s in China and for which Zhang Henshui is notable. Though this style of writing was widely enjoyed, some tried to discredit it as mere entertainment for relaxation on a Saturday afternoon¡ªthe equivalent of today¡¯s movies. The Mandarin Duck & Butterfly School of literature was frequently derided by ¡°May Fourth¡± intellectuals as excessively sentimental and trivial. They were the ones who coined the term and used it in a derogatory way. They found this literary style too commercial and ideologically backward during an age when literature in China was dominated by the leftist politics and Europeanising aesthetics of the May Fourth Movement. Arguably, however, Zhang Henshui tried to dignify the genre by retaining the form and language of the old-style Chinese novel, but assimilating techniques and content from May Fourth writing in an effort to modernize traditional fiction and make it more attractive to the masses. The arguments over maintaining scholarly tradition or making literature more approachable to the masses is ages old, and the same disagreements were happening during the Modern era among scholars and writers in the West.
   
   Though this novel may have been written for the general reading public with a slant toward the literary tradition, it may not suit the tastes of contemporary Western readers. The minutiae and drawn out suspense, which create the book¡¯s merit for many, are the very same factors that will make it move much too slowly for other readers. History buffs, Chinese literature fans, and Chinese culture seekers will find the story compelling and will appreciate its exhaustive, Jane Austen-style level of detail. If you¡¯re building a library of Chinese classics, you¡¯re keen to learn something about one of China¡¯s most popular authors, or a fan of 1930s Chinese culture, grab a copy of this translation off amazon.com.

5 comments about Night Train to Turkistan: Modern Adventures Along China's Ancient Silk Road (Traveler).

1. Stevens and three friends (including author Mark Salzman) follow the route of Fleming and Maillart, a 1930s adventure couple from Beijing to Kashgar, the capital of Chinese Turkistan. This is a fun little book, at times truly hilarious, as Stevens blithely recounts the squalid horrors of traveling in a Third World country, or is challenged again and again by mendacious, obstinate bureaucracy who will say anything to prevent them from traveling. But there's not much history or anthropology to speak of, other than a few comments about the Tibetans or Uighurs, or passages from Fleming's book. Nor does Stevens come to any novel or shrewd insights about China, other than the Cultural Revolution must have sucked, although no one will talk to him about it, and its bureaucracy is like an army in its cold homogeneity. It even dismisses the Tienanmen Square riots at the end! A lightweight, amusing travel piece; it could have bean more meaningful, such as Salzman's books or Bill Holm's Coming Home Crazy.



2. As I have stated in other reviews, I do not like the author's personality too much(favorite quotation from another review: "Stu's a jerk, but...") But this book takes an unlikely premise and turns it into a very gripping account of a travel through Asia. I also highly recommend the book written by one of the other travellers here, Mark Salzman's Iron and Silk.



3. Stevens provides a humorous recounting of a romp through Western China attempting to follow the trail of 1936 travelers Fleming an Maillart along the ancient Silk Road. Night Train to Turkistan is entertaining for its quirky characters including infuriating bureaucrats, reluctant Chinese interpretor (Mark Salzman, author of Lying Awake and Iron and Silk), a six foot female athlete who draws a crowd of suitors and gawkers everywhere she goes, and proprietors of various roadside establishments.

   The four travelers are just outrageous and creative enough to actually make their way from Beijing to Kashgar and back, despite a multitude of bureaucrats that seems hellbent on prohibiting them from doing just that. The book starts out with the quartet delivering skis to a national ski team in a country with no ski areas, in the hopes of obtaining a vaguely official-looking reference letter that might unlock some door somewhere. It goes on from there.

   This was a fairly quick read, and, as other reviewers have noted, it's not heavy on anthropological or historical insights. But I don't think the intent of the book was to provide these insights. This is a case where getting there is all the fun. The book is all about the journey, and those who have attempted to journey through bureaucratic developing nations are likely to recognize the types of frustrations and seemingly inexplicable events and policies recounted here. The book is all about crammed unheated buses and trains and low-flying planes and various other conveyances. It's about imperfectly built Russian hotels and incomprehensible bus stations and greasy roadside noodle stands and scheduled group pit stops and increasingly implausible explanations from government workers, desk clerks, and pencil pushers. This all sounds like an incredible bore, but Stevens' entertaining descriptions take you there and hold your attention to the end. If you are looking for an anthropological or historical treatise on Western China, you will be happier looking elsewhere. But as a humorous recounting of a journey through Western China, this one fills the bill. It is primarily from the perspective of a traveler, and the insights are limited, but the observations of a traveler are well worth the price of the book.

   As an aside, several of the other reviewers suggest that this book was set in 1989 or around the time of the protests in Tiananmen Square. In fact the book was published in 1988, and the journey occurred in 1986, both prior to the protests in Tiananmen Square in the spring of 1989. It is unfair to suggest that the author was minimizing the events of that spring, as they had not yet occurred.




4. 
   Travellers come in many flavors, just like ice cream. Some try to "get in" with the natives of the places they go in order to learn more about foreign ways and perceptions. Others prefer to challenge themselves with tests of strength and endurance, paddling up jungle rivers or scaling giant peaks. There are innumerable variations. However, there is one type of traveller whose tales tire me very quickly. That is the type who likes to regale their readers (or listeners) with the total awfulness of everything, to impress (?) people with what they had to put up with, and to tell how ___________ the people were. (choose from among....greedy, stupid, venal, tricky, persistent, dirty, lying, impossible) Occasionally they meet one or two different individuals who only prove the point about the rest.
   
   Stuart Stevens did not know anything about China. His attitude seems to hover most of the time around the level of "frat boy goes China". He managed to recruit two other babes in the woods, plus Mark Salzman, who did know Chinese, had spent a couple years in China already and had written a decent book about it. It would be interesting to hear Mark's opinion of this trip. That travelling rough in Third World countries tends to be difficult is hardly news. Of course, it all might not have been nearly as bad as Stevens says because he is so securely fastened into the "vomit, spit, and urine everywhere" school of travel writing. Stevens had the idea to contact a famous solo traveller from the 1930s, Ella Maillart, a Swiss lady, who had journeyed with a British man along the southern edge of the Takla Makan desert in Xinjiang province (once known as Chinese Turkestan). He tries to retrace their steps, but fails totally and completely. He is forced by Chinese bureaucracy to take the usual tourist route around the north of the desert, winding up in Kashgar, almost to Pakistan. This is an interesting part of the world, and when Stevens can get away from his lightweight moaning about the primitive conditions, the cold (who told him to go in December ?), the bad food, and duplicitous, intransigent Chinese, he writes a nice description. In fact, I would say that this is a well-written travel book with nice flashes of humor, but focussed mostly on the negative. The author takes a leaf from Carlos Castaneda in his "Conversations with Don Juan". He just repeatedly fails to get the message. If he had only decided early on that Chinese hate to tell others "NO" directly, but prefer to give some excuse which may sound lame to Westerners, but which indirectly tells the recipient that "what you are asking is not possible", we could have been spared all the incredulous, open-mouthed astonishment at the Chinese bureaucrats' "lying ways". What we have here is a failure to communicate. I'm sure this is all part of a non-organized trip to Turkestan, but it is not the major part, nor is it a very interesting part. If you are into the Yuck School of Travel Writing, this work is just up your alley. If you would like some sort of perspective on Xinjiang, its people, history and problems, give this book a miss.



5. A travel memoir from an abrasive guy who convinces three friends to go with him to China in the mid-1980s to re-trace the fabled Silk Road route across the high Chinese desert to India. The friends are David, a fitness nut who looks like a special forces recruit; Mark Saltzman, the acclaimed author of his own memoir of China, Iron And Silk, who is along to translate for them; and Fran, a six-foot tall athlete whose statuesque looks ensure that she is mobbed by amazed, admiring crowds wherever they go.
   
   The Han Chinese especially, and China in general, come off in a very negative light: a backward country filled with lying, slothful officials who despise Westerners. This is no Iron And Silk though I did shoot through it briskly due to its clean-cut writing and unrelenting tension (as they struggle with the nightmarish Chinese bureaucracy that blocks their every step).
   
   There's all sorts of tension in the memoir: building within David, who most cannot stand the pitfalls of bureaucracy; and rising between aggressive Stuart who likes to ask former members of the Red Guard how many grandmothers they slaughtered during the Cultural Revolution, and gentle Mark who seeks a way to translate while saving everyone's face. Stuart comes off as a jerk. The memoir is centered so firmly on him that the others barely come across. I think Fran or Mark would have had way more interesting viewpoints than Stuart does.
   
   Throughout his journey, he enjoys asking probing questions of almost every faltering-English-speaking Chinese he meets: questions that put them on the spot in regards to China's troubled past and current government (neither of which is these individuals' faults). That's fine and well when he's attempting to make some smug Communist party official uncomfortable, but not when he's badgering ordinary little people who are afraid to comment or who are stuck living under bad circumstances and don't need their faces rubbed in it by some arrogant tourist. On the other hand, Stuart's travel difficulties had several laugh-out-loud funny moments, and their airline trip near the end of their journey has to be read to be believed.

1 comments about Go2Guides China Ages 12+ (Travel Guides for Kids Who Are Going Places).

1. I have always wanted a guide that is written for children! The Go2Guides are perfect. So much information is a colorful and unique guide. My children are adopted from China and we are planning a trip back to see and learn about their country and heritage. These guides gave them so much critical and interesting information. I especially like that there are guides for the different age levels. My thirteen year old loved hers and my 6 year old was thrilled with her guide. It was obvious that each were written with the age level, interest level, and reading level in mind! I can't recommend them enough. Even if you never travel to China, the Go2Guides wonderful to expose your children do different countries. I am looking forward to the next ones!

4 comments about Looking for Chengdu: A Woman's Adventures in China (Anthropology of Contemporary Issues).

1. I lived in Japan for 9 years and this is a book I want to give friends who ask what it was like. Even though this book is about China, and China and Japan are not the same thing, reading this book helped me to understand much about what I had seen and been through in my own experience. Yes! Yes! Yes! I kept saying when I read it. This is how it was. And here is somebody putting it into words.

   There are the underlying truths about Asia, and greater yet underlying truths about crossing between any two cultures. Finally, there are the truths about any woman's life whether she stays home or travels far. Hill Gates calls them as we all have seen them, from getting your period to getting your hair cut in a foreign land. There are the long van rides that constitute "vacations," the forced alcohol, the question of breakfast foods, unheated living quarters, unexplained prohibitions, glorious discoveries of beautiful scenery, and the eternal question of whether being a foreigner means you're also actually a woman.

   But most of all, it's about the work. In this case, the work is anthropology. Here again, universal truths apply. Good work gives you an adequate struggle. You want to solve things, you want to apply your own talents. You want to learn and contribute, get and give, laugh and cry. Really, you do. You hope to be changed by it and come back with something to report. You enjoy sinking into the luxuries and comforts of your own familiar culture once you make it back to dry land. And then, one day down the road, you get that hankering to leave those comforts again...What a privilege having this life is. All it costs is the belief that you have control over anything.

   My favorite quote from the book ought to warn off anyone who thinks you get to control your own dignity once you choose to put yourself out there. Gates nails it as she observes that, "When it comes to etiquette, the home team has the advantage."




2. Perhaps a third of the book is about traveling in China, mostly in southwestern China, where private enterprise blossomed during the 1980s. The other two thirds are about trying to do research funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, sponsored and administered by the Sichuan Fulian (Women's Federation--literally "Women United"). Anthropologists' fieldwork memoirs are published after more academic presentation of their research results--in Gates's case, a 1997 book _China's Motor: A Thousand Years of Petty Capitalism_ (that compares what she observed in the 1970s in Taiwan, historical records, and her 1987-96 research in Sichuan). The discomforts, including sickness, depression, frustrations about transportation, food, lodging, access to information, and the misunderstanding by "the natives" of the anthropologist's wisdom and good-will may not be vented in public at all.

   Although the author is the major character in the account of her research in the years before and after the crackdown of the PRC gernotacry on private consumption and the accumulation of riches by anyone other than the families of high-placed officials, unlike much contemporary postmodernist anthropology, Gates remains interested in the agency of people (particularly women) trying to prosper in changing and difficult conditions in societies organized differently than the anthropologists' own one. Gates is engagingly honest about her frustrations with Chinese life as well as her joys of solidarity with those she studied and the reader learns some things about living through rapid change in the Chinese interior from her insightful book.




3. Yes, I have read some of Gates' work, but not this one - it doesn't matter in this system. I am merely balancing a double counting of a positive textual review that registers numerically as a zero, thus artificially generating a very low average.
   On balance Amazon reviews are useful, but the lack of control leads to this sort of nonsense. Note also the lack of signature on the doubled review; presumably just an error but one wonders given the recent Canadian site boondoggle with these reviews.



4. This book is a memoir of a decade past written following a Rockerfeller grant to study the women's emancipation movement in SW PRChina, to later compare and contrast with a similar study in Taipei, Taiwan. This fieldwork is undertaken with the cooperation of the Propaganda Dept, Women's Federation, Chengdu, Szechwan province, PRChina.

   Structurally this book is a daily diary which covers, in part, her travels in China as well as some highlights of 100 interviews on women-owned, small business entrepreneurs, that were formed during the Deng's Reform and Opening campaign of the late 80s.

   Her POE is Guangzhou, where she decides to initially travel alone much as the natives do. Her travel scenarios, including her visit to Kunming, City of Eternal Spring, in the first 50 pages of the book, where she had local academic acquaintances to show her the sights. She speaks Putonghua, a form of Mandarin, so she can slowly communicate with the locals in a basic form. It appears that she does not like reading Chinese. In part, she writes with the older Wade-Giles form of romanization, so Szechwan is Sichuan and Taipei is Taibei. Armed with an Academy letter, she uses it to travel, as best she can to cajole the ticket sellers and hostel and guesthouse desks, the way the natives do, and cites prices in RMB, and FEC only when there is no other alternative or she wishes to splurge with a hot bath.

   The more memorable scenarios is her visit to Kunming, capital of the mountainous Yunnan province p36-44 in December 1988. They travel up the Burma Road a bit and discuss the minority people and their distinctive dress p54-8. She eats the native food and promptly gets a bad case of diarrhea, spends two days in bed. She buys a beautiful Naxi cape from a leather maker that was destined to be another bride's dowry.

   Halfway through her anthropological project, her tired workgroup of four demands that she take vacation and unknownst to her, her host department arranged a 7-day holiday with a drive and excursion into far Western Szechwan province to enjoy the Fall colors and stay with a Tibetan family p109-138. Anticipating a boring trip and getting behind in her project, she crankily accompanies the group during another PMS episode. Contrary to her expectation, she enjoys the trip immensely, romps in the forest, and sees blue sky. At each stop, there are local Women's Federation reps to show the group around and introduce them to native families, translate discussions, and describe what they are seeing. They discuss the Tibetan-Han dichotomy and how each culture tries to co-exist.

   There are about 20 scenarios on interviews on women-owned businesses in the book. Most businesses are small, from mom & pop format to ones with handfuls of employees. They are the stereotypical grocery, restaurant, garment, and etc format. What I got out of the book was that women's survival during the "Great Leap Forward" and Cultural Revolution was very harsh, especially in the countryside. Initially the Politburo encouraged formation of these businesses, the owners used the profits to improve their houses, and then the tax collectors came to even things out in the socialist's tradition. So the Politburo is inventing their policies at time goes. It seeds flourishing entrepreneur until they become successful, then taxes them for an increased revenue stream.

   Her writing is fairly well crafted and she discusses scenarios of general interest, so that one can finish the book without getting truly bored of repetitious fieldwork details. The book, divided into 19 chapters, includes about 20 photos of subjects, maps and travel itineries to follow along. There is no index and any notes are referenced on the bottom of the page. Comparatively, I would consider her prose better and more comprehensive than Paul Theroux, a China travel writer covering the same time period. But Peter Hessler is a better describer of Chinese thought and behavior; of course he spent 2 years at a teachers college and learned the local dialect. But as indicated in the preface, she notes her literary limits and includes her published bibliography of academic work.

   The author is a Canadian born, UK raised and educated, who writes in UK prose, so you have to decipher the usual suspects that differ in UK vs US English. She earns her doctorate at Central Michigan U, but is at heart a Brit feminist, and constantly refers to it during her sojourn. From time to time this divorced, pre-menopausal woman titillates the reader with her fantasies as a ravishing redhead in China. To me this was pulp-fiction that the editors must have required her to put in the scripts to help sales. I could have also done without the monthly PMS issues.

   She keeps contemporaneous notes on her notebook computer, so hopefully 10 years later, she doesn't over embellish or forget the details of her 6 month sojourn in Chengdu. I read this book at a local library.

   She attempts to unify her prose by introducing a historical mentor that went before her, a fellow Brit, Ms Isabella Bird Bishop, who does China research in Szechwan a century earlier. Since she merely references her work in a couple pages p48-9, I find it rather distracting, yet amused that she compared her journey to hers.

5 comments about Ultimate Journey: Retracing the Path of an Ancient Buddhist Monk Who Crossed Asia in Search of Enlightenment.

1. _The ultimate Journey_
   retracing the path of an ancient buddhist monk who crosses asia in search of enlightment

   by richard bernstein

   I bought the book in HongKong several summers ago, as i waited for my Chinese visa, knowing this would be the last new English bookstore for awhile.
   It was a good choice, well written, interesting and really to the point. For it is a combination of travelogue and spiritual adventure in trying to retrace the path of Hsuan Tsang .
   Mixed up are the author's thoughts about the reading about Hsuan Tsang and his journey, the physical places that both visit as Bernstein follows the ancient monk's path, and social commentary not just on the places and people but reflects a lifetime of a newspaperman's experiences in this part of the world. What could be a very disjointed and fragmented 'stream of consciousness' travelogue turns out to be a rather organized investigation into not just the author's current travels but the relationship of the monks journey and what happened in the intervening years from the mid 7th C. Well written as the author is a successful and introspective newspaper writer, thoughtful as this is really a work from the heart for him, and for me very much to the point as i had the book with me in Xian as the Big Goose pagoda.
   Because of the dearth of english reading material that summer travelling, i think i read it twice, once straight through and at least once more a page or chapter at a time as i was starving for anything to read, even something i had already finished. I was not disappointed, for his writing and insights are deep and bear close reading. but most of all it was worth the weight in my already overloaded pack, a true recommendation from the heart and shoulders. enjoy.




2. I'm a Buddhist, an international 3rd world traveler and I love travel writing. I thought I'd love this book and was very disappointed. The author should have taken the time to develop some Buddhist practice before launching into inaccurate intellectual Buddhist psycho babble. If you want to write about Buddhism, close the books and develop a mediation practice....everything else misses the mark. Without that perspective the book is boring.



3. While not qualified to judge the author's comments on Buddhism, the book, for me, was one of the best travel books I've ever read. For some reason, Central Asia with its blood-stirring names -- Tashkent, Samarkand, the Silk Road, etc. -- has always fascinated me. Bernstein, in his 50s, did what I, now in my 60s, would have liked to have done but didn't -- travel the Silk Road and exotic points beyond. Perhaps his struggle with his mid-life crisis made his book all the more poignant to this old coot, but I found the story of the monk searching for truth and the story of the journalist searching for himself nicely completmentary. By the time I had finished this delightful book, I felt that I had accompanied the author along the way. And if Bernstein can do that for me, then I pronounce "Ultimate Journey" a helluva good read.



4. Great writing about travel, history and Buddhism are but a few of my major interests, so I was looking forward to digging into Richard Bernstein's ULTIMATE JOURNEY.
   
   But alas, this is not great writing about travel, history or Buddhism - though (with that latter gripe) as this book often drifts towards the upscale insularity and ivory-tower navel-gazing tendencies Western Buddhism is occasionally accused of, it's probably just as well.
   
   Bernstein's many, many digressions completely derailed this book - his writing about his own ancestry are one of the few places things come alive here, the other being his summation of Hsuan Tsang's actual journey through China, central Asia, and India.
   
   Elsewhere, we get a lot of stuff about the Chinese girlfriend (methinks she'd have written a far more interesting book), the career ennui of an exceptionally priveleged man (at this late date, not automatically interesting, or unique in the least), credentials (which are impressive), and a lucky sidekick (a tall "L. L. Bean"-esque Chinese gentleman, generally referred to as Brave King, described as being eager to tag along as a respite from guiding malevolent Turks around the Gobi, though I'd have liked to hear a bit more of what Brave King was actually thinking, and those Turks were probably just misbegotten midlife crisis dudes from Ankara off on some sort of half-cocked sand-blasted vision quest across the wilds of Xinjiang).
   
   There have been a number of great books about Asia, blending history, travel and occasionally Buddhism in grand fashion: Peter Matthiessen's SNOW LEOPARD, Pico Iyer's THE LADY AND THE MONK, Vikram Seth's FROM HEAVEN LAKE, and Ma Jian's RED DUST - the last three written by actual Asians. For all of it's pretenses, ULTIMATE JOURNEY does little to challenge the stature of those classics. Oh well.
   
   -David Alston



5. Unbelievable that the author could have transformed an epic pilgrimage by a legendary Buddhist hero into a dreary travelogue which passes from train to cab to rickshaw against a background of the author's midlife crisis.
   The title itself is misleading because there is no journey. There is an uninspiring movement from place to place, but if there was any growth to be had, the author missed out on it. He professes no spiritual belief, and his disdain for the spiritual beliefs of those around him is explicit. Why travel around the world following the path of a devout Buddhist when you don't even believe in Buddhism?
   This book should be required reading for the author's mother and his wife, probably the only two people who would find his pathetic musings the least bit interesting. The most important lesson to be learned from Ultimate Journey is that Bernstein lived a really interesting life, but when he turned 50, he let his fears push him into trying to make something grand happen. If he had looked inside for his ultimate journey, it would have been a lot more interesting and meaningful than this tepid tome.
   I gave it two stars because of how clearly he describes the misery of travelling in China (now topping my "Do Not Visit" list).

1 comments about Hong Kong: Front Door/Back Door.

1. The Architecture of Density
   
   Words: Rebecca Walker
   Images: www.photomichaelwolf.com
   
   German-born photographer Michael Wolf has been described by some as `humanly alert'. KEE talks to him about the urban dynamics of a complex culture.
   
   Michael Wolf views ordinary things in extraordinary ways. Culturally astute, Wolf's artistic inspiration comes from the local culture in which he immerses himself. Wolf has been fascinated by China's complex urban dynamics since moving to Asia as a contract photographer 10 years ago and his photography focuses on the idiosyncrasies of the Asian way of life. Insightful and absorbing, his latest book "Hong Kong, The Front Door/The Back Door" deals with the SAR's cultural identity through depictions of the city's architecture.
   
   Wolf was born in Munich and grew up in the USA. He began a career in photography after graduating from the University of Essen in Germany, freelancing for various international publications including Time, Spiegel and Stern. In the early 1990s Wolf had an epiphany. "I was sitting in my room in Amsterdam and suddenly knew I needed to make a big change in my life. I had a picture of the globe in my head and when I came to Asia I knew that was where I needed to go."
   
   His decision was a good one and it was in China that he found his ultimate inspiration. "I love the visual chaos of China. It is a photographers dream," says the photographer. Wolf's poignant portrayals of the lives and living conditions of his cultural environment are subjective and personal and have earned him international acclaim. As described by Art Critic Kenneth Baker, "By their formal intelligence and acuity of observation, Wolf's Hong Kong pictures easily earn the status of art works."
   
   Wolf's first book, "China in Transition" (2001) documents the disappearing grandeur of the Middle Kingdom in China. It is a compelling portrait of old culture embarking into modernity and casts a moving gaze at China and its people on the threshold of the third millennium. His second book, "Sitting in China" (2002) depicts a multifaceted China, from its chairs to the mindset of its people. Through a diverse assortment of compelling images, Wolf documents the beauty of the ugly, the stretching of time, the art of improvisation, and the nature of the stool as a portrait of its user. He often depicts discarded objects of the man-made world in his photographs and is interested in the "beauty inherent in used objects." He explains, "My parents are both artists and from an early age my mother took me to flea markets to rummage through a myriad of used knick-knacks. I love pattern and character, and the feeling that something has a history."
   
   Wolf's third book, "Chinese Propaganda Posters" (2003) showcases his vast personal collection of colourful propagandist artworks and cultural artifacts produced between the birth of the People's Republic of China in 1949 and the early 1980s. "Chinese Propaganda Posters" is whimsically structured to correspond with the chapters of Mao's Red Book and gives a sense of how the illiterate masses used images to define themselves in Communist China. "The posters give a sense of how the Chinese viewed their future at that time. The discrepancy between fantasy and reality really fascinates me and the posters are also very stylistically beautiful."
   
   In his latest release, "Hong Kong: Front Door/Back Door" (2005), Wolf continues to explore the theme of the organic metropolis. Hong Kong is one of the most densely populated metropolitan areas in the world and Wolf's photographs seek out the human spirit in the urban jungle. The images in the book depict the high-rises that shape the spatial experience of Hong Kong's citizens. Since Wolf himself is one of those citizens (he has been a Hong Kong resident since 1994), his photographs have a distinctively personal essence. "To me the concept of the `back-door' is far more interesting than the front. The back alleys contain a tremendous visual wealth. When you enter through the font door of someone's house you see what they want you to see: the best version. The back door on the other hand tells a culture's true story."
   
   A close look at one of Wolf's architectural images uncovers irregularities such as plants, laundry and scaffolding that interrupt the orderly design of monolithic apartment buildings. The monotonous regularity of each façade is given a distinct personality through human details. "When people don't have enough space, they improvise and adapt. There are many symbols of Chinese thriftiness in the book that are very telling of the Eastern mindset. In the West we throw things away when they break. In the East people take the time to fix things, it doesn't matter what things look like, as long as they work."
   
   Thought-provoking texts by art critic Kenneth Baker and designer Douglas Young are included in "Front Door/Back Door". The two pay a humanistic tribute to the ingenuity of city-dwellers and their content examines peoples' lifestyle choices and explores the concepts of form, function, identity, and design. As stated by Baker in the book's introduction: "The new Hong Kong residential architecture has turned the lives of the Hong Kong people inside-out." This assertion is supported by Young who says, "Buildings that begin as monoliths are slowly humanised by their inhabitants; architecture becomes a framework upon which people can hang their personal personalities."
   
   Young describes Hong Kong as a "city of contrasts" and says, "Architects (in Hong Kong) have ingeniously stretched the tolerance of strict building codes by squeezing as many households as possible into a given site." Wolf chose to collaborate with Young and Baker on this project because he was drawn to their cultural knowledge and artistic sensibility. "Douglas Young has a very interesting local vision of Hong Kong whereas Kenneth Baker puts the photographs into context artistically on an international level."
   
   Wolf's interest in the people and societal changes taking place in China earned his images first prize in the `Contemporary Issues' section of the 2005 World Press Photo Awards. Held annually, the awards have come to be regarded as the most prestigious for photojournalism in the world. Says Wolf, "I have been a photojournalist for over 30 years, so it's great to be rewarded for all my hard work."
   
   Wolf is interested in exploring a wide range of multi-faceted artistic pursuits and says he has an ever-increasing urge to work on his own projects. His installation art piece, "The Real Toy Story", is one such example. In 2004 he spent four weeks collecting over 20,000 toys from various charity shops and flea-markets, all with `Made in China' stamps. He then visited five toy factories in China where he photographed the workers producing the toys and the resulting artwork was an elaborate installation that incorporated 16,000 toys and embedded photographs. The installation was extremely well received by art critics worldwide and will be exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago in 2006.
   
   With the next 12 months booked in advance, Wolf shows no sign of slowing down. He stands by his motto: "If you are a vision and real conviction, you will find success." And that he has.

5 comments about Everest the Hard Way.

1. The story of the British expedition to the Southwest face of Everest by the expedition leader Chris Bonington. The story is well told and very interesting. Bonington intermingles his own thoughts with the views of other members of the team. One of the better books on an Everest expedition I have read. I found it much more interesting then Tom Hornbein's "The West Ridge." Bonington includes many Appendix sections, almost a third of the book, on the logistics of the expedition. You could run your own expedition by just reading the appendixes. A classic in the Everest genre.



2. The story of the British expedition to the Southwest face of Everest by the expedition leader Chris Bonington. The story is well told and very interesting. Bonington intermingles his own thoughts with the views of other members of the team. One of the better books on an Everest expedition I have read. I found it much more interesting then Tom Hornbein's "The West Ridge." Bonington includes many Appendix sections, almost half the book, on the logistics of the expedition. You could run your own expedition by just reading the appendixes. A classic in the Everest pantheon.



3. I first read this book as a young boy. I was enthralled by the personal accounts from the climbers that took part in the expedition, and by Bonnington's writing style.

   Each time I have read it, I gain my respect--anew--for the men who leave the comforts of home and civilization to brave the roof of the world. Of all of the accounts of Everest expeditions, this is by far the best. I especially enjoy the section on logistics. Having been a climber for many years, I enjoy seeing how other people "do it."




4. This is the expedition book about the first ascent of the difficult Southwest Face route. Bonington's own writing, a little dry, is supplemented by interesting excerpts from the diaries of his teammates, including Pete Boardman, who as always writes beautifully. This is the ascent on which Mick Burke was lost. Overall, though not quite among the very best of mountaineering books, this is a classic and belongs on all shelves. The photos included capture the bleakness and mystery of the terrain and the precarious box-tent camps beautifully.



5. For many years Chris Bonington was one of the leading organizers of British climbing expeditions and a superb climber in his own right. He wrote a whole series of books around his expeditions, all of them well worth reading of you like these kind of books. In "Everest the Hard Way" he leads a team that successfully climbs to the top via the South West Face. This was back in August 1975, and it was (and is) a pretty amazing story. There are some great descriptions of the climb, the camps, the preparation, the personalities of the climbers. I picked up this one when it was first published and highly recommend it! I've been to Base Camp myself, looked at the mountain, and there's no way I'd be trying it, even the easy way! But I don't mind reading about it!
   
   The climbing team that Bonington put together for this expeiditon reads like a whos' who of British climbing in the 70's - and sadly, a number of them later died in climbing accidents. This particular expedition lost one climber, Mick Burke, in a summit bid. Basically, they climbed the south-west face of Everest, the steepest and highest face in the world, including the sheer 1000 ft "Rock Band" at 26,000 ft. They put up 6 camps, the highest just above the Rock Band at 27,300 ft and in one of the summit attempts, 2 members of the team successfuly bivouaced out on the South Summit.
   
   The books got a great collection of photos, like most of Bonington's books do, as well as a huge series of appendices (150 pages out of the 350 page book) on the organisational, logistical and other aspects of the expedition. Like all Bonington's books, it's well written, descriptive, and conveys the challenges, both physical and mental, that the climbing team faced. Published in 1976, it's still, 30 years on, a really good read about a climbing team that took on one of the toughest climbs in the world and suceeded.

1 comments about The Silk Road: Xi'an to Kashgar, Seventh Edition (Odyssey Illustrated Guide).

1. I found this book most useful on a recent trip along the Chinese Silk Route and would recommend anyone doing the same to purchase the book.

No comments about Nelles Central China Map (Nelles Maps).

No comments about Tibet: A Photographic Tour through the Realm of EnchantmentAs Viewed through the Lens of Sun Chengyi.