A tired collection of unimaginably tired cliches
May 2, 2006 | Category: China
Peter of the Away on Business blog, who was also editor of the first edition of Frommer’s China (to which I contributed a couple chapters), sent along the following with the suggestion that it would be useful if I were ever in need of an emetic. I post it here with commentary in case any of you are in need of same.
The “it” is the introduction to the “Best of China” chapter in the just released second edition of Frommer’s China, which begins like so:
No other single country can even come close to offering such a vast choice of destinations as the unimaginable vastness that is currently known as China.
Hats off to the ever-vigilant Frommer’s copy editors. But this passage says more about the author, reported to be one Christopher Winnan. Like too many other travel writers given the opportunity to write about China (a country so delightfully fucked up one can find interesting things to say about it even before being conned on the first ride from the airport), Winnan mails it in. He chooses to perpetuate—nay, inflate—the worst regurgitated schlock about the place—schlock those of us who wrote the first edition spilled gallons of ink to debunk. Witness, for example, what he does with the common and dubious claim that China has 2000, 3000, 4000 or [what have you] years of history:
We concede that we have barely scratched the surface, especially when we consider that human history in this area stretches back almost two million years, much further than the much-vaunted 5,000 years of Chinese civilization, yet even this is hardly a smudge on the far longer geologic record.
Longer geologic record?
Contrast that with the introduction Peter wrote for the same section in the first edition:
It’s unfortunate for visitors to China that however impressive the country’s sites, they are often dwarfed by the hype surrounding them. The Chinese travel industry is determined to shuttle tour groups around a limited shortlist of both truly magnificent sights and merely wannabe jaw-droppers, selling a highly imaginary picture-book China so over-promoted that it can hardly fail to disappoint. And yet beyond the world of the carefully cropped photograph, the over-charging, and the tourist trap, there is a China where life goes on regardless of your presence, not staged for your pleasure—where you, rather than just your wallet, are welcome.
The point of all this is not to sell more copies of our edition of the book, which is by now long outdated. It is rather to highlight the difference between good and bad travel writing on China, as well as to point out the mystifying tendency amongst travel editors to reward the cliched and unhelpful, while punishing the useful and nuanced.
Frommer’s internal editors whispered often to me about their frustrations with Peter, who had the temerity to write honestly about unpleasant realities like Beijing’s awful traffic and to demand the placement of Chinese characters next to place names in the body of the book (something that never happened). He is now rumored to be on their list of “difficult” writers. The publisher’s darling, meanwhile, is J.D. Brown–author of their previous China titles–writer who produced prose not unlike Winnan’s, who mistranslated the name of one of Beijing’s most famous streets, and who won an an international travel writing award for a book so full of soporific postcard imagery the writers who were asked to update it later demanded to have their names appear separately from his on the inside pages.
Winnan himself captures it best when he quotes John King Fairbank, whom he elects as “the world’s foremost authority on China” (shouldn’t this honor be given to a Chinese person?):
“Our libraries are filled with writers who know all about China, but could not see how much they did not know.”
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Josh Chin is a freelance journalist based in Beijing. He also once worked as a sous chef in a French restaurant in San Francisco. Neither job has been good for his health.Latest from Twitter...
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Too funny! What more can I say except that I agree 100%. I guess it proved my thesis about what would have happened to Frommer’s Beijing if I passed it up. Want to do the next edition, old man?
If only it had stopped at mistranslating a Beijing street name.
The famous line was:
‘Before Liberation in 1949, Wangfujing Lu (Goldfish Lane) was known as Morrison Street.’
Setting aside the witlessness of helping to spread CPC propaganda to a mass foreign audience by using terms such as ‘Liberation’, Wangfujing is a Dajie, not a Lu; its meaning is ‘Avenue of the Princes’ Well’ (‘Goldfish Lane’ is close, but no opium pipe); and Wangfujing was only known as Morrison Street to the small number of foreign residents in the late 1800s and earl 1900s, and certainly never as that to the Chinese, who might have been thought to count for something in their own capital. Readers might also reasonably expect to find out who Morrison was (an Australian who was the principle China correspondent of The Times, and regarded, despite not having a word of Mandarin, as oracular on China, not least by himself). Otherwise what’s the point of mentioning him? Unfortunately if the author actually knows, he doesn’t tell us.
And there was a great deal more of the same kind of embarrassing nonsense in the book, which had actually appeared in two editions without any of Frommer’s remarkable editorial staff picking up on any of it.
To be fair to ‘international travel writing’ awards, a dubious bunch of PR exercises for destinations at the best of times, and although we’re constantly pestered to allow ourselves to be entered for them so we can describe ourselves as ‘award-winning’ writers, they didn’t sink to Brown’s level. The award was from a Chinese government tourism agency, and, of course, the only kind of writing likely to win that would be the kind of breathless ooey gooey chop suey writing that did. I don’t think it was called the Propaganda Award, but it probably should have been. Production is always up and the minorities are always happy (they sing and dance).
Unfortunately with guide books you rarely get what you pay for, and it’s the publishers, who so often care about nothing except getting something with ‘China’ on its front on the shelves as quickly as possible and for as little cost as possible, who must carry at least as much of the blame as the halfwit authors they recruit with insufficient examination of their qualifications, and no fact-checking of the resulting material. Or, as in the example given above, even a check for common sense and simple readability.