Destination: China
Commie Chic in China
by Jim Benning | 10.07.05 | 10:35 PM ET
PBS’ NewsHour with Jim Lehrer is airing a seven-part series on the rise of China as an economic power, and Friday’s installment was terrific: an exploration of the cult of Mao that lives on in the country today. “How does the totalitarian communist icon fit with the capitalist wealth-fest that the People’s Republic of China has become?” correspondent Paul Solman asked. Looking for answers, he visited The Red Capital Club, a Beijing restaurant that recreates a 1950s Communist Party hangout, complete with a party limo parked in front.
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Yahoo! BuzzWorld Tourism Organization: 100 Million Chinese Travelers by 2020
by Michael Yessis | 09.27.05 | 4:54 AM ET
How significant is the number? Consider this: Chinese citizens were only freed by their government to travel for leisure in 1997, and last year only 29 million mainland Chinese citizens traveled abroad. Tom Miller of the China Economic Quarterly writes that the upcoming Chinese tourism boom is a mixed blessing for Europe’s tourism economy.
The Critics: “Sky Burial”
by Jim Benning | 08.22.05 | 11:41 PM ET
The Los Angeles Times reviewed what sounds like an unusual novel about Tibet: “Sky Burial” by Chinese journalist Xinran. The novel, writes Seth Faison, “offers a perspective Western readers rarely get: a Chinese person who sympathizes with Tibetans. It’s a compelling story about a woman from Suzhou who goes to Tibet to search for her lost husband. She encounters danger and hides with a nomadic family in the vast openness of the Tibetan plateau, only to drift for 30 years and become thoroughly immersed in Tibetan culture before she can complete her goal.”
Have Papal Vestments, Will Travel
by Jim Benning | 04.20.05 | 9:30 PM ET
Cleo Paskal, What’s the Biggest Reward of Life as a Travel Writer?
by Jim Benning | 04.20.05 | 9:29 PM ET
Shanghai: ‘The Playground of World Architecture’
by Jim Benning | 02.07.05 | 3:25 PM ET
Perhaps no other city on the planet offers such a dazzling display of futuristic architectural styles than Shanghai. The February issue of Harper’s features a terrific analysis of that architecture. Writes Mark Kingwell: “Shanghai is a fantasyland of architectural grandiosity where any drawing, no matter how insane or adolescent, may come to life almost instantly, without the citizens’ committees, building restrictions, and expensive labor that hamper architectural geniuses everywhere.” Alas, the story is not available online.
The Headmaster, the Terrorists and Me
by Julia Ross | 10.05.04 | 9:37 PM ET
Photo by Julia Ross. Two years after the Bali bombing, Julia Ross recalls the attack's unlikely impact on her teaching experience in China
On the Bus with Hong Kong’s ‘Long Hair’
by Jim Benning | 09.15.04 | 11:26 PM ET
Journalist and travel writer Daisann McLane is filing dispatches from Hong Kong this week for Slate. The first article, which appeared yesterday, focuses on Sunday’s legislative council elections and “Long Hair,” a Che-T-shirt-wearing Marxist activist and surprise winner. McLane jumped on his press bus Monday, as soon as she got the invitation. “I used to be a staff writer for Rolling Stone, so I know the first rule of superstar journalism: If you’re invited on the tour bus, you go,” she writes. Today’s dispatch focuses on Hong Kong cuisine. McLane is at work on a memoir about learning Cantonese. If it’s half as engaging as the New York Times story she wrote a year ago about studying the language, it’s sure to be a good read. She was featured in a 2002 World Hum interview.
Ten Years of Travelers’ Tales
by Jim Benning | 07.12.04 | 9:16 PM ET
The San Francisco Chronicle’s John Flinn celebrates the publishing company’s travel anthologies in a column Sunday. “[T]hese rambling anthologies are like mosaics: Each piece might add only a single note of color, but combine them and step back, and a rich and multifaceted portrait emerges,” he writes. Travelers’ Tales editor Jen Leo liked Flinn’s column, writing in her weblog that it was “a well written primer for those who have never heard of Travelers’ Tales.” She also noted a few upcoming titles from the company, including a collection of China stories. For more on Travelers’ Tales, World Hum interviewed co-founder James O’Reilly in May.
Pico Iyer on “Tibet, Tibet”
by Jim Benning | 10.27.03 | 8:58 PM ET
Iyer reviewed the new book by Patrick French in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times. “The new work stitches together an unflinching account of the author’s two-and-a-half month journey across Tibet in 1999 with an exhaustive excavation of historical resources designed to show that Tibet was never the peace-loving paradise so many generations of well-wishers have longed for it to be,” Iyer writes. In the end, it seems, Iyer had mixed feelings about the book. “I began to feel that what [French] had seen and heard in Tibet was so abject and so harrowing that he could no longer even open his ears to the hopeful voices of Dharamsala and London.” The article is available online only to subscribers.
You Ordered in Cantonese
by Jim Benning | 07.29.03 | 1:08 AM ET
Travel writer Daisann McLane is learning to speak Cantonese. Not many foreigners take up the language these days. Mandarin is the official Chinese language, as well as the one that Western professionals are racing to master for business reasons. As a result, the practical-minded Chinese in New York’s Chinatown, where she studies, think she is a little crazy.
But as she writes in a thoughtful and inspiring story in Friday’s New York Times, her new language skills have unexpectedly opened new doors in her hometown.
“I’ve lived in New York for more than 25 years, and for most of that time I related to Chinatown the way I suppose most non-Asian New Yorkers do: as a fun place to eat dinner that is exotic, mysterious but ultimately unknowable and even, on occasion, brusque,” she writes. “But when I spread my Chinese homework out on restaurant and coffee shop tables, unexpected things happen. It is as if a door swings open and Chinatown invites me into the house to meet the family.” McLane, who also writes the “Frugal Traveler” column for the New York Times, fielded questions from World Hum last year.
Is Television Destroying Bhutan?
by Jim Benning | 07.04.03 | 12:06 AM ET
The Himalayan kingdom is touted by adventure travel companies as a more exotic and remote alternative to Nepal and Tibet. But the country is changing fast, thanks in no small part to TV, introduced just four years ago. So how have Larry King, the Rock and Bart Simpson altered life in the country? Crime and drug use are up. And a third of Bhutan’s girls now want blonde hair and lighter skin, according to one unofficial survey. “There is something depressing about watching a society casting aside its unique character in favour of a Californian beach,” Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy write in a fascinating story in the Guardian (UK). “Cable TV has created, with acute speed, a nation of hungry consumers from a kingdom that once acted collectively and spiritually.”
Looking for Some Writing That Evokes a Sense of Place? Pick up a Good Whodunit.
by Michael Yessis | 06.11.03 | 12:16 AM ET
So says Reggie Nadelson in a vivid essay in the June issue of Travel + Leisure. The author of “Red Hot Blues” and “Hot Poppies” examines the importance of place in crime novels and recounts a few events from her own travels that led to specific scenes in her books, including a trip to Hong Kong that influenced the latter book.
Dear American Daughter
by Michael Yessis | 11.24.02 | 5:30 PM ET
Jennifer Adler had some bad experiences after giving out her e-mail address to people she’d met while traveling, so she made a pact with herself not to reveal her electronic identity again.
Then she met Lin, “an aged, slim man in slacks and a pale green crocheted sweater-vest” on a train in China. She traded addresses. It’s an exchange she treasures. “In the seven months since that morning, Lin and I have been writing about once a week,” she writes in a beautiful, moving essay in this weekend’s New York Times. “He addresses his messages to me ‘Dear American daughter.’ I have helped him with bits of English and tried to be sincere in answers to questions about American life; in turn he has bestowed his wisdom as only a stranger, a wise old foreign stranger, could.”
‘My Parents Didn’t Know How To Behave at Some of the Grandest Sights in China’
by Jim Benning | 06.26.02 | 11:49 PM ET
When Rolf Potts headed out with his parents onto the vast expanse of the Mongolian steppe, he worried about them. First, they seemed to lollygag on the hike. Then they became obsessed with finding botanical specimens and what looked to be garbage. Rolf was sure their parent-child relationship had suddenly reversed. Before he could scold his mom and dad, however, he came to a realization: Travel hadn’t turned his parents into children.