No fantasies, myths or clichés: Travels in Asia

How is it possible to approach writing about Asia? It’s distant, but discoverable; it’s filled with people, but also your own experiences of it; it is the cynosure of so many eyes and stories that many fantasies, myths and clichés about it abound. In today’s Travels in Asia session, three authors discussed their relationship with Asia, and how they write about it.

Kim Cheng Boey’s essays were informed by his nostalgia for Singapore. On a year-long trip through Asia and Africa, he found upon his return to his homeland that his memories became intertwined with the new experiences. Boey read from his essay ‘The Smell of Memory’ – he considers smell ‘the most primordial of the human senses’. Singapore, with its ‘obsessive cleaning’, has removed all its smells, and installed in their place ‘anonymous sky towers’.

Simon Winchester is well known for his books on the history of the Oxford English Dictionary, among many other things, but the journalistic impulse in him has taken him to many far-flung places. The author of Simon Winchester’s Calcutta, Korea and Bomb, Book and Compass, Winchester has taken many journeys in Asia, including one from Europe through the Khyber Pass, and another to Hong Kong, where he lived for some time. As he unspooled his travel tales, casually throwing names like Ulan Bator, South Korea and Irkutsk into his telling, it became clear that his varied and rich experiences were due to his keen curiosity, as well as the endless interest offered by the expanses of Asia. There were touches of the absurd to his tales, too. Winchester recounted a story of the ‘new’, technologically advanced China. He was once stranded in the Gobi Desert, his car having given out completely, but ‘somewhere in the Gobi Desert were cell phone towers, and I was able to get onto Google’.

Ouyang Yu is a poet, novelist, translator, critic and non-fiction writer whose prolific output would have any dilatory writer seething with envy. For Yu, there are three ways of travelling through Asia – personal, cyber and imaginative – all these ways of travelling are related in some way, all referring back to the ‘text’ of Asia. In his reading, he evoked the strangeness of belonging tinged with strangeness. In one trip from Kunming, for example, Yu encountered the sound of a Chinese dialect different to his own, men smoking pipes longer than an arm, people wearing headdresses and eating grasshoppers.

When Boey suggested that what he found most compelling in other travel writers, I found myself agreeing with him: the writers he loved, like Greene and Chatwin, had vision. They were not just reporting, they were also telling a story, and whether they are liars or raconteurs, that is what we respond to.