Jonathan Lau

Parfitt, a longtime English teacher in Taiwan, explains his trip across China — he ultimately visits or travels through 17 of the PRC’s provinces — as an attempt to understand and assess it. This, unfortunately, means that he’s gone off the rails more or less before the book has even begun, for I can think of no worse way to approach understanding China than by traveling around visiting important historical (i.e., tourist) sites.

First of all, tourist travel ensures the maximum level of exposure to China’s most annoying touts and swindlers. I have traveled much in the manner Mr. Parfitt traveled across China twice during my time here, and both times I can report feeling similar levels of rage and frustration at points along the trip, levels I never come close to when I’m living regular life in Beijing (or before that, Harbin). That said, Parfitt has either written selectively or taken history’s most calamitous trip, as most of my travels in China have been enjoyable overall, despite experiencing many of the annoyances Parfitt mentions. It’s worth noting that he and I visited many of the same places within just a few years of each other, but his impression of them is always negative.

Secondly, while traveling does expose one to a great variety of places and people, thus granting one’s survey great breadth, it virtually ensures that you will be unable to achieve any sort of depth in your understanding. A tourist simply isn’t in any one place long enough to really understand much of anything. Unsurprisingly, then, I found Parfitt’s renderings of Harbin and Beijing among the most offensive, probably because those are cities I’ve lived in for an extended period of time and have more than a cursory understanding of1.

Finally, tourists are likely to have a very hard time seeing or hearing anything real, because Chinese people — like anyone, really — are going to be hesitant to reveal their true feelings to strangers. That goes doubly for foreigners, and probably triple or quadruple for Taiwan-based foreigners like Parfitt who, I’m guessing, had a hard time concealing his biases.