Fresh Air Fiend (9 page)

Until recently, I was happy enough to regard the travel book as an unclassifiable artifact, like the distant journey. Then, in 1989, the events in Tiananmen Square unfolded, and in the aftermath I started to reassess the genre. I think that any travel book about China written in the mid-1980s ought to have prepared us for those events, maybe even prefigured them. I have always felt that the truth is prophetic, that if you describe precisely what you see and give it life with your imagination, then what you write ought to have lasting value, no matter what the mood of your prose.

"Cantankerous" is the lazy reviewer's word for my handling of this complex process. "Mr. Theroux didn't like [the Chinese people] much," a
New York Times
reviewer observed about my China book,
Riding the Iron Rooster.
"Grouchy Traveler Back on the Rails Again," one headline ran, and another, "Theroux Grumpy in New China Travel Book." There were several more, and they are still fresh in my mind (though I must say that sales of half a million books have the effect of neutralizing even the most ill-natured and silly review). The thrust of many of these reviews was that I was a sour and impatient intruder in a socialist paradise, and that I had an irritating and impolite habit of bringing up unwelcome subjects while interrogating the Chinese with a kind of unreasonable gusto.

In the book, I gave an account of how, during an anti-crime campaign, the Chinese government had executed ten thousand people—not, I pointed out, during the Ming Dynasty but between 1983 and 1986, when tourists were sailing down the Yangtze, skipping around the Forbidden City, and remarking on how "Westernized" the Chinese were. This enthusiasm for shooting hastily convicted criminals in the back of the neck, I went on, was supported by the bridge-playing, lovable Deng Xiaoping, an energetic hangman who clung to the Chinese belief in "killing a chicken to scare the monkeys." During a pep talk to the five-man standing committee of the Politburo, I continued, Mr. Deng summed up his attitude by saying, "As a matter of fact, execution is the one indispensable means of education."

The victims of such instruction might be murderers, but they might also be pimps, arsonists, prostitutes, gamblers, procurers, rapists, white-collar criminals, thieves, muggers, or members of Chinese secret societies. In other words, disrupters of life. The Chinese have a horror of
luan,
chaos. A suitable candidate for capital punishment is anyone who goes against the grain. People who engage in such activities are regarded by the Politburo—indeed, by chain-smoking, "Westernized" Mr. Deng—as hippie scum whose only cure is a bullet in the neck.

Every railway station in China (I passed through hundreds of them in every province and region) displayed portraits of executed people: there they were on the wall, the haggard faces of the condemned, looking doomed. A red X over the face meant the person had been dispatched. I was told that many were students, and that roughly three thousand malefactors a year were executed.

I decided in my book to keep away from the Forbidden City, to give short shrift to the Great Wall, and to talk to the Chinese—workers, officials, and students. The working people complained about inflation, the officials complained about students, and the students said reforms were not happening quickly enough. "There will be more demonstrations," one student told me, referring to student protests in six Chinese cities, including Beijing and Shanghai, that had taken place only weeks before. "Many more." This was in early 1987.

Meanwhile, American television crews were filming the grand opening of the Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet in Tiananmen Square, and the fashion shows, the Japanese cars, the terra-cotta warriors, the mass-produced back scratchers, the arrival of American business executives, the bowling alleys in Canton, and so forth. What else could they do? Television cannot film corruption. Television cannot spend five days on a rattling railway train, talking endlessly. Television needs excitement, an angle, a sound bite. So television did not prepare us for the massacre of the students in Tiananmen Square.

Nor did the American businessmen, junketing politicians, accountants, lawyers, or bankers. They were making deals, not trying to capture a mood. The poor jet-lagged tourists couldn't do much either: they were being hauled from one repainted monument to another and told that this or that Disneylandish place was an ancient tomb or temple.

I believe I have a sunny disposition and am not naturally a grouch. It takes a lot of optimism, after all, to be a traveler. But a travel writer must report faithfully on what he or she encounters in a country, and
Riding the Iron Rooster
is full of the voices and complaints of Chinese students, who seemed to me very similar in outlook to American students of the 1960s, of whom I was one: alienated and impatient for change. I also faithfully reported official cant, the fall of Hu Yaobang, the rise of Zhao Ziyang, and the dismissal of Fang Lizhi (who, confined to the American embassy in Beijing, looked more and more like Joseph Cardinal Mindszenty, the Hungarian prelate who spent fifteen years in the American embassy in Hungary). In China, I felt I was seeing one paradox after another. To understand the country, you need to write about more than its pseudo-spiritualism or its clumsily reconstructed temples. Nor is it a question of liking or disliking the Chinese. The job of the travel writer is to go far and wide, make voluminous notes, and tell the truth. There is immense drudgery in the job. But the book ought to live, and if it is truthful, it ought to be prescient without making predictions.

With the events of Tiananmen Square, I saw that the travel book performs a unique function. A book has the capacity to express a country's heart, as long as it stays away from vacations, holidays, sightseeing, and the half-truths in official handouts; as long as it concentrates on people in their landscape, the dissonance as well as the melodies, the contradictions, and the vivid trivia—the fungi on the wet boots.

N
ORMAL, HAPPY
, well-balanced individuals seldom become imaginative writers, and generally writers tend to be notoriously unhealthy. There are reasons for this, the most compelling of which are that a writer works alone, indoors, in a room, on a chair, with the door shut. Any young person who wonders what his or her chances are of becoming a writer ought to assess their ability to deal with solitude and, figuratively speaking, an entire working life thrashing around in inspissated darkness. It has been said that writing is a rat race in which you never get to meet the other rats.

The writer is odd from day one, and in the course of pursuing this maddening profession becomes distinctly odder. There are not many exceptions. Only unfunny non-writers were surprised when Art Buchwald announced a few years ago that he had been treated many times for depression, or that William Styron wrote in
Darkness Visible
of being suicidal. It is a commonplace to say that creative people tend to be irrational, manic-depressive, or hard to get along with. It is not unusual for a successful writer—your favorite, the one you think of as full of sunshine, wisdom, and laughter—to spend great portions of his or her life in a state of fury, or hideously disappointed, or even raving mad.

The loneliness of the long-distance writer concerns me, because writing a large book is a daunting task requiring time, silence, and space. It is a condition summed up in the image of a two-pound chicken trying to lay a three-pound egg. It can be very irritating when writers are told how they might manage their lives better ("You should get yourself a computer!"). The more imaginative and ambitious the writer, the greater his or her solitude—and, you might say, the greater the likelihood of the person's being eccentric.

You might deduce from the foregoing that writing is my hopeless passion. Perhaps it is, but it is not occasional, nor is it work in any conventional sense. It has no limits; it is simply my life.

I feel a need to emphasize the seriousness of the writer's dilemma because of the radical nature of my solution. I am not dealing with the fanaticism of the literary passion, but with the problems it poses—the way it may consume a person or wreak havoc on his health. I take writing for granted as a fact of life, so I am more interested in the opposite of writing, which is a counterlife and a consolation and also a passion.

I have always lived near water, and for forty-five years, since I learned to row at the age of ten, I have found refuge in the bosom of small boats. Scarcely realizing why, I took my frustration outdoors and gave it an airing. When I was eleven, at scout camp, I learned to paddle a canoe. At my school, team sports were the thing, and strong talented players were chosen over weak inexperienced ones like me. I did not mind being rejected. I knew that the school, like most American schools, hated losing teams. It would have been a humiliation to be regarded as having helped the school lose, nor was any school inclined to teach me the fine points of the game—any game. As a result, I lost interest in all ball playing. Never played, never went to games, still don't.

The sense of liberation that I felt on the water, alone in a boat, was comparable to the freedom I had felt expressing myself in writing. Navigating on a trip in a small boat is like a reenactment in the open air of being a writer. "The Open Boat," Stephen Crane's short story, is only superficially about seamanship, and there is hardly a boat trip or ship journey in literature that is not also a metaphor for the active life. On lakes and rivers in Africa, in sampans and sailboats for three years in Singapore, throughout eighteen years of boating in Britain—on the Thames, along the coast, on the elongated lochs of Scotland—I felt I had found a way of freeing myself from the intensity of writing and the sense of suffocation of being confined indoors. I never owned an engine or outboard motor: my interest is in non-polluting self-propulsion, not speed—sailing, rowing, paddling.

The passion became stronger as I grew older, more aware of my health and, especially, more conscious of a growing inwardness. Being outside, away from my desk, I found inspiring, and some of my best ideas have come to me in the most unliterary circumstances—offshore, in the invigorating trance that the aerobic exercise of rowing continuously can induce.

I had always spent summers on Cape Cod, even when I was resident in England. I kept a rowboat and a small sailboat on the Cape, for my own benefit and also so I could teach my children how to use them. Such skills, I felt, would stand them in better stead than chucking a ball, swinging a bat, or risking brain damage by tackling a muddy oaf. I don't despise such sports. I merely feel they have limited use as a person grows older, and I know that men and women can row and paddle and sail well into their eighties.

The solitariness of boating is not a disadvantage; for a writer it is almost essential to pursue a solitary passion in the open air. Long ago I accepted the absence of congeniality in a writing life. Small boats I found to be perfect companions, and the longer I spent in them, the more possibilities I began to discern. The Thames, as rowers and sailors know best, is tidal as far as the first lock, at Richmond. That makes the river more challenging, even treacherous, but you can turn the tidal flow to your advantage, and with good timing it is possible to coast home on an outgoing tide.

Rowing on a sliding seat is wonderful water-beetle exercise, and after I had done it in London using borrowed boats (I was a member of the Thames Rowing Club), I took a major step in 1982 and had a sixteen-foot wooden rowing skiff custom made for me by Lowell's Boat Shop, in Amesbury, Massachusetts. This boat can be rowed using a fixed thwart or a sliding seat, or—equipping it with a dagger board, a rudder, and a spritsail—it can be sailed. I named the boat
Goldeneye,
after a seasonal duck. The year it was delivered, I rowed it around the whole coast of Cape Cod and to Martha's Vineyard, as a sort of maiden voyage.

I wrote about that trip, but the trip was the thing, not the essay, which I called "Sunrise with Seamonsters," after a sunny Turner painting of a madly littered seascape. I sought small boats for the exercise and the experience, not for gathering material. I regarded the effort—and still do—as a rest for my imagination, and a way of undoing the frowstiness and creeping rigidity of spending hours at a desk. Of course, many people are stuck at a desk—I know that; I am not gloating. I am merely describing one man's escape, which is passionate in the classical sense, like the impulse of a person who vanishes from home or work to a secret and revitalizing assignation with a lover.

After a while, messing about in small boats ceased to be a sport or recreation. It was a physical necessity, and when winter came and my boats were dry-docked or garaged for the season, I got restive. A rowing machine may keep you in shape, but exercise had been only one of my objectives. I needed air and space and light, and the challenges of wind and open water. I had not minded being suddenly fogbound and having to use my compass. My best trip ever had been from the Cape to Nantucket, way beyond the horizon, setting off southeast into the blue water of Nantucket Sound using only a chart and a compass. Nothing can compare in unearthly intensity with the experience of being alone in a small boat with 360 degrees of watery horizon around you. Yet there are months of the year on Cape Cod and in Britain when no sane person ventures out in such a boat. Even the harbors are empty. The ferries and fishing boats come and go, but a New England winter is simply too cold for rowing or sailing.

The sea in winter is unforgiving—much worse than any wilderness of snow-laden trees, more merciless than a mountainside, harsher than any desert. If you go down in cold water and lose your boat, you are doomed as soon as your core temperature drops—and it drops in minutes in a winter sea.

It was during a period of winter withdrawal in 1984, returning from a skiing trip, that I stopped at a sporting goods store and saw a kayak hanging from the ceiling. The boat seemed reasonably priced. I bought it on the spot, with paddles and a life jacket. A few days later, on a cold Cape afternoon, I paddled it down Scorton Creek to its mouth and then into the sea. The boat was much more stable than I had imagined, and I marveled at how easily it tracked through a heavy chop. Most of all, in this enclosed banana-shaped craft, I was warm.