If you are in Shanghai, you should soon be able to find copies of Suzhou Basics on shelves in your local bookstore.

Suzhou Basics is my first book-length travel guide, published by Urbanatomy in Shanghai.  It covers all the important hotspots in Suzhou, and I think the perspective it provides on the city is one that most visitors would enjoy sharing.  It was certainly a lot of fun putting it together.

Suzhou is one of China’s most beautiful and historic cities.  The gardens that you will find all over Suzhou set the standard for the Chinese classical garden — an art form that receives a fair amount of attention in Suzhou Basics.  Suzhou is easily accessible from Shanghai (about 40 minutes by train), and a day trip there is very easily done.  But a longer stay is, of course, all the better.  In Suzhou Basics, you can find all the information you need to plan your stay — including food, accommodations, shopping, nightlife, and sightseeing.

I hope you enjoy the book, but even more, I hope you enjoy the city.

I was very impressed over the weekend.  Just before my family members left Singapore, my niece asked me to take her downtown so that she could buy a Bible that had Chinese characters, Chinese phonetics (hanyu pinyin), and English.  It’s an expensive book, but she used the money that had been given to her in red packets during the Chinese New Year to buy it.  She said she wanted to use it to learn Chinese.  I know that it is possible to learn to read a language this way (and with the environment around you, to speak as well), but have not seen anyone do it.  Watching my niece was amazing.

The night they were preparing to leave, she took the Bible out and started reading.  By verse 2 of Genesis 1, she’d figured out that 神 is God (though that one might cause her some confusion as she goes on).  With a quick look back over the verses she’d read so far, she figured out that 地 was earth, and so 天 must be heaven.  She continued on this way, and put together everything in the first two verses.  She read them aloud for me several times, and then I read them and she repeated (without looking at the printed words) 2 times.  She plans on continuing this method, 2 verses a day, from now until the time she comes back to stay with me again, which she tentatively plans to do in August/September.  By then she should be somewhere in Exodus, and I am going to be interested to see how her language skills are at that time.

I’ve read that it was once pretty common to give kids a text in a classical language and a lexicon, and before you know it, they would be able to read the language without any problem.  I don’t think it is something that is done so often anymore — we are much more hands-on these days, and that is a real pity.  My 13-year-old niece is just the age that a lot of people started this sort of education, back in the day, and I am very intrigued to see how the experiment works out for her.  Watching things click in her mind the other day, I realized that this old-fashioned way of learning certainly has some merit.

If things work out as she plans, she’ll be staying with me for a few weeks in Shanghai toward the end of the summer or early fall.  If she is still interested in the language like she is at this moment, I am thinking I will sign her up to attend language classes every day.  With the environment, and the ground work she is going to do between now and then (and I do believe she will do it — she is a very motivated kid!), she could end up learning Chinese very well in a relatively short time.

Making me completely jealous.  And extremely proud.

Of the four most prominent Tang Dynasty (618-907) poets — Li Bai, Du Fu, Bai Juyi, and Wang Wei — Wang is the one who has been least introduced to the world outside of China.  I’ve recently been reading through a collection of 100 of his poems, trying to gain a little familiarity with his work.  I have to say, having read it, that I don’t think this particular collection, 100 of Wang Wei’s Poems in English Verse, is going to help Wang’s reputation outside of China very much.

I picked the book up in Shanghai, and really like the layout of it.  Each poem appears in both English and Chinese, on facing pages.  The Chinese has Hanyu Pinyin, so that those Chinese-speakers who don’t read characters well (like me) can at least put in a little work and gain some understanding of the poem in the original.  That’s a real plus.  Also, the notes offered in the English translations are interesting, for the most part.

What is lacking for me in this text is the translation.  It comes off as trite and cliché, which is not at all what I think Wang’s work should be.  The rhyme and meter used is rather poorly done, making the works sound all wrong in English.  I know that Wang’s work in Chinese is very formal, and I can see the beauty in the structure there.  Trying to recapture that in English is good, and it might even be true that  it needs a classical form to do so.  But the rhymes used and the awkwardness of the meter make it a poor attempt.

I wish I thought I could do a better job of it.  I know how hard it is to get translation right, and I know that I can’t offer anything better than what appears in the book I’ve got in my hands.  I have a long way to go before I can understand the poetry well enough to re-configure it into a form that fits the poetic tradition I grew up with.  But I am trying, and maybe I’ll get there someday.

For now, I can just say that Wang Wei is a poet I would like to know better.  After all, anyone who gets himself in trouble for presenting works reserved for royalty to his own circle of low-born friends is alright in my book.  I always like a guy who bucks a system that favors an elite crowd.

I’ve recently finished writing the complete text of my first draft of the Suzhou travel guide I’ve been engaged to write.  It took me a while to get into a groove with it, but once I did, I spent long hours at a time thinking of nothing but Suzhou and how best to present it to first-time visitors to that wonderful ancient city.  Somewhere around the 25,000th word or so that I wrote, I began to wonder when Suzhou-overload would set in.  In the midst of editing and rewriting now, I think I have an answer — it won’t.  There is just so much to this city.  It is so layered, with so many facets to it, that it’s easy to sort of switch gears and start thinking about something else, and yet something still Suzhou-related.  It makes for a very fun writing experience.

This is the first full-length travel guide I’ve written.  I’m pretty happy with the information there so far, though the writing is a little weak in some parts at the moment (it’ll be fine before too much longer, though, I think).  Overall, I have to say that writing travel guides is really a lot of fun, if this experience is any indication.

Now wish me luck — I’d sure like to get a few more gigs like this!

Besides the excellent works of prose featured in the back issue (Winter 2008) of Asia Literary Review I recently read, there are on its pages some really nice works of poetry and art. I am no expert on the visual arts (far from it), but I really enjoyed Karen CL Cheung’s photo essay covering Chen Guang Ming’s series of paintings entitled Miners. The oil on canvas pieces do a fantastic job of capturing a glimpse into the lives of a segment of China’s society that is often overlooked — living a life practically buried under the earth of that huge nation — the coal miners in the north. Cheung’s essay adds some depth to the viewer’s understanding of the subjects pictured, while the paintings offer a lot of heart. It is a very nice combination.

The Chinese poets who appear in the issue are Shen Hao Bo and Yao Feng. Shen was born from Jiangsu province, and currently lives in Beijing. Yao, having studied at Beijing Foreign Studies University, serves as assistant professor in the Portuguese department of the University of Macau. This was the first time I read the work of either poet. Both poems are translated by Luo Hui.

Shen’s “Snow by the Wall” uses the metaphor of snow near a wall alongside a city street, but quickly turns it to “the cancer of snow.” The tone is a little too prose-y for my taste, but I am not sure whether that is a problem of the original or the translation. Seeing the translation of Yao’s work, I have to think that Luo has followed the original with the rather straightforward-sounding lines of Shen’s work.

Yao’s poem sounds a little more like verse, with syntax that sometimes disrupts rather than closely following typical speech patterns. The thought of the poem, however, is presented in a rather straightforward manner, seeming to leave little space for the reader. This is, though, perhaps a little deceptive. Upon multiple readings of the poem, I’ve found more there than I first thought — that the poem says more than it seems to on its surface. The opening line reads, “A friend visited me in the ancient city.” I am not sure what ancient city Yao imagined for his poem, but Suzhou immediately came to mind, since I’ve been working overtime this week on the Suzhou travel guide I’ve been engaged to write. Images of “the view in the distance” one would expect to see from Suzhou popped into my head, and added something to my reading of the poem. While the verse doesn’t seem to turn much — or at least, not very subtly — there is something in the way the poem ends that does actually open up space for the reader’s contemplation on the image drawn by the piece.

Overall, I actually enjoyed the prose and paintings by Chinese writers/artists more than I did the poetry in this particular issue of Asia Literary Review. But one way or another, there’s plenty of fine writing in the journal, by writers from China and other parts of Asia. I’ve got a few other back issues I’m eager to get to, having finished this one.

I’ve recently been reading a back issue of Asia Literary Review that I picked up at a second hand book store. It is the Winter 2008 issue. I thought it might be fun to have a look at what some of the Chinese authors featured on the pages had to say. I’ll start with a piece, though, that is not by a Chinese author, but is rather about life in China during the Japanese occupation.

Caroline Petit’s short story “Flight” opens the issue. It is a fun story of two foreigners in China during the Japanese occupation who meet on a train. Both are trying to escape from China. One will have no problem, with his Australian passport, but the other, a Russian lady, isn’t going to have it so easy. The story seems that it is moving along rather predictably, though it comes with a bit of a twist before all is said and done.

Petit’s writing is strong, and for anyone who’s very familiar with China and its history, I think the representations of the expats moving around during that time in China’s history will probably feel pretty familiar. There’s certainly at least a little bit of stereotyping going on (by race, nationality, occupation, etc.), but that is part of the fun. The tension that filled China during the occupation by Japan is captured pretty nicely, and serves as a perfect backdrop for the story to operate. Overall, I enjoyed Petit’s fiction.

The two works of prose in the Winter 2008 Asia Literary Review that were by Chinese writers were both memoirs. Both were well-written, but Chiu Kin Fung’s “Children of the Walled City” was probably my favorite of the two pieces (and maybe my favorite piece in the whole journal).

Chiu uses a pretty clever technique in getting his memoir underway, making reference in the third paragraph to Robert Ludlum’s representation of the Walled City in his novel The Bourne Supremacy. I remember reading the novel when it was fairly new, perhaps in 1989 or 1990, three or four years after its publication. The depictions of the Walled City in that story are vivid, and stuck with me for a long time after having read it. Chiu gives kudos to Ludlum for “how well he captures time and place” (p. 161). Then he goes on to tell us what the Walled City was like for those who were raised there, including Chiu himself.

Chiu’s telling of life in the Walled City doesn’t carry a real aroma of the seedy, dangerous lifestyle that most depictions of the place have. He looks nostalgically back on his childhood as a time of liberty and loyalty. He knew who his friends were, and he knew what it meant to trust them. It seems that this is what is most significant in Chiu’s memories of that time and place. And I think it is fair to say he mourns its passing.

The other memoir in the Winter 2008 issue of the journal , Z. Z.’s “China High,” addresses lawlessness within China’s borders today, rather than looking back to that ill-reputed time in Hong Kong’s history that Chiu has captured. Today, China is not generally thought of as being a place that would be described as seedy or lawless, but that is the picture that we get from Z. Z.’s essay. (Z. Z. is a US-trained lawyer. Make of that what you will.)

Z. Z.’s world reminds me a lot of that presented in the novels of Wang Shuo, though the two write about completely different times. Still, the sense that one can get away with whatever he wants as long as nobody’s looking (and nobody’s ever looking) pervades. Drugs and partying play prominent roles, and in Z. Z.’s essay, fast living is best done perched atop an illegally-obtained, fast-driving motorcycle.

I feel pretty certain that the world Z. Z. presents exists. I’ve seen hints of it here and there, though it is not exactly an accurate representation of the circles I mostly move in while living in China. It is, where it is available at all, decidedly a countercultural lifestyle — one that Z. Z. happens to write about very well.

A friend pointed me to an online literary journal that might be of interest to people who live or have lived overseas, ExpatLit.  I’ve finished reading one issue, and downloaded another to my Kindle to read.  So far, I’m enjoying it.  There are some fun stories and poems there.  Some of the works will resonate for people who have lived in countries other than their place of birth.

I wasn’t sure that the magazine would be for me, at first, because I’ve never actually lived what is normally thought of as an expat life.  True, I’ve lived all of my adult life overseas, but never in the capacity of an expat.  I’ve always been very much a part of the local scene, and don’t have all that many friends who are not local.  But the journal isn’t only geared for the high-flying jetsetters we normally think of as moving in an expat crowd.  In fact, I don’t think it’s even mainly targeted at that readership.  So I was glad to come across the site, and anticipate enjoying more issues of the magazine down the road.

Before I left Shanghai for Singapore a couple of weeks ago, I picked up a copy of  Think Like Chinese by Zhang Haihua and Geoff Baker.  The look of the volume was attractive (I know, I know… don’t judge a book by its cover!), and the idea of trying to get inside “the Chinese mind” appeals to me, so I picked it up.  I started reading it on the way home, and just finished it this week.

Overall, I have to say it is good, but it does tend to repeat itself more than seems necessary.  I think that if I were new to China and Chinese culture, this would not bother me so much.  But it seemed the repeated bits were things I’ve known for a long time, and so it got a little slow at times for me.  That said, if I were relatively new to China, I think that seeing the same ideas presented more than once in different contexts might be helpful, so I can’t really hold that against the book.  The only thing, then, that I have to complain about is the fact that there were several typing errors, which is always an irritation.  That’s a pity, because otherwise this book is really pretty good — and I say that despite the fact that my interests in China are not really geared toward setting up a business, which is the very clear focus of the book.

Anyway, I suppose I am not really looking for a reason to complain.  So, I guess I can move on to the good stuff.

Of particular interest to me was a discussion in the very early parts of the book on the importance of the Chinese language in shaping Chinese thought.  I’ve known for a long time that language is a fundamental shaper of Chinese thinking, but what I had never heard that Zhang and Baker bring to the forefront in this book is that in order to learn the Chinese language, one must use a form of “symbolic thinking” that uses both hemispheres of the brain almost simultaneously.  When using English (and most other Western languages), the left brain is primarily used.  For Chinese, both right and left brain are put into action together, with the right brain triggering a fraction of a second before the left.  This is apparently due to both the pictograph nature of the written language and to the tonal system of the spoken language.  It is pretty amazing reading, looking into how this shapes the way the Chinese mind works.  I have to say a big thanks to Zhang and Baker here, because they’ve given me leads for some other reading material I intend to pursue in connection with this idea.

Some other good points raised in the book include the reminders of just how vast a thing “Chinese culture” is.  Zhang and Baker compare it to Europe, with its widely differing cultures from country to country.  Though China’s provinces all lie within one national boundary, the cultural differences are still there, and that needs to be understood by anyone who wants to work in China.  And, even more importantly, this applies all the more to overseas Chinese, most of whom were brought up in a Chinese culture that can be seen as “of the past” in Mainland China, as most overseas Chinese were brought up without the influence of communism.  There is no getting around how big a difference that makes — often meaning that the cultural differences between Mainland Chinese and overseas Chinese is as great as between Mainland Chinese and those of completely different ethnic groups.  I think Think Like Chinese does a pretty good job of emphasizing this point, and it is one that is helpful to keep in mind.

Overall, I find Zhang and Baker’s Think Like Chinese to be a pretty insightful book for people wanting to do business in China, especially for those relatively new to China (more than a year or so, less than 10 years), or those who have limited direct contact with people born and raised in Mainland China.  It is an easy read, and probably worth picking up and giving some attention to before starting a big venture in the Chinese market.

During the national holiday at the beginning of the month, I went to the second hand book store on Shan Xi Lu (near Fuzhou Lu) with a couple of friends.  We browsed around for a while, and I brought home a few books.  (OK, a lot of books.)  I found two that were especially interesting to me, back issues of the magazine Chinese Literature.  I started reading one of them yesterday, the 2.1996 issue.  It is, so far, very good.  The fiction and criticism are both quite engaging, and make me look forward to the poetry, which I hope to get to in the next couple of days.

The magazine began publication in 1951, but these 2 back issues were the first I’d ever come across.  I will be popping by the second hand bookstore more often, and hope to come across more old issues of the journal there.  It was a lot of fun finding these 2 volumes, and I will be very happy if I manage to come across some more.  And either way, the continuation of the treasure hunt will be fun in itself.

I am pleased to announce that I got a really great gig for the next several months.  I’ve been asked to edit a guide book on the city of Suzhou. It will be released in conjunction with the World Expo next year, if all goes as planned.

I’ll keep you posted on progress.  For now, I am just pleased to share the news.