Ape Rifle

Having recently committed myself to office-bound employment in a nondescript Montreal office tower, it’s little surprise that I’ve been struggling with the occasional bout of wanderlust. The thrill of travel, the awe and excitement inherent in experiencing new places, have given way to a routine of shirt-ironing, lonely food court lunches and windows that can’t be opened. This hermetically-sealed world can certainly feel stifling with its overabundance of plastic and artificial light. The decision to embark upon this road, however, is not one I regret: the time had come in my life when I needed to trade in the global wandering for a little more stability, both personal and financial. As a major bonus, the work I have taken on is both challenging and rewarding.

Of course, this doesn’t mean I don’t find my mind wandering, on occasion, back to the road, back to those distance places I’ve lived- often, back to China. I struggle to keep my experiences there alive and relevant to my current life, perhaps out of fear that I will be consumed by routine and lessen my engagement with the world outside my own small circle of movement. I have heard it said that debt is a driving force behind the political disengagement of so many in the West, but it would seem to me that work-related fatigue is an equal, and not wholly unrelated, culprit. Who has time to ponder the state of the world when there are bills to pay?

Being geographically tied down for the time being, I thus satisfy my wanderlust through reading. In this age of up-to-the-second online news and more streaming video content clutter than you could possibly know what to do with, it is still hard to beat a Sunday afternoon nestled up with a good newspaper, magazine or book. I’m an avid user of the internet, granted, but I cannot help but be irritated by the attention deficit format of most major portals and news services- I tire of digging through all the videos and multimedia gimmicks to find something substantial that I can actually read. Put me down on the side of opinion which considers talk of the demise of printed media as greatly exaggerated; the internet still has a long way to go (and as an added bonus, books don’t burn out my eyes).

And so I regularly tear into Harper’s and The Economist (sure its economic dogmatism is a bit tired, but the breath of its coverage and the quality of its political and business commentary have me hooked regardless), and check out solid Canadian fare such as The Walrus and Maisonneuve. In terms of books, I put Amazon through the motions a few months back and ordered myself an eclectic little stack, ranging from Lullabies for Little Criminals to A Long Way Gone and Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism (a great, nasty little anthology about the deep inequalities inherent in the world’s oft-celebrated urban development stories).

Needless to say, I couldn’t resist grabbing a few titles relating to China. I got China Shakes the World, China: Fragile Superpower- both of which I have yet to read - and China Road by Rob Gifford. This last one I tackled first, as it appeared more travelogue than armchair policy analysis, and that offered the chance to hit the road vicariously, to re-enter that strange world where everyone is mangling some dialect of Mandarin. It was the sort of book I felt would offer me some mental escape from the office and remind me of life in the back of bumpy buses, even if the cover hinted at some of the dreadful clichés so common in modern China punditry. I didn’t have many expectations beyond figuring it would wet my nostalgia for life and travel in the Middle Kingdom, and that was good enough. Anything to take me back for a while.

But the book was a very pleasant surprise, and I have to commend Mr.Gifford for putting together one of the more refreshing readings on China I’ve come across in quite some time. It isn’t that Mr. Gifford’s approach is particularly groundbreaking; a Beijing-based journalist moving on to the UK after spending a good amount of time in China’s embrace, he travels across the country from Shanghai to the Kazakh border and reflects upon the country and his experiences there. What makes China Road stand apart from so much China punditry is its disregard of the common economistic perspective in favour of a more deeply engaging humanistic approach. We are so bombarded with talk of China’s ‘economy’ that one could be forgiven for forgetting that flesh-and-blood people actually live there, and it is frightful how readily our economics-obsessed societies can reduce so many lives to a statistics sheet.

Rob Gifford, thankfully, puts the focus back on the Chinese people he meets, as he writes about their dreams, ambitions, fears and frustrations. He further complements this with commentary on his own experience as a foreigner in China, and some of these passages certainly brought a smile to my face as I remembered my own life circa 2002-2004. The writing is brisk and engaging, deftly touching on politics and history without getting weighed down in dense academic analysis. China Road is certainly rooted in a travel experience, but uses its accounts of particular lives and incidents to explore China’s complex history and wax cautiously on future implications. Gifford manages this in a manner that demonstrates his deep knowledge of Chinese history and politics and avoids getting lost in the theoretical ether. He also feels no need to shy away from the usual sensitive topics, but approaches them from a welcome perspective devoid of any condescension or sense of cultural superiority. It is clear that the author has a deep fascination with and respect for the Chinese people, but at the same time he doesn’t let that obfuscate his view regarding the serious problems inherent in the society they’ve built for themselves.

All in all, I think Rob Gifford has written a great book. While it certainly plays to the China expat crowd - which can identify with many of his experiences  - it also provides a balanced, realistic and accessible glimpse into life in the Middle Kingdom for anyone interested in going beyond the numbing economism of the mainstream media.

In particular, I find there is strength in Gifford’s refusal to offer any solid theoretical prognosis on China’s future. In a crowd where some warn of an imminent collapse while others trumpet an inevitable and untouchable rise to global domination, China Road presents the country (properly, in my opinion) as one of such contradiction that no one can reasonably predict how the whole thing will turn out. This is a theme that Gifford touches upon throughout the book, and is perhaps the best analytical tool with which to approach a society country empire civilization so huge, complex and convoluted that any pundit or hack can find ample evidence to support their particular view.

China is both a strong state and a decentralized, chaotic empire where the edges are held together by brute force; it’s bursting with optimism and festering with hopelessness, its greatest source of instability its obsession with stability; it’s a land of unrelenting grand-scale urban development and crumbling stagnation; it’s a society dripping with wealth where most people still fight for basic survival; it’s an unimaginably overcrowded country yet a land of vast, remote landscapes haunting in their quiet beauty; it’s fiercely nationalist yet rudderless and struggling for identity; it ruthlessly destroys its own history to restore its former glory, weighed down by the past while trying to escape it; it calls capitalism communism; it offers freedom yet crushes dissent; it inspires awe and derision; wealth, opportunity and the good life have never been so available to (some) of its citizens, and yet the land is careening precipitously towards environmental suicide. The Chinese have never had it so good- or so bad. There is a saying that the more time you spend in China, the less you should understand it.

China can be anything to anyone, given its size and turbulence- it’s would be no surprise, in the end, if the place simultaneously collapsed and took over the world. Thankfully, to Rob Gifford it simply provided the opportunity to write a thoroughly enjoyable book called China Road, which allowed me to travel once again on those kung fu movie bus rides through the desert, as my present life is increasingly reduced to hermetically-sealed office space. It brought me back to a time in my own life when I crashed through the deserts of Xinjiang or the backwaters of Henan, staring out the window and being wonderfully confused and conflicted about the Chinese world passing by outside.