Travel Writing

The students here with me in China are taking three classes: Chinese language, Topics in Chinese Culture (tied to lectures, day trips, and activities like tai chi, calligraphy, and painting), and a course in Travel Writing. For the Travel Writing course, students are reading Paul Fussell's "Abroad," Mary Morris's "Wall to Wall: From Beijing to Berlin," Pico Iyer's "The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto," and Donald Richie's "The Inland Sea." One of Paul Fussell's main arguments is that travel has become tourism (he wrote the book in 1980) and the students, among other exercises, will debate whether or not that's true. They'll be creating travel journals - some in old-fashioned leather-bound journals, some in blogs, the rest somewhere between. One student will illustrate hers with watercolor drawings; others hope to include tickets and other ephemera. The bloggers will no doubt include digital photos. The first reading was an essay by Pico Iyer entitled "Why We Travel." http://archive.salon.com/travel/feature/2000/03/18/why/

Iyer, in a "Salon" essay from March 2000, without mentioning Fussell by name, refers to the controversy about tourists and travelers:

"We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again -- to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more. The beauty of this whole process was best described, perhaps, before people even took to frequent flying, by George Santayana in his lapidary essay, "The Philosophy of Travel." We "need sometimes," the Harvard philosopher wrote, "to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard, in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what."

He continues: "If a Mongolian restaurant seems exotic to us in Evanston, Ill., it only follows that a McDonald's would seem equally exotic in Ulan Bator -- or, at least, equally far from everything expected. Though it's fashionable nowadays to draw a distinction between the 'tourist' and the "traveler," perhaps the real distinction lies between those who leave their assumptions at home, and those who don't: Among those who don't, a tourist is just someone who complains, 'Nothing here is the way it is at home,' while a traveler is one who grumbles, 'Everything here is the same as it is in Cairo -- or Cuzco or Kathmandu.' It's all very much the same."

It's a beautiful essay, and I've suggested to the students that if they feel uninspired this essay can prompt any number of responses. Is it somehow less virtuous to go to McDonalds in Fez or Beijing? (I've been to both: in Fez it's a place to take a date, decorated with a painted Berber-style ceiling, offering the McArabia sandwich; in Beijing it's a place to meet other Americans and eat miniature versions of the shake and the burger.) Of course it's not the act of going to McDonalds - it's what that means. Take a look at Iyer's essay. He has a lot to say.