Blogger’s dilemma

 I’ve become hard to please, at least when it comes to books about China and maybe all non-fiction. I read fellow Columbian Peter Hessler’s River Town long before I had any inkling I’d be walking in his footsteps, a Peace Corps volunteer teaching English in a mid-China river town. His book certainly wasn’t boring, but I couldn’t quite understand why it was so well received. Nor could I understand how he could get away with quoting his students’ writing as extensively as he did. (I, no doubt, have a peculiar perspective of such things, having been tortured by so many Institutional Review Board consent forms in my day.) And perhaps I’m just jealous—he was a “China 3” and enjoyed a degree of independence as a writer and traveler that is perhaps more limited for us “China 18s.” More on that in a minute.

I reacted even more strongly to Paul Theroux’s Riding the Iron Rooster, partly because Theroux writes so much more strategically and powerfully—and partly because what he writes so well is so outrageous. If you had only Theroux to go on, you’d think all Chinese people were spitters and hawkers and total philistines. I was unforgiving, even though Theroux wrote over a quarter of a century ago and drew most of his conclusions from his berth on a train, as if that is the way to get to know a people and a culture. But Theroux would be the first to admit that travel writing, his anyway, is essentially autobiographical—and maybe he was less interested in what was outside the window than in his notebook. But again, I find myself jealous. He wasn’t afraid to be rude to anybody or anything.

What would he say if he were less independent, if were, say, in the Peace Corps writing a blog, perhaps monitored on several fronts? And then I remembered! Ah! He was in the Peace Corps! And he was kicked out—long before there were any such things as blogs. And, as if we were in a conversation, I read on and found Theroux justifying his negativity by saying it’s simply too hard for writers to make nice people interesting. He doesn’t deny that decent human beings exist, even if they don’t make good fodder for stories.

So just as I was wondering if you have to be a misanthrope to be an interesting writer, especially about China, I happened to read Mark Salzman’s decades-old review of Theroux’s Riding the Iron Rooster. Salzman nailed the thing that bothered me most: Theroux writes masterfully about “the barren deserts of Mongolia and Xinjiang, the ice forests of Manchuria and the dry hills of Tibet” but not about the Chinese people. He doesn’t seem to know them. This gripe is from a writer who has also written a book about China. Salzman’s beautiful memoir Iron and Silk lightly and tightly describes his experience teaching English in China while pursuing his passion for Kung Fu. It’s delightful reading—and Salzman doesn’t seem to be a misanthrope.

Glad to have my faith in humanity restored a little, I found myself reading Will Schwalbe’s End of Life Book Club (not about China) and suddenly wishing that he could be a little more Therouxish. I’d given the book to my son because, based on reviews, I thought it described the book-loving mother-son relationship we had. But I found myself agreeing with what another reviewer said (wishing I’d read this review first): “Discretion and familial loyalty are fine characteristics . . . But these are not qualities that make for a scintillating memoir. To paraphrase Joan Didion, a writer is always ratting somebody out. A great memoirist, even one moved primarily by love and devotion, must possess a certain amount of ruthlessness — toward himself if no one else. Schwalbe’s book contains little of the lacerating honesty that marks Didion’s recent memoirs of loss.” Hmmmmm.

So here’s the conundrum: how do you aim for some sort of truth, truth that is also wise? Could I—should I—write with more “lacerating honesty” even if I weren’t in the Peace Corps and serving in China, with all those constraints? I’m not sure I could. Frankly, though, I’m not sure that either Didion or Theroux give us lacerating honesty, let alone wisdom, even though they both give us memorable prose.

It’s the biographer’s dilemma, the autobiographer’s dilemma, every creative non-fiction writer’s dilemma. And a blogger's dilemma. To their credit, neither Theroux nor Didion think they can tell us anything other than how “it” appears to them; both admit they’re ultimately, in their notebooks at least, writing about themselves. Didion says, “But our notebooks give us away, for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable ‘I.’” And others, Lynn Bloom among them, see that that implacable “I” as an ethical stance, one that doesn’t pretend to be saying anything other than what “I” think. But what is the writer seeing from that “I” stance? What, for example, is being seen in China?

All I’m doing is keeping a little ole’ blog—but I’m keenly aware that I am in the Peace Corps and serving in China with those constraints—and I’m conscious of the tension between art and non-fiction everywhere—and the tension between regard for loved one’s feelings and unexpressed observations.