Lonely Planet Plagiarism?
According to the Guardian, a Lonely Planet travel writer who worked on guidebooks to several Latin American countries has admitted that he didn't even visit some of the places he wrote about, and that much of the information he provided was lifted from travel brochures and the Internet.
Writing for Lonely Planet seems like the ideal job: get paid to travel! See the world! Yet having spoken to a few researchers myself, the work tends to be stressful, underpaid, and tedious. I met an LP researcher in Portugal who said she never spent more than one night in any city and would spend hours walking around, poking her head in the doors of guesthouses and restaurants, and basing her review on one fleeting impression.
In China, a travel writer for Le Routard I met in Kunming told me he was responsible for covering Yunnan, Xinjiang, Tibet, and Qinghai Provinces- a swath of land nearly as large as Western Europe, without the latter's finely-tuned transportation network. He said if he had to take another rickety 14 hour bus ride in rural China, he would turn homicidal.
So- take what you read in Lonely Planet with a grain of salt. I find LP useful for its maps, its practical information (Visa regulations, etc.), and its mostly accurate estimations of travel times. As for sights, hotels, and restaurants? Use the best travel resource mankind has ever known: word of mouth.
The Guardian article does contain one paragraph I found quite funny:
In one extract he writes: "The waitress suggests that I come back after she closes down the restaurant, around midnight. We end up having sex in a chair and then on one of the tables in the back corner. I pen a note in my Moleskine that I will later recount in the guidebook review, saying that the restaurant 'is a pleasant surprise €¦ and the table service is friendly'".
Maybe being a guidebook writer isn't so bad, after all.
Little America in Fuzhou
From September 2005 to July 2006, I lived in Fuzhou, a large coastal city located in southeastern Fujian Province. For the most part, Fuzhou resembles any other Chinese mega-city: ubiquitous construction projects, fancy new shopping centers, decaying apartment blocks (one of which I called home), and little snippets of the past like Buddhist temples and ramshackle street markets. For me, the most interesting feature of the city was its proximity to Taiwan. The distance between Fuzhou and Taipei is a mere 145 miles, yet to get to Taipei from Fuzhou required a stop-over in Hong Kong. Funny world, indeed.
Soon, I discovered that Fuzhou had another interesting feature: an unusually large number of the locals have relatives overseas. I once asked my high-school class how many of them had cousins, aunts, or uncles in the US alone, and nearly half raised their hands. One day, a student of mine introduced me to her "sister"*, a teenage girl from Toronto.
*The generation of Chinese born after the implementation of the One Child Policy tends to refer to cousins and even close friends as "sister" and "brother", which can be confusing at first because few of them bother to clarify the actual relationship. The Torontonian, upon being introduced as my students' sister, subsequently rolled her eyes and said, "we're cousins".
Recently, Ben Ross (an old friend of mine from Fuzhou and fellow China blogger) wrote that he has heard Fuzhou dialect spoken on the streets of Chicago, where he now lives. In San Francisco, I once asked an immigrant Chinese where he came from and was not surprised to hear "Fuzhou" in response. Chinese from every province immigrate, but a disproportionate number of them come from little Fujian.
A new dispatch in Slate points out why this is: immigrants who become established in a foreign place will later send for their spouses or siblings to join them in the rush for prosperity. This pattern is known as "chain migration" and explains why certain villages near Fuzhou have an acute shortage of working-age men. In fact, a great number of people left in these places are babies and the elderly, as working couples living overseas will send their offspring (equipped with US passports) back to the motherland to live with their grandparents as per Chinese custom.
Will this trend continue? Fujian's geographical and linguistic proximity to Taiwan means that the city has attracted an enormous amount of venture capital from the latter, turning Fuzhou into one of the wealthier cities in all of China. Despite being somewhat lacking in tourist attractions, Fuzhou has far more five-star hotels and fancy restaurants than, say, Kunming. Should this prosperity trickle down to the middle and working classes, the Fuzhouese might find the idea of emigration less attractive. Or, perhaps, those who leave the country may find themselves replaced by Chinese from the interior drawn to the city for its booming economy.
In any case, read the whole Slate piece.
(photo: my old neighborhood in Fuzhou, taken in 2005)
Boycott Silliness From Hillary Clinton
In a press release dated April 7th, Hillary Clinton called for President Bush to personally boycott the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics "absent major changes by the Chinese government". Should Bush agree, he would join German chancellor Angela Merkel and British prime minister Gordon Brown in absentia during the games' kickoff event. French president Nicolas Sarkozy has yet to announce his plans.
At first glance, whether or not Western political leaders attend the ceremonies strikes me as irrelevant. Nobody will be tuning in to catch a glimpse of Bush, after all.
But what does Clinton hope to accomplish by proposing Bush boycott? Does she really think the Chinese government will be sufficiently embarrassed to compromise with the West on policy goals? If anything, their reaction would be the opposite: China is known for digging its heels in the face of international criticism.
Of course, Clinton is in the middle of a hard-fought presidential campaign, so perhaps she felt that blustering about China would help among certain constituencies.
Meanwhile, as the Olympic torch winds its way through Europe and the Americas, public support for boycotting seems to be on the rise, with 31% of the US population in support according to a recent poll.
But here's a question about the boycott that I haven't seen raised: isn't this a slippery slope? The US and China, after all, are not sworn enemies. They have diplomatic relations and strong economic ties. They participate together in diplomatic endeavors, such as the Six Party Talks concerning North Korea. Is it appropriate to use the Olympics, an international athletic competition intended to foster global good-will, as a platform for humiliating a country with whom our interests are so great? Especially when everyone who follows Beijing politics understands that a boycott won't work.
Wouldn't Middle Eastern countries, say, then boycott the London games in 2012 in retaliation for Britain's role in the Iraq War? To me, the idea of a boycott seems like a dangerous precedent.
I have my differences with the Chinese government on a whole host of matters and will likely be somewhat nauseated by the display of jingoism at the Games, but really: what do people think will really happen if the world allows China to host the Olympics peacefully?
NOTES:
Hillary Clinton press release via The Washington Note
Reuters story via Passport
A Memorial To Remember
Last August, a Kunming expat known as "Bike Mike" set off with his girlfriend on a river rafting trip not far from the city. Sadly, in an accident they (and a local river guide) were killed. The news sent shock waves throughout the Kunming community, as Mike was well-loved and respected. He had first arrived in Yunnan Province in the early 1990s while cycling through Asia, and liked the city so much that he decided to stay.
Everyone knew Mike- he was tall, gaunt, and long-haired with a beard that would have impressed even ZZ Top. As a relatively recent arrival, I only had the chance to meet Mike a handful of times, but in each instance he was always gracious and kind. At his memorial service, I knew I was far from the only one to have had that impression of him. He was a wonderfully idiosyncratic character- a man "more comfortable in his own skin than anyone else I've met" in the words of a mutual friend. The longer I sat and listened to stories of Mike, the better I wished I had known him.
At my birthday party two weeks ago, a friend of mine brought along a DVD memorial that Mike's brother had made in his memory. He lent it to a Chinese friend of mine, and she later showed it to me one evening.
The video contained several interviews with Mike's best friends, an international collection of Kunmingites who had known him best. Rather than reconstruct the events of Mike's life, or offer summary assessments of the man, those interviewed simply told "Mike stories". There was the time he rode into the countryside and dined with a local peasant family, the tale of how he was so deliberate when playing Risk he would sometimes take nearly an hour to complete his turn, of how he would gather his friends from all walks of life together for dinner and drinks, and of how he loved long, philosophical arguments. I felt, upon finishing the video, that I had a clear picture of the man. I knew little of his background, of his family, of his occupation, even, but from listening to these stories I somehow "knew" him well.
In an expat community, one is immediately classified by age, nationality, and occupation. These, after all, are the first questions anyone asks you when you meet. What made Mike's memorial video so moving, then, was its emphasis on his character, as related through anecdotes. It didn't matter that he was in his 40s, was from the US, or that he sold hemp products to make a living. Somehow, hearing about his prowess in trivia competitions or his love of costume parties conveyed so much more, and made his memorial video so poignant.