Reflections on a Fascinating Page-Turner
The planets are shifting, for I am reading a book... for fun. After 7 years of doctoral study (which came all too abruptly to an end this summer), this reading-for-fun thing still seems like a strangely self-indulgent phenomenon. A rare event, indeed. Thus, right around the time of the Chinese New Year, the stars aligned and I began a book that itself begins in China, well, near China: Hong Kong. The title? Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven, by Susan Jane Gilman. A work of non-fiction. Two female college graduates just arrived in China "ten minutes after" communism ended. It is 1986, yet the narrator writes that as they have step off the boat onto a fishing wharf near Shanghai, they seem to have stepped back 100 years in time. She soon realizes something dreadful - that they may be running from something rather than to anything.
They are each increasingly confronted with themselves in a swarming sea of displacing waters where they are but a spectacle to the Chinese, with their Western skin and "big noses" (as the narrator puts it). And conversely, they realize that they themselves are only voyeurs. Spectacles and voyeurs, is this what cultural crossings are? A superficial short-circuit, the outer ring of the vicious cycle of surface observations?
I like this thought for it often seems to be true: a tourist is a spectacle at the same time that he/she is a voyeur. For though the tourist is 'inside' a new place, a new land, a new culture, he/she remains on the outside. The thin veneer between inside and outside is an almost-transparent lens, a bubble in which the tourist moves around; this veneer of separation is the liquid through which one sees - or distorts - the other. It is so close to being transparent (one does in fact 'see' the world around him or her, physically speaking) that it actually tricks the tourist into believing he/she can see, when in fact, he/she is stricken with a cultural blindness that one does not immediately know how to cure.
How to proceed from here?
They are each increasingly confronted with themselves in a swarming sea of displacing waters where they are but a spectacle to the Chinese, with their Western skin and "big noses" (as the narrator puts it). And conversely, they realize that they themselves are only voyeurs. Spectacles and voyeurs, is this what cultural crossings are? A superficial short-circuit, the outer ring of the vicious cycle of surface observations?
I like this thought for it often seems to be true: a tourist is a spectacle at the same time that he/she is a voyeur. For though the tourist is 'inside' a new place, a new land, a new culture, he/she remains on the outside. The thin veneer between inside and outside is an almost-transparent lens, a bubble in which the tourist moves around; this veneer of separation is the liquid through which one sees - or distorts - the other. It is so close to being transparent (one does in fact 'see' the world around him or her, physically speaking) that it actually tricks the tourist into believing he/she can see, when in fact, he/she is stricken with a cultural blindness that one does not immediately know how to cure.
How to proceed from here?
I was really taken in by your blog. Extremely well written and all so true!
ReplyDeleteThank you! I am only seeing this comment now, as the blog got buried under 6 years of life. May resurrect it now. Be well.
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