Book: Lost on Planet China by Maarten Troost

I LOVED this book. It was written in 2008, about 5 years ago, when the author traveled in China for several weeks. Before the trip, he tried briefly to learn Mandarin (Chinese for Dummies) but that didn't work out; he goes anyway. There is humor...my kind of humor, and I laughed out loud several times..spontaneously, no matter where I was, while reading certain passages. Like this one: Maarten arrives in Shanghai where he has prepared by having little strips of "crisply written Chinese characters" for his destinations. He tries several of these on the taxi driver, and none seems to be the right one, so finally the author just gives up and says "Yep, that's the place....and I settled back and relaxed into this ride toward I-didn't-know-where. I'm flexible that way."

What impressed him was the horrendous pollution (interesting, as just the past few days, the news has been of the horrendous pollution in Beijing from all the coal-burning factories), the crowds (millions all over), the little kids with split pants pooping and peeing in the gutters, the coughing  and hawking of the populace (no doubt because of polluted lungs), the oddities he ate (the book is subtitled Or How He Became Comfrotable Eating Live Squid), the inexplicable weird allegiance (still) to Mao, the very rapid globalization/Westernization happening before his eyes...

He learns to bargain and haggle for everything he buys; he hikes on a terrifying trail at Tiger Leaping Gorge; he travels west to Tibet and north to Dandong which is right across the Yalu River from North Korea; he goes to Hong Kong, to Nanjing, to Macau and Xi'an (terra cotta warriors); he climbs the Great Wall (with "a million, possibly 2 million visitors"); he goes to Lanzhou, Chongqinq and Guangzhou, traveling via train, plane, bus and boat.

"In Ningbo, I changed buses and bus stations. I can say with some confidence that the part of Ningbo located around the two bus stations is hideous. It was filthy. It was, of course, teeming with crowds. Cigarettes and phlegm hurled hough the air in every direction. The buses droned by in a blue haze of exhaust fumes."

"I spent several days in Lhasa, rarely leaving the tight confines of the old town. I could have remained for months...Perhaps I could move my family here, I thought. Kindergarten in Tibet. That would be cool. And the air was clean up here. Of course, there wasn't much of it, so perhaps that would be a problem. Is it good parenting, taking kids up to 12,000 feet?...the Tibetans were kind and affable. I 'd expected to find a people crushed by Chinese oppression...Indeed, they are the jolliest people I'd encountered in China."

He keeps commenting on the horrific pollution: "How could people live in this? I wondered. How could they put up with it? The air was so rank and dense with pollutants that even a Republican would be hollering for clean air. Really, it's that bad. And then, as I perused my newspaper, it occurred to me that it's very possible that the Chinese are not aware, exactly, of how appalling their air truly is."

And along the way, there are paragraphs of history and social science and economics, so after reading this book, in addition to being highly entertained, I also learned a lot about China...modern China, on the cusp of........ I guess that remains to be seen.