The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 8 June 2015
by Lincoln Kaye
There are many Chinese people living abroad from their country these days. One of the largest Chinese communities outside of China (or Taiwan) is San Francisco's Chinatown, after all. And yet, for most, China remains a cypher. Its ancient culture goes back five millennia, is highly chauvanistic and hermetic, and, of course, is growing into the largest industrial (and eventually, political) power in the world. We ignore this country at our peril. It will be deeply challenging to meet China on its own ground. The 21st may ultimately be the Chinese century. Lincoln Kaye, a business correspondent for The Far Eastern Economic Review has traveled throughout Asia and spent five years living in China. (He was also married to a Taiwanese woman who supplies illustrations for this book.) This idiosyncratic book, published in 2003, is a compilation of Kaye's experiences in China and Tibet. There are four main chapters, each focusing on one event, place or experience, but each combining impressions and encounters over a period of time. What results are long essays on Chinese culture as seen fairly close to the ground. The stories are compelling and disturbing for their first-hand experience of Chinese life, with its long and troubled living history, its astonishing top-to-bottom government corruption, the stripped landscape, and the special challenges of its many combined cultures trying to make their way in a complex and rigid capitalist-socialist system rooted in ambition and suspicion. We read of great festivals of familial and cultural connections, visits to dramatic historical sites. There is the hidden town that held an "election" under Chinese rules, that almost vanished under its revolutionary disfavor, and whose story was suppressed by the regime. We learn of one of China's first private hospice care centers, a chaotic home for the dying struggling, itself, to survive in a corrupt system that once only allowed government hospitals. This is a grim yet comic chapter. Of course, no society seems to do dying terribly well. In the title essay, which closes the book, we join in a remarkable journey into the foothills of the Tibetan plateau with a playboy turned Buddhist lama. Kaye sees behind the scenes of Tibetan devotion to the remnants of Buddhist practice they are permitted, and into the personal backstory of the reincarnated leader of a monastery once destroyed in the Cultural Revolution. He begins with a deeply skeptical view of this religious fervor, but comes away with a more complex emotional sense of what is happening in that ongoing clash of cultures. Kaye (since retired to a post as fire lookout in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest) is an engaging narrator. His stories touch on aspects of Chinese culture that make the reader wonder how China's growth as a world power will affect cultures around the world, their own ambitions, and the fragile natural environment being exploited by the largest economy on the planet. So the book can be deeply troubling. But it is educational, as well, an unusual view of Chinese culture not seen in guide books. It contains an earthy view of a nation with which we will become increasingly familiar, like it or not.
See Also: ["Socialism is Great!" by Lijia Zhang]