The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 26 January 2016
by Vikram Seth
Adventurous travel is the realm of youth. Only the young (mostly) are audacious enough to storm off through the wilderness, or through unknown populations and cultures, without the anticipation or fear of disaster. Only the young (or most adventurous among us) have the confidence that whatever natural or bureaucratic catastrophe that might befall them can be overcome by sheer confidence and self-assurance. All this is especially surprising now, in a world in which images of young foreigners at the mercy of hostile people in hostile lands litter the media landscape. And yet, the lure of adventure in travel calls to us, both young and confident, and old and leery. And it takes some experience for a traveller to be confident of success, and yet to be also aware of his or her own ignorance of the cultures through which they move. Indeed, it is this humility that truly opens us up to be changed by the travel. Young Vikram Seth, traveling through western China and Tibet in 1981 displays all of this confidence as well as humility in this engaging travel narrative.
Traveling with a group of fellow graduate students from Nanjing, Seth went to western China, and Heaven Lake, not far from the city of Urumqi. The idyllic spot was a salve after a crowded tour bus traveling across the great western deserts of that country. From there, he crossed back across China, deciding to travel back to his family in India by crossing Tibet. The paperwork required for such an unlikely feat in 1981 took him back to Nanjing and Beijing before he could return west and commence hitch hiking on trucks carrying goods to the forbidden city of Lhasa. Already, Seth was the unlikely beneficiary of a dense Communist bureacracy, one hand of which didn't necessarily know what the other was doing. He squeezed through the cracks of paperwork to make this rather compelling, if jarring journey across mountains and high plains. He rode with characters surprisingly open to his presence, meeting Tibetans, Uyghurs and Chinese whose stunning hospitality allowed him to make this journey. He stumbled into Lhasa, visited shrines, historic sites, carpet factories and, most moving, the homes of people who have lived there all their lives, with long memories of the rise of Communism and the dark days of the Cultural Revolution. Finally, in a desperate bid to get back across the Nepalese border before his visa expired, Seth walked from a southern Tibetan city, through flooded landscape and across the border, back to familiar lands.
But, let us not forget that this is China and Tibet in 1981. So much has changed since then as to make that landscape hardly recognizable. Indeed, there is now a high speed train from Beijing to Lhasa, utterly transforming this same journey. China continues to change at an astonishing rate, much of its history and environment subsumed by a monstrously sprawling economic engine. And despite that, with the reader's understanding of this, Seth's historical adventure remains a story of a time and a place exotic and fascinating.