I BOUGHT my first literary magazine in spring 1989. I remember, not because it was my earliest encounter with travel – I had never been ‘abroad’ – but because it was one of those days that looking back seems more significant than the rest. I was a student, down in London for the weekend to visit a friend from school – a friend I considered my superior in every way that mattered. Intelligent, witty, impossibly urbane, he had that easy manner some people do, and we all loved him for it.
I might add ‘unreliable’ to the list. We were to meet outside the Empire in Leicester Square, but he never came. I waited in the drizzle for an hour then dug around in my pockets and pulled out the number for his university halls of residence. I marched over to a phone box and, doing my best to pretend I didn’t see the semi-naked women plastered all over it, dropped ten pence in the slot. Someone on the other end said he had gone home. I never saw him again.
I stomped off into Soho feeling more annoyed than betrayed but soon forgot my troubles as that strange neon world of sex shops, bars, street cafes and restaurants worked its magic. I hadn’t known such places existed. I don’t remember much of that afternoon, but I do recall feeling suddenly euphoric as I looked up at a pub sign: The Intrepid Fox. I was intrepid. Later, I must have drifted into a bookshop in the Charing Cross Road looking for something to read on the train that, thanks to my ‘friend’, I would now be taking home that evening – I knew no one else in London to stay with. Somehow, I was attracted by the cover of Granta – a moon hovering over a desolate landscape and the title ‘Travel’, which I still now read as an instruction.
Sitting alone in a draughty carriage on the Great Eastern Main Line, the train tunnelling its way into the night, I read, and as I read, I was transported, first by Ian Buruma to Taiwan, then by Norman Lewis to Siam, and then most memorably by Colin Thubron to China as he trudged along the Old Silk Road:
If I had charted the most landlocked spot on earth, the arms of my compass would have intersected here, in China’s far north-west. Its heart is a howling wilderness, 600 miles wide, where the winds have buried and mummified whole caravans. The native Uighurs call it Taklamakan, ‘You enter and you never return.’ Aurel Stein thought Arabia tame by comparison. Sven Hedin called it the world’s most dangerous desert. Its dunes rise to 300 feet, and in sudden temperature changes the moving sands make hallucinatory noises, as if caravans or troupes of musicians were passing nearby. So at night, wrote Marco Polo, ‘the stray traveller will hear as it were the tramp and hum of a great cavalcade of people away from the real line of march, and taking this to be their own company they will follow the sound; and when day breaks they find that a cheat has been put on them and that they are in an ill plight. Even in daytime one hears those spirits talking … ’
Good writing, whether travel or memoir or reportage or fiction, can give you a glimpse of some foreign place or a sense of its people, or, on a very good day, if you are lucky, a new understanding of your place in the world.
In Asia, much of what is written is veiled from western eyes. Lloyd Fernando, in his introduction to Twenty-Two Malaysian Short Stories, answers the charge that Malaysian writers are less prolific then they ought to be by noting: ‘Our writers have a choice of at least four languages for literary purposes – Malay, Chinese, English and Tamil.… The output in these four main languages at least equals that elsewhere, at any rate in volume; and there are very, very few people, even in this region, literate enough in all four languages to be able to claim convincingly that Malaysian and Singapore writers have not been sufficiently active.’ What then of India, where writers have at least eighteen languages to choose from, without counting English, in which they are prolific? Ethnologue, regarded as authoritative, lists 2,197 of the world’s 6,809 languages as Asian, and just 230 as European.
The Philippines and Indonesia, along with Korea, Taiwan and other unlikely places, have vibrant literary scenes all of their own with awards, journals, festivals and celebrated authors, and all hidden from the English-speaking world. Publishing houses in China, where writing was obliterated after 1949, now churn out 200,000 new titles a year – equal to the US and the UK combined. Japan’s publishing industry is second in size only to North America’s.
Asia, says Time magazine, is also experiencing what may be the last great newspaper boom as literacy rates rise and the fourth estate enjoys new freedom. Eight of the world’s ten largest selling paid-for dailies are printed in Asia and, rather surprisingly, many newspapers carry short fiction at the weekends – a tradition long since abandoned in the West. The most read English language broadsheet anywhere is The Times of India, a reminder that Asia’s English-speaking (and reading) population is growing fast. The spread of English has brought western publishers in search of new markets, shadowed by agents scouting for literary talent. New festivals and writing prizes multiply by the year.
With each passing day, the Asian experience finds new expression in English. One of the purposes of the Asia Literary Review is to bring to international attention the voices of a new generation of Asian writers and their unique view of the world. Already available throughout Asia and in Australia, Europe and the UK, with this issue Asia Literary Review can be found in bookstores across North America. Rudyard Kipling wrote, ‘He travels the fastest who travels alone.’ Perhaps so. But I learned early that the whole world is close to hand, you have only to turn the page.
