纽约时报评骑乘铁公鸡
Mark Salzman
PAUL THEROUX, taking the Chinese proverb ''You can always fool a foreigner'' as a personal challenge, rode a series of trains from one city to another all over China for an entire year.
Mr. Theroux stayed in lousy hotels, ate bad food, saw lots of disgusting things and nearly got killed by an incompetent driver.
He is in top form as he describes the barren deserts of Mongolia and Xinjiang, the ice forests of Manchuria and the dry hills of Tibet. He captures their otherworldly, haunting appearances perfectly.
But his book is mainly about Chinese people, and it appears that Mr. Theroux didn't like them much. He's entitled to his opinion, of course, but I think he goes overboard trying to convince his readers that the majority of the Chinese are contemptible or foolish. Here are a few quotations; see what you think.
Many of the Chinese are vibrant, courageous, talented, kind and generous. They don't think their lives are unimaginably dull, and instead of becoming cynical they work to improve themselves and their country in spite of its problems. Mr. Theroux does not include people like this in his book; he doesn't give them a chance to reveal themselves. That's hardly surprising, given the sort of approach he demonstrates in the following encounter:
You get a similarly distorted view of China from ''Riding the Iron Rooster'' because Mr. Theroux, although he saw every corner of the country, ate plenty of Chinese food, visited lots of museums and met a variety of people, apparently didn't make any Chinese friends.
It wasn't all his fault. How would most Americans treat, say, a Russian writer traveling around our country asking questions about Central America and Vietnam through an assigned State Department interpreter? For one reason or another, most of the people Mr. Theroux encountered looked upon him as either a rich tourist or a hostile foreign journalist, and treated him as such. Their behavior toward him cannot be assumed to be typically Chinese.
Mr. Theroux is renowned for his ability to gain insights into human nature from even the most mundane situations.
More often than not, he is passing judgment on China rather than describing it, all from a very limited perspective. The result is an opinionated, petty and incomplete portrait of that country.
