Rome Journal I: Why Travel Anywhere?

engraving of first photo of Parthenon by Joly de Lotbiniere (1839)

What is the point of travel? People do the Terracotta Warriors, the Forbidden City and the Wall when they go to China. You go to Jordan for Petra, India for the Taj Mahal and the Ganges, Cambodia for Angkor Wat, Rome for the Pantheon. Angkor what? remarks the jaded tourist. But what really is the experience of these countries? You begin your journey out of one of the big international hubs like JFK by being informed there are over 20 planes head of your on the queue. The flight is uncomfortable and it’s hard to sleep even in premium economy since the person in back makes no secret of how discomforted they have been made by your seat going back an extra two inches. You’re jet lagged when you start, jet lagged throughout the trip and arrive home from your “vacation” totally jet lagged. Then there's the experience of modernity which is now ubiquitous. Yes China and Cambodia both sport wonders of the world, but they also have McDonald’s and KFC which line the roads as you navigate your way from the airport, with its familiar Hertz, Avis and Budget Rent-A-Car signs to your hotel. It’s comforting to know Dunkin' Donuts is everywhere but do I have to fly 6000 miles to have a bran muffin and American coffee when I should be forcing myself to imbibe the more authentic espresso or cappuccino and croissant en Paris? You can get drunk on familiarity even in the most far away places. It used to be that Americans would indulge their homesickness by buying an overpriced drink Harry’s Bar in Venice, Paris or Rome, but now there’s no need for an expensive tourist hangout when your Big Mac is to be had right around the corner. All the trappings are there and the people with their iPads and phones even speak a patois that’s so filled with Americanisms, that they’re argot doesn't seem that far from a Boston accent or southern drawl. The difference between being is simply that it’s a little more uncomfortable. People are living lives remarkably similar to the one you live back at home, only you're an outsider (without the comfort of a web of friends and connections), who is constantly forced to ask strangers for directions to the nearest Metro or Underground stop.

The Terra Cotta Warriors

If you’ve ever been in the company of friends who’ve been to China, you’ve heard them launch into the requisite, world-weary confirmation that they have indeed seen the Terra Cotta Warriors. The establishment of this fact has the quality of a salutation. It’s like the meaningless “How was your trip?” converted into Renminbis. Of course there is also the Great Wall. How could one go to China without “doing the Wall?” doing being the gerund that is generally used by affluent couples who joylessly check off the must-see sites in their progress from middle to late-middle age. Imagine going to China and not seeing the Terra Cotta Warriors. What would happen? Would one have to make an appearance before the International Criminal Court of Tourism, where travelers who have gone to Rome without journeying to either the Caracalla Baths or the Vatican are put on trial, along with those refuseniks who, when visiting London, play hooky on seeing the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace. Many nice, intelligent people go to these sites. Many of them have advanced degrees from prestigious institutions, so it is hard to fathom what is going on. Did André Malraux visit the Great Wall, the Terra Cotta Warriors or the Forbidden City when he was collecting the impressions he reflected on in Man’s Fate? OK, yes, the Forbidden City was probably not as overrun by tourists as it is today, and the Terra Cotta Warrior had yet to be unearthed, but you get the idea. Great fiction writers like Malraux, Graham Greene and V.S. Naipaul who travel and write about their travels more often than not tend to prefer red light districts to tourist sites, for what it’s worth.

The Forbidden City

When in Venice, you might go to the Cipriani. In London, the Connaught. In Paris, the George V or the Ritz. And on the Cote d’Azur, the Hotel du Cap. These are the old fashioned Grand Hotels, with quiet corridors, doting concierges, and soft, elegant sheets that were turned down by the night maid. When it was a seller’s market, you had to be landed aristocracy or at least know a landed aristocrat to make a reservation in some of these dignified redoubts. They were a far cry from the Holiday Inn, the Marriott or even the Meridien. These hotels were more like clubs and had a certain cachet. The closest most travelers would come to one of these pleasure domes came from reading about them in the pages of a novel. Writers like Evelyn Waugh, Hemingway and Graham Greene might have been found at their bars, documenting the foibles of the upper crust as they recorded the cultural history of the age. However, let’s say one wins the lottery or has the uncanny good fortune to invest in Apple at the right time and, for a moment at least, becomes the kind of cash cow that needs to be milked. There generally is no more reliable place to empty one’s pockets than a grand old establishment like the Cipriani, facing the Lido, the beach where Ashenbach confronted his homosexual longings in the Mann novella. But, will the uprooted cosmopolitan of the 21st Century really find respite in these museums, in which the aristocracy of Europe, probably including several itinerant Romanov’s, experienced its death rattles? Indeed, these anachronisms have a clientele that differs greatly from the world they entertained in the past. It’s a little like entering the Forbidden City in Peking. The experience of the tourist is nothing like what it was like when the inner sanctum was really off limits to anyone but emperors.

The China Syndrome

In the collective unconscious of the American spirit, China is a black and white Charlie Chan movie with proverb-chanting Charlie played by the Caucasian actor Sidney Toler. China is take-out Chinese food or the Cantonese restaurant, circa 1955, with big oriental shades, Han dynasty murals, and impassive Confuscian waiters in white jackets pulling the silver covers off the #1—egg roll, chow mein and fried rice. China is foot binding (less brutal than the clitorectomy, but torture nevertheless), Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth, Sun Yat Sen, Chiang Kai Shek, Mao, the Long March, the rape of Nanking, Zhou En Lai, The Gang of Four, the Cultural Revolution. China is the Forbidden City and the Great Wall as pictured in Richard Haliburton’s Book of Marvels or William Hinton’s Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village. This sleeping giant epitomizes the Orientalism of Edward Said’s famous essay.

But while the mythology of China festers in the imagination, a real China burgeons. Shanghai has 4000 skyscrapers, which is double that of New York. Embedded within the structure of an ostensibly communist society is an engine of wealth production that cannot be adequately accounted for by the usual terminology—free market, economies of scale, division of labor—employed to describe capitalist production. This new China is a socio-economic chimera, an authoritarian head presiding over a free market body, the overactive superego accommodating the demiurge.

China is science fiction to the extent that its wealth is like a black hole. Imperial America has declined, leaving in its wake stealthy expansion through magnetic pull. China doesn’t invade (with the exception of secessionist provinces like Tibet). Its expansion is by way of attraction rather than promotion.

America is about to be foreclosed on by China, which more than ever holds the mortgage to our property. In The Man in a High Castle, Philip K. Dick envisions the Axis powers winning the Second World War, and Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America imagines the rise of anti-Semitism as Lindbergh beats Roosevelt in the 1940 election. The WMD of the China novel is bound to be a credit default swap.