Stages & Pages

After inhabiting various South Pacific islands for his previous two bestsellers (Getting Stoned With Savages, Sex Lives of Cannibals), J. Maarten Troost heads to Asia in search of the answer anyone planning to live in the 21st century is looking for: what’s the deal with China?

Troost humorously sets the record straight with his latest novel, Lost in Planet China. With witty intellect, a touch of political sarcasm and a knack for boiling down complicated history, Troost, who claims not to be a travel writer, brings the profession to an impossible standard with his raw perspective and brutal honesty about traveling through “the America of Asia.”

For Troost, it seems China is first and foremost one gigantic nightmare for the Environmental Protection Agency. Indeed, most of the twenty-four chapters are replete with interjections of “apocalyptic smoky haze” and “the foulest air this side of Venus,” no matter where he is, be it Beijing’s choking highways or the barren mountains of Tibet.

Along with the mega-factories, the phlegm-hawking locals and lack of basic sanitation (children freely excrete into street gutters), one gets the sense that China does not bode well for the future world.

While these events do not help China’s image, they are gold for an exceptionally entertaining read, whether one desires to go to China or not. The half-Czech, half-Dutch, Canadian-passport-holding, California-residing author holds the worldly perspective and rare non-journalist trait in being able to sift through the piles of mundane material to turn up just enough diamonds for a stellar piece of work.

There is not a base that Troost skips over with China: the rapid economic development, skewed government (are they Commies? Are they not?) extraterrestrial cuisine (Fried Tiger Penis, anyone?), seething Japanese sentiment, a booming sex industry, its relations to Hong Kong, Taiwan and Tibet, and the long-awaited glory of the Olympics.

The sheer volume of information that Troost covers within 379 pages is nothing short of impressive and speaks its own decibels on how complex the People’s Republic of China is.

Why does the government claim to be for its people, yet they cannot vote?

Why do the cities flash so much wealth, yet more than half the country lives under $200 a month?

And for God’s sake, why is the country so damn polluted?

Troost begins in Beijing, where the traffic, crowds and omnipresent face of Mao Zedong wreak havoc on his senses. As he makes his way from city to city, he meets characters of all kinds: Meow Meow, the prostitute/tour guide outside a Shanghai hotel; senile grandpas who start fights in the middle of a Nanjing street; reefer-smoking Western hippies in Dali, etc. All point to some aspect of the country that Troost uses as clues in his quest to find the real China, which he pieces together bit by bit, painting a portrait that is both complex and intriguing, but most of all, unresolved.

After all, how do you package a land 1 out of 5 humans on the planet call home, 10,000 years of history, and endless menus of everything from Chicken Brain to Ox Larynx?

With comical anecdotes tinged with history lessons that even the average Joe can comprehend, Troost takes the reader on a wild ride through the looming empire of the coming century. If he was able to keep his wits about him through consuming live squid and being stranded on Putuoshan during a typhoon, there’s hope for the rest of us in surviving the veritable planet that is modern China.

Interview with the author: