Lost on Planet China

This was my “plane book” for last week’s trip: J. Maarten Troost’s Lost on Planet China: The Strange and True Story of One Man’s Attempt to Understand the World’s Most Mystifying Nation.

And here’s a short review before I drive to the airport, get in several hours of work, transport kids here and there, and get the place ready for practice tonight. You know how it goes.

First, Troost is a really fun, engaging writer. And what he found in China is really scary. I no longer want to travel there. Give me a paddle of some kind, please, point me to the water and I’ll be just so very happy.

Everybody knows about China’s enormous economic growth but to see it through Troost’s eyes is another thing. Dozens of cities with millions of people, skyscraper cranes everywhere, air that can hardly sustain life (allegedly something like 25% of the air pollution in California is from China)….

Chinese politics, like the massacre in Tiananmen Square and the colonization of Tibet (and various other minority groups), is utterly Orwellian. It puts “Bush speak” to shame for it’s half-heartedness.

But with a trillion dollar surplus, a military that no one will be able to match for long, holding the financial cards on the world economy, etc., well, I’m afraid we are in for one rough ride in this “China Century.”

One of the highlights of the book is Troost’s trip to Tibet where he sees practitioners bowing along on pilgrimage. I can’t find that passage now but here’s a little sample of his writing:

“How, I wondered, did these people manage to live here? True, there was a haunting, austere beauty to the land. There was something elemental in Tibet that I had not experienced before. The sky disappeared in to an endless blue-black void; the mountains are venerable, and the land hard. Perhaps it was the lack of oxygen, but in Tibet I felt near to something profound and powerful. It did not leave me with soft and fuzzy feelings. Instead, it felt something very like awe, a deep, primordial awe.”

Kinda like really facing the wall.

I’ve got some hermit escapist tendencies, like my “fantasy-of-choice-when-the-going-gets-rough” (escaping to a cabin in the pristine north woods), and this book certainly shook more of that to the surface.

Fortunately or unfortunately, the reality of the 21st Century is that we’re interconnected in more immediate and visceral ways than ever before. I see no where to escape. And that is what Buddhism can offer to this little blue dumpling planet – realization of that truth (not just the idea) and clarity about how to go forward from this place.

Oh, I’m not a fan of Surya Das but if you want to see him tell Steven Colbert (“Barrack Obama’s Church Search”) why Obama should become Buddhist (hopeful message of interconnection, etc), click here. Very funny presentation.

But to conclude my review, Lost on Planet China is well worth the read. A very good challenge to the delusion that America is God’s chosen country and will forever be on top of the world.