The 'Trollop' treks Asia anew

ON THE road, some travellers open up like water lilies in the morning to drink in the sunlight and soak up their surroundings, while others wither and close, sealed inside their personal preferences and their prejudices. 

Janet Brown is thankfully in the former category, and that’s what makes her such an engaging travel writer. In her second open-road memoir, “Almost Home”, Brown is open to the people she encounters and the places she sees. She might be getting off on the wrong floor at Hong Kong’s infamous Chungking Mansions so she can follow the mysterious strains of ethnic music that pluck at the heart-strings. She might be trying to find a tuk-tuk driver to take her over hernia-inducing roads to the ruins of a Khmer temple in rural Laos.

With her, it’s the small details that form the big picture. This dedication subtly comes out in the section about staying in Bangkok, where even the poorest Thais tend to have clean clothes and hair and take great pride in their appearance, she notices while riding around on public buses (not the usual travel mode for expatriates and visitors). 

In an excellent introduction, the author relates her own girlhood growing up in Alaska as the daughter of station-wagon pioneers from New York who ventured north until they ran out of land. Her father refers to the country’s founding fathers, saying, “They went off to seek their fortunes.” That desire for materialistic gain does not propel this young woman.

After raising two boys, Brown discovered Bangkok in middle age, returning for several stints of work and travel. For a while it became her adopted home. In the congested and serenely chaotic capital, she discovered the magic in the mundane details of everyday life. Writing of the infamous traffic gridlock, she wryly remarks, “Buses made practising Buddhists of us all.”

This is the longest and most emotionally gripping section of the book. It’s followed by stopovers in Hong Kong, Beijing and Penang.

Brown is the antithesis of Paul Theroux, another American travel writer but one who’s far more established. Where he sees stupidity, greed and hypocrisy everywhere, she takes a more positive approach to everything, from the Chinese curiosity toward outsiders like her in their midst to the fact that older woman often become “invisible” to men and thus avoid unwanted come-ons. 

Only in the section on Malaysia is there much griping – with good reason – about bedbugs in a hotel and the caterwauling performances of pop music at the Chinese temple in her adopted neighbourhood.

She and Penang make for a marriage of inconvenience. This segment is not easy reading, but it might remind you of cities or countries you hoped to like but just didn’t click with somehow. 

In her previous travel memoir from 2008, “Tone Deaf in Thailand and Other Places”, Brown established a voice for herself that combined straightforward observations based on the five senses with a self-deprecating sense of humour. It’s a rarity on the travel-media circuit, where authors want to come off as Indiana Jones-style adventurers or boast about their scholarly pedigrees in arts and history. 

I treasured her modest disclosures in that book, such as: “Being a coward by nature, I liked to position myself in the middle of a cluster of street-crossers.” 

“Tone Deaf” was also notable for providing a rare farang woman’s perspective on Thailand. As in “Almost Home”, little of the expat bitterness that contaminates many books about the country – and chat forums on websites like ThaiVisa.com – has seeped in, so don’t expect any of the usual grumbles about traffic, pollution, corruption and two-tier pricing. Nor does Brown give the green light to any red-light district rambles either. 

This is not to say that she glosses over the haemorrhoids on the city’s backside. Instead of being repulsed, this New York native discovers a gritty charm in them, like the stray dogs she spotted from her old apartment window frolicking around a derelict mattress in a vacant, garbage-strewn lot, which is depicted in the opening chapter of “Tone Deaf”. 

The advent of websites like Wikipedia, TripAdvisor and Google Maps has changed travel writing forever. Whereas in the past you had to be something of an expert to punch in all the historic dates, events and chronicles, or spend a lot of time in libraries, now you can just cut and paste all that background info into the story. Predictably, this has led to a lot of “generic” tales that regurgitate the same facts and the same dates in a tedious tango. 

For the most part, Janet takes a none-too-historic approach, favouring descriptions of the present over recollections of the past. This works well enough in relatively young cities like Bangkok and Hong Kong. It does not work so well for Beijing, with its thousands of years of history, especially when Janet is exploring the narrow lanes and courtyard houses of the old hutong neighbourhoods. 

 ThingsAsian Press has acquired an enviable reputation for putting together high-quality books at affordable prices, with sharp photos and lovely glossy paper. That’s true of her two memoirs, too, except that, in “Almost Home”, some of the photos are blurry and some, like the one of a chicken that lives in a Bangkok telephone booth, are not placed opposite the appropriate text.

But these are minor speed bumps on this literary journey. They won’t hobble readers too much. Written with warmth, wit, humour and candour, Brown’s memoir can be an entertaining travel companion for your wanderings in Asia.

 

Jim Algie’s latest book is the short-fiction collection “The Phantom Lover and Other Thrilling Tales of Thailand”. See more bytes and pixels at www.JimAlgie.com. 

 

 

Almost Home: The Asian Search of a Geographic Trollop 

By Janet Brown

Published by Things Asian Press, 2013

Available at Amazon.com, US$11.50 (Bt373)

Reviewed by Jim Algie