Mysore -> Kochi -> Madurai -> Pondicherry -> Mamallapuram -> Chennai -> Bangalore -> Hong Kong -> Guangzhou

I will miss using only open-air vehicles for intra-city travel.

Agra -> New Delhi -> Bangalore -> Mysore

In economic terms, from the perspective of the uninitiated pedestrian, the hearts of India's premier cities resemble the outskirts of China's second-tier provincial capitals. India's pockets of rapid growth are cozily nestled - in many cases hidden - among neighborhoods of inchoate social fabric and wide boulevards abutted by sandy depressions in place of sidewalks. The sight of a stray cow ambling across six lanes of heavy traffic in the middle of New Delhi is, astonishingly, rather common.

Two strange things written on Indian Diet Pepsi bottles

1. CONTAINS NO FRUIT

2. "CONTAINS CAFFEINE" (these words are in quotation marks on the bottle)

It seems that one can't compose the body of a post from an iPod, so: Guangzhou->Kuala Lumpur->CameronHighlands->Penang->Melaka->Singapore->Delhi->Agra

Recommended Reading

Yesterday I administered the final exam for my class on Contemporary British and American Short Stories, and in flipping through my students' analyses of Hemingway's "Cat in the Rain," I was mildly satisfied that if I had taught my students one thing, it was that one will derive very little of value from literature if one simply reads stories and asks, as my students so often had: "What does this story mean?" By mid-semester I had weened them off of this tendency and convinced them to think more critically about different facets of the stories, rather than assuming (often in error) that there was one singular, immutable moral lurking beneath the surface of each text.

I was recently reminded of the origins of their tendency to simplify and essentialize. All authors are clearly trying to assert something, one reasons: why not just find out what that assertion is and be done with it? In this recent essay on the relevance of literary criticism, Elif Batuman put the problem somewhat differently:

I was immediately convinced by Tolstoy’s claim that the only accurate, and thus really truthful, interpretation of “Anna Karenina” was a word-for-word retelling; and, since “Anna Karenina” already existed with 100 percent word-for-word accuracy, what use was Strakhov? Who cared what Strakhov thought Tolstoy meant, when Tolstoy himself had put an enormous amount of time and effort into writing down precisely what he meant?

Her answer to both conundrums (conundra?) is perhaps persuasive, perhaps not.

败子回头 (The Return of the Prodigal Son)

Sitemeter tells me that most of my readership long ago left Changsha et al. for dead, but for those of you still clinging to the hope that new content might emerge, Christmas has come late this year. As this semester draws to a close and I prepare for another season of international travel, I thought it appropriate to breathe some new life into my only consistent chronicle of these two years. I have spent most of the last four months in Guangzhou and Zhuhai (the former my home, the latter my once-a-week teaching locale), though it should be noted that since my last post I did travel to Harbin in Heilongjiang Province (Administrative Region #27), Changchun in Jilin Province (Administrative Region #28), and Taipei and Taizhong in Taiwan ("Administrative Region #29").

Life in Guangzhou differs from life in Changsha mostly insofar as the city is far more developed and decently more cosmopolitan in outlook. I have begun studying Cantonese in order to better take advantage of my surroundings, but in truth the extent to which one needs it in addition to Mandarin is scarcely larger than the extent to which knowledge of the Hunanese dialect would have been necessary last year. A more noticeable difference - one which few Chinese people neglect to point out - is the paucity of spice in local cuisine. The regional cuisines (primarily Cantonese and Chaozhou) are notoriously bland, although in my opinion the availability of high quality dim sum makes up for the deficiency. Perhaps the greatest lifestyle improvement has been Guangzhou's ever-expanding metro system: from what I could gather, most Changsha bus drivers honed their skills on the job, and I do not miss them.

In nine days I will embark on another winter's journey along various tendrils of the Chinese diaspora, which I will surely tell you about. Until then, I recommend this level-headed, non-hysterical treatment of China's political landscape.

New York -> Beijing -> Xining -> Urumqi -> Kashgar -> Yengisar -> Turpan -> Urumqi -> Hong Kong -> Guangzhou

And there you were thinking that Changsha et al. had finally succumbed to the fate of so many ill-fated travel blogs. No, as the "et al." comes to represent an ever-deeper and more convoluted web of travel destinations, we soldier on.

Xining, located in Qinghai Province (Administrative Region #25) , has got to be one of the least-known cities ever chronicled on this blog, and with good reason. Like much of western China, it derives its appeal to travelers from its minority communities (Tibetans and Hui Muslims), but also like much of western China, the city has been so thoroughly inundated with Han Chinese that it might as well be Changsha.

Xinjiang (Administrative Region #26), however, is a different story. Although Urumqi, its capital, has undergone irreversible Sinification, the rest of the region remains thoroughly Uighur. Trying to get a decent lunch in Kashgar during Ramadan is like trying to find a clean bathroom anywhere west of Chengdu: it's simply not going to happen. Trying to communicate with locals using Chinese is also a losing battle - they speak Uighur, and are content to keep it that way. Turpan, the lowest and allegedly hottest place in China, is an unfortunate place to be a Muslim woman in August, when covering up every inch of skin is just as important as it is to a Harbin schoolgirl in the dead of January.

Here in Guangzhou, my home for the next year, it need only be said that the women (or, more accurately, the men) have no such scruples.