说明:双击或选中下面任意单词,将显示该词的音标、读音、翻译等;选中中文或多个词,将显示翻译。
Home->News->Culture_Life->
Tales of the unexpected
2020-08-12 
A view of Sarajevo, capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina. BAI LIN/FOR CHINA DAILY

"No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main." English poet John Donne wrote these famous words shortly after he recovered from a serious disease in London in 1623.

Today as the COVID-19 confines people, countries close borders, and the future looks shrouded in uncertainty, breaking isolation and building psychological and physical connections seem to have taken on an added and immediate urgency.

This is especially true when people recollect past travels to the remotest areas on this planet, destinations that are often overlooked, where young travelers listened intently to locals' stories putting pride and prejudice aside.

Their initial curiosity gradually grew into a more profound understanding that offers new perspectives for people to see others and themselves. That is why the latest issue of One-Way Street, a Chinese literary periodical based in Beijing, titled An End to Isolation, is having such a huge impact on readers, many of whom comment online that the travelers' writings in this issue helped to open their eyes and hearts and take them to a bigger world in a time of isolation.

This issue is a special edition, focused on One-Way Street Foundation's Sailors Project that launched in 2018, and which has just kicked off a call for submissions for its 2020 iteration. The foundation financially supported Chinese applicants to travel to various destinations. Each participant was supposed to submit work based on their travels, either in writing or on film.

The project draws inspiration from American poet Walt Whitman's A Song of Joys, which extols everything in the poet's life, even hardships, loneliness and death. In the end, it goes: "O to have life henceforth a poem of new joys!/To dance, clap hands, exult, shout, skip, leap, roll on, float on!/To be a sailor of the world bound for all ports,/A ship itself, (see indeed these sails I spread to the sun and air,)/A swift and swelling ship full of rich words, full of joys."

"To be a sailor of the world bound for all ports" became the slogan of the project, celebrating the buoyant idea of setting sail for an extensive world and building connections, says Wu Qi, 34, the periodical's editor-in-chief.

Freelancer Bai Lin has toured and written about Belgrade and Sarajevo, since being selected for the Sailors Project in 2018.[Photo provided to China Daily]

In 2018, the foundation received a total of 500 applications, from which five proposals were selected. These included Pamir Mountains by Liu Zichao, Belgrade and Sarajevo by Bai Lin, and bird-watching in the Indonesian islands by Feng Meng-chieh from Taiwan. All of the winning applicants are in their 20s or 30s.

"Travel writing has not been a well-developed category, so far, in China, although there are some established older writers. Decades ago, fewer people had the chance to go outside of China to see the world, to communicate with locals using foreign languages, and to bring their stories and observations back with good writing," Wu says.

However, Chinese people now have an unprecedented chance to travel around the world or to access information about the outside world, whether from books or online, especially before the pandemic, he says. In the past, the world was discovered and written about by travelers largely from developed countries, such as Britain, France and the United States.

Gradually, more Chinese people went to these destinations. First, groups of noisy sightseers and shoppers, and then more independent backpackers and travel writers, including overseas students, have joined in globalization and the literary tradition of travel writing, Wu says.

"Such a trend will reflect on Chinese travel writing," he says. "For example, if you see Liu Zichao's three books based on his travels, obviously the most recently published is very different from the first printed in 2015, with much progress and change."

Locals outside a hotel in Kyrgyzstan. LIU ZICHAO/FOR CHINA DAILY

Project takes flight

For 2018's project, Wu and his team first chose 50 proposals from the 500, then decided 12 winners in the second round. Among these were offerings from media professionals. The majority of the 50 proposals were related to humanities subjects.

That was why the bird-watching plan to Indonesia by Feng, a college student of ornithology from Taiwan, left so deep an impression on Wu.

"It's like a fresh breeze which helped me realize that the whole world of natural sciences has been overlooked, so we had to choose her because she was so unique," Wu recalls.

Feng's The Vanishing Maluku became Wu's personal favorite. "When I read the essay, I felt the joy described by Whitman. Perhaps, it was partially because I knew little about birds," Wu says.

Like other applicants, Feng also talked about the history of the Indonesian islands she started visiting in 2018, but maybe because she was still a college student, her writing, following no pattern, appears candid and intimate, he says.

When Feng set off, she fell victim to a disease suspected to be malaria that attacked periodically during the journey, so that she was not sure whether she could continue.

In a recent live talk online, she said that there were several occasions where she was nearly raped.

At the end of the essay, she wrote about a young woman called Xiaolan, 20, from the Chinese mainland, who had traveled together with an American who claimed Xiaolan as his "wife". Similar in age and sharing the same language, the two "fragile "travelers then became companions, roommates and friends.

"Even without the parts about birds, her travel was a very interesting story with all the difficulties and struggles that remind me of my first journey," Wu says.

Liu Zichao, another successful applicant for the project, has visited the Pamir Mountains, and mixed with the local people. [Photo provided to China Daily]

Retreading ancient steps

For Chinese writer A Yi, one of the judges of the project, Liu and Bai are "contemporary versions of Xuanzang".

In the seventh century, Xuanzang, a Buddhist monk who lived during the Tang Dynasty (618-907), spent 17 years traveling to India to bring original Buddhist texts and authentic interpretations back to China, contributing greatly to not only the introduction and translation of Buddhism, but communication between cultures. He recorded his travel in The Great Tang Dynasty Record of the Western Regions.

"Like Xuanzang did in India, Liu and Bai went to Central Asia and the Balkans, bringing back information and culture from those regions," he says. "Liu's work, for instance, is a successful example for Chinese travel writers and will exert a long-lasting influence."

Central Asia and the Balkans are regions often overlooked by many tourists, which is also one reason that proposals from Bai and Liu stood out.

"We, living in China, are conscious of life only here, or in North America, Europe and Southeast Asia, regions that mainstream tourists can reach. We think we know about the world, but the world is much larger than we imagine," Wu says.

"For instance, we don't know much about Central Asia or the region of former Yugoslavia. By traveling, or reading other people's travelogues, we can get a more complete image of the globe, and we'll know that lives in the world are diversified. We shouldn't indulge our self-centered tendencies, which is something that can often happen in today's China, Europe and the US," Wu says.

"The winning destinations are all difficult to reach. We want to make it difficult," he says.

In 2010, Liu, still a journalist, was on a business trip to Horgos in Northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region. He saw trucks in a long line waiting for customs clearance and the magnificent Tianshan Mountains from afar. In awe, Liu says, he wanted to see the world beyond the snow-capped mountains.

He went to his first stop, Uzbekistan, in the autumn of 2011. Since 2016, he has traveled in Central Asia for his new book. In 2018, he used the funding to pay for his travels to Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. His book Among the Stans: A Central Asian Journey was recently published.

The One-Way Street special issue includes Liu's Pamir Highway and Wakhan Valley, an essay based on his one-month journey in Tajikistan, where he traveled from Dushanbe to the Kulma Pass along the Panj River.

He says he was so excited to walk on a stretch of path that Xuanzang traveled about 1,300 years ago. "Few Chinese people have traveled to that place and written anything about it, so it became an important achievement for me," he says.

Across the Panj River lies Afghanistan. "The river is the boundary between the two countries, but it is just a naturally-formed river. The boundary is imposed on people who actually are of the same Wakhan ethnicity, and relatives who used to visit each other, but now they have different lives, currencies and nationalities," he says.

A bird nestling in a tree somewhere in Indonesia. FENG MENG-CHIEH/FOR CHINA DAILY

The road within

Apart from thoughts on the outside world, the travel matters a lot for the "sailors" themselves because it is closely related with their inner world.

Having been a journalist and editor for Beijing News Book Review for nearly four years, Bai Lin quit the job in 2017 and started traveling in the Balkans in 2018 as a freelancer.

She is now working on the last part of her book about her exploration in the region over the last three years, which requires her to pay another visit to the ancient monasteries in Serbia. However, due to the pandemic, she has had to suspend the plan.

Bai says that her interest in the former Yugoslavia originated from her own curiosity at boundaries people keep in daily life.

"I travel and write to solve my own problems, and to deal with my relationship with the world," she says.

In modern society, people talk about "sense of distance" or "don't cross the line" in various relationships. Despite its necessity, the boundaries people keep between each other have already enlarged into gaps, she says.

Feng Mengchieh, a college student of ornithology from Taiwan, has visited Indonesia and focused on bird-watching. [Photo provided to China Daily]

"It is actually about how you see yourself and the world. You might think individuals are islands, countries are different from each other and we draw lines in between to stop people from crossing over," she says.

That is why issues about the former Yugoslavia are so fascinating for Bai.

It was a country where people of different ethnicities, races and religious beliefs mixed peacefully as neighbors, lovers and friends, she says. However, at a certain moment, everything changed. Neighbors killed neighbors, and friends turned against each other.

"In essence, what I want to explore is how the boundaries between countries in the Balkans enlarged into gaps," she says.

Unlike the impression she got from the media, she felt safe in the Balkans, even when she walked alone at midnight in the mountainous areas in Serbia, because people are "good". She tried to talk to the locals and listen to their stories and views, abandoning stereotypical prejudices and established theories.

"Apart from the courage to travel alone in strange places, you also need courage to break established prejudices, trust what you see and feel, and speak your ideas out, which is really difficult because you face a lot of pressure from dominant discourse," Bai says.

Feng said that the most difficult thing for her while traveling is choosing to trust people after she encountered dangerous situations.

When it comes to the future, Bai and Liu, are very optimistic because they believe that COVID-19 pandemic is temporary and people from different countries are communicating with each other all the time regardless of political conflicts. More or less, they've gained this confidence from their travels and their writing.

"Where to go, and what to write and read are decided by ourselves," A Yi says. "Politics is unpredictable and will, in the end, challenge and test each individual, but first of all we can decide our own destinations and change ourselves."

The Sailors Project 2020 has already kicked off, inviting talented youth to apply with their own travel proposals. [Photo provided to China Daily]
Most Popular...
Previous:Group-buying sustains consumption efforts
Next:Ancient fables, modern lessons for younger readers