dispatches
essays /
Essay Excerpt / Mind Blindness and the Decline of Hitchhiking /
Paul Theroux seldom leaves the reader neutral; his sharp eye spares little of what it sees. At first a novelist, he set out one day to ride a train from his London home to the far end of Asia, pioneering in the process a genre of take-no-prisoners travel writing. But no fair-minded reader can question Theroux’s authority. With homes in Cape Cod and Oahu, his American roots run deep. Yet in his constant travels, he is hardly an innocent abroad. From the time he left Massachusetts for the Peace Corps in Malawi in the 1960s, he has gotten, and gets, as close to the real world as anyone can.
Most nations are stubbornly in love with themselves and hardly interested in the virtues of others. It is pretty unhelpful but not uncommon for a nation to believe so devoutly in its superiority that it vigorously promotes the notion that every other nation is barbarous.
After an opening like this, the next word you expect is “Germans!”– but really you could substitute almost any people, Americans, Japanese, Zulus, Trobriand Islanders, Swedes, Israelis, Samoans, Chinese, and many others. Go to Hong Kong. If you’re not Chinese you’ll be called a gweilo — literally “ghost man.” That is a remark in a long tradition of xenophobic offhandedness. A marble Qing Dynasty screen I once saw in Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum depicting Westerners of the 17th century was inscribed with the stern text, “They dress in grass, eat turnips, and despise their kings.”
This attitude also sometimes goes under the name ethnocentrism, but it is not a rarity: most people have a better opinion of themselves than of others, and in particular of strangers. Anyway, for the Chinese this self-cherishing was an advance from earlier representations of foreigners on Chinese maps, where Europe and Africa were shown as tiny islands off the Middle Kingdom coast on the flat earth. Even around the turn of the 19th century, when at last the Chinese accepted that the world might be round, Chinese maps depicted the natives of these islands as monstrous, and one-eyed, and some people were shown with holes through their midsections so that they could be carried as cargo on long poles.
It is important to stress at the outset that Americans are not the only ignorant people on earth, but we have fewer excuses than most.
In America / Essays / Paul Theroux