Book Review: Lost on Planet China

J. Maarten Troost, Lost on Planet China: One Man’s Attempt to Understand the World’s Most Mystifying Nation (New York: Broadway Books, 2008), 382 pages


From his previous life on remote islands in the South Pacific, Maarten Troost observed there are two kinds of folks you can count on seeing at the ends of the earth: Mormon Missionaries and Chinese Businessmen. I’m not sure what Troost has against Mormons, but he decided to explore the land of the latter who were, from his perspective, quickly converting the South Pacific into a Chinese Lake. Thinking China is the next happening place (and possibility a location to raise his family), Troost heads off to investigate. He was not amused, but his readers will be highly amused by his observations.
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Troost finds China crowded, polluted, stuffed-up and perverted. The first should be of little surprise as it is well-known that China population is the largest of any country in the world. The second is also of little surprise as Chinas has recently taken the lead in the amount of carbon pumped into the atmosphere. The air is so bad that Troost suggests it would even cause a Republican to be in favor of a clean air act. To prove this point, Troots later has one of his school friends, an out-of-work due-to-the-elections Republican operative travel around with him for part of his trip in China. One of the nastier things Troost observed throughout the country was how everyone seemed to cough and hack and openly spit out phlegm, as if the whole nation was suffering from a respiratory problem. As far as the last characteristic, Troost doesn’t actually call China perverted, per se, but he does remind us of the puritan attitudes of the Chinese government and then goes on to show us the real China through encounters with prostitutes, a mistaken foray into a gay bar and ancient pornography.
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Food is another area of discomfort for Troost. At first, he’s repulsed at the thought of eating live squid, but eventually cleans his bowl. (185) He feasts on barbeque frog as if it was something no one else had ever eaten. (150) He heads into a market where all kinds of animals are offered for sale for the purpose of consumption. Troost concludes that this was apparently where Noah unloaded his cargo. (215) Throughout the book, he tells of eating all kinds of things that he would have never eaten would back home in California and I’m left to wonder if he ever at a hot dog. As for frogs, I ate them as a kid. I don’t remember them being barbecued, but being that was in North Carolina, they may have been.
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Troost is big on statistics and liberally sprinkles such tidbits of information throughout the book. Fifty percent of all bottled water in Chinas is contaminated. (84) China burns more coal in a year than the United States, Japan and Europe combined. (85) China has only 3% of the world’s drivers but 25% of automobile fatalities. (179) China is home to three-quarters of the world big cranes. (211) The average age of death of a traffic cop in Guangzhou is forty-three, and the cause of death isn’t bad drivers but respiratory problems. (217) The hodge-podge of facts Troost drops throughout the book are interesting, but there were so many of them that I began to wonder if he made them up. After all, he’s the same author who started off his second book with a disclaimer. He is not Dan Rather (or was it Tom Brokaw) and isn’t interested in facts.
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While traveling through the country, Troost was amused at China’s media complaints about the about inferior of Western products. He’s reading this while drinking bottled water and thinking that instead of being Nestles, it’s just as likely water from a spigot in Beijing. (84) He often makes comments about Chinese dog food sold in the West and their baby formula sold in their own country. Throughout China, he finds it hard to ascertain if what you’re buying is what it says it is. (146-148) Troost also explores the way the Chinese government doesn’t allow criticism and how, after Mattel had to do a massive recall of toys painted in China with lead paint, the Chinese force the company to apologize for its engineering of magnetic toys that were found to be fatal if consumed. (116) In an entertaining way, he tells of the American-Chinese standoff following one of our spy planes, a lumbering turbo-prop, that according to the Chinese rammed one of their own limber fighter planes. The international incident was the only time the George W. Bush apologized, something he vowed never to do again. (119) Troost also finds the Chinese government control of religion a little overbearing. Ignoring the Vatican, the country decided they had the right to appoint their own Cardinal and overlooking centuries of tradition, have appointed their own successor to the Dalai Lama while the official child chosen as successor has mysteriously disappeared. (291)
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Although he does have a Republican friend, Troost doesn’t seem to care much for conservatives and especially the politics of George W. Bush (after all, he’s Dutch and Canadian). He notes that at most there may be a dozen Americans willing to risk nuclear war with China over Taiwan, but unfortunately those twelve are all working in Bush’s White House [this book was published in 2008, the last year of Bush’s presidency]. (253) While not being a fan of Bush, he inadvertently illustrates a point that Bush and death penalty advocates have always maintained. Capital punishment deters crime. When offered a bag of weed, Troost declines saying there is no way he’ll even consider smoking pot (remember, this is the guy who wrote Getting Stoned with Savages) in a nation that has mobile execution labs. He went on to note that another area that China leads the world in is executions and how, since 2004, they’ve moved away from the messy shot in the back of the head to mobile labs that “humanely” administer lethal injections, sparing the mess and saving the corpse for a thriving government business in organ transplants. (237-9) -
After reading this book, I still want to visit China. I was especially impressed with his hike through the Tiger Leaping Gorge. (263) Besides, in a world that’s so different, I might actually enjoy listening to Michael Jackson, as Troost did when taking the train from Tibet, or to Country Christian music which serenaded him on an in-country airplane flight.
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Of the three books that I’ve read in the past year on China (the other two are Rob Grifford, China Road and Colin Thubron, Shadow of the Silk Road), I would recommend China Road if you want to learn about the country, but Troost is, hands down, the funniest book of the three and for that reason, I recommend him. By the way, I never got around to review Shadow of the Silk Road, which is more than just about China as Thubron travels from China back to the Mediterranean Sea. Only the first part of the book is about China.