Video Night in Kathmandu by Pico Iyer

After reading Rolf’s interview with Pico Iyer, and then Iyer’s essay “Why We Travel,” I was intrigued enough to seek out the man’s travel writing. About a month ago, as if by providence, I happened upon a secondhand bookshop at Plaza Singapura that carried all of Iyer’s books, both his travel writing and his novels, and so I picked out his first travel book, Video Night in Kathmandu, since 1) it’s good to start at the beginning, and 2) the book concerns his travels through Asia, where I now live.

I was swept away by Iyer’s prose. His precise attention to detail, his incredible powers of observation and insight, and his copious amounts of note-taking immersed in me in his travels as if I were right there beside him. The book was originally published in 1988 (mine is the 2001 reissued paperback from Vintage), and things have changed some in the twenty years since (which Iyer owns up to in the afterword, written in December 2000); just one example from personal experience: the tourist-ridden Bali of 1985 was replaced by a desperate ghost town when I visited in 2003, after the bombing at Kuta Beach and the SARS outbreaks had crushed the tourism economy (although I am told that the country has recovered somewhat since then). In one way, the book can be seen as a historical snapshot, a still-image of mid-1980s Asia. However, Iyer’s insights into the people in the countries he visited (Bali, Tibet, Nepal, China, The Philippines, Burma, Hong Kong, India, Thailand, and Japan) become universal truths, no matter how the forward march of progress alters the Asian landscape.

Much of his focus is on the impact tourism has had on these countries, or their interaction with the West. However, he also comes to realize that each nation still remains uniquely itself, that the commercial invasion of McDonald’s or the novels of New York Times bestselling authors cannot fundamentally alter the people themselves.

Bali, for example, drew its strength, its magic and its eerie purity from the ancestral currents that pulsed through its soil, currents that Westerners could sense, perhaps, but never touch; just so, the moving yet unwavering faith of Tibet would withstand the ravages of tourists, I hoped, as surely as it had withstood the vicious assaults of the Chinese. Burma had calmly closed its door to the world, and China had opened it up just enough, so it planned, to take what it wanted, and nothing more. Prodigal, hydra-headed India cheerfully welcomed every new influence from the West, absorbing them all into a crazy-quilt mix that was Indian and nothing but Indian; Japan had taken in the West only, so it seemed, to take it over. As for Nepal, and Thailand even more, both gauged Western tastes so cleverly and adapted Western trends so craftily that both, I felt, could satisfy foreigners’ whims without ever becoming their slaves. Even Hong Kong, the last pillar of the Western Empire, was now getting ready to return to Asian hands. (357-8)

Iyer is also surprisingly funny. His efforts in Guangzhou to acquire a train ticket to Beijing through the China Travel Service take on a Kafkaesque air, as he is shuffled from place to place, victim of the New China bureaucracy. His entry into the Rangoon Airport in Burma evokes the absurdity of Bulgakov, when a country that actively discourages tourism makes one declare not only valuables such as jewelry or alcohol, but also one’s watch, spectacles, cuff links, wedding ring, contact lenses, credit card, shoelaces, and/or travel alarm clock.

I wish that Iyer had said more about Singapore, my new hometown, other than dismissing it as “McCity, a perfect Platonic model of the Commonweal, as safe and efficient and convenient as McDonald’s, and just about as featureless. [... It] resembled nothing so much as a California resort town run by Mormons.” In my two months here, I have not seen this to be the case, but again, twenty years is a long time in Singapore, a country burning its candle extremely bright these days.

I normally read at a phenomenal pace (sometimes a book or two per week), but it took me a full month to finish Video Night in Kathmandu, partly because Iyer’s lush descriptions and fascinating insights forced me to slow down and savor the written experiences, and partly because I didn’t want the book to end. Thankfully, I know where I can acquire his other travel books when I get the jones for his writing again.