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More reviews by Peter Gordon
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Smoke and Mirrors by Pallavi Aiyar
Young westerner moves to China, teaches English, learns Chinese, starts writing for foreign publications and ends up writing a rather good book about the sojourn and which includes any number of perspicacious observations about China, the Chinese and relations with foreigners. This could be Peter Hessler, but this time, it isn't. More interesting yet, it's a young Indian woman whose observations take not the West but Asia's other giant as a point of reference.
SMOKE AND MIRRORS is a combination of memoir, travelogue and socio-economic treatise. PALLAVI AIYAR, now the Beijing correspondent for The Hindu and China-based advisor to the Confederation of Indian Industries, manages to be simultaneously intelligent and charming. Aiyar has an easy pen: the statistics are readable and not all at daunting, the historical background relevant and brief, the socio-political observations carried lightly.
The trip to Tibet, the house in the hutong, the teaching gig at the Beijing Broadcasting Institute will all be familiar ground to those who have read other "China books". Just because Indians are Asian doesn't mean they are any less ethnocentric than Westerners: Aiyar's visiting Indian delegations have their share of cultural (and culinary) misunderstandings and disasters.
But as pleasant as SMOKE AND MIRRORS is, it is the Indian perspective than sets it apart from the other books of the genre and makes it important. India is the other half of the developing Asia equation, and Sino-Indian political, economic and commercial relations are likely be of increasing importance, important not just to the two countries involved, but to everyone else as well. Aiyar's point of comparison for everything from manual labour to minorities and political freedom is not the West, but India. While the West sends executives and foreign direct investment to China, India sends traders and hotel doormen.
Aiyar is writing for her countrymen, but everyone interested in China and India will find much of value in this well-written book.
Peter Gordon
03/03/2009
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Peter Gordon is editor of The Asian Review of Books. |
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