Negativity in Travel Writing

People enjoy a good horror story. In fact, travel writing often feeds on the negative aspects of a place rather than the positive. A guest lecturing journalist at my university once said that good travel writing is full of horror, the unexpected and the absurd.  There is nothing more boring to read, he said,  than someone writing about their perfect honeymoon at the beach with their soul mate, where the weather is wonderful, the food is fabulous and the couple return home tanned and more in love than ever. That's a story that lacks a good plot. 

A good plot develops with failed attempts, struggle, adversity, terror, rage, intrigue and a dash of romance. Of course, travel writing is supposedly non-fiction. But writer's craft and framing definitely play a large role in travel writing.

So a beach honeymoon story should be something like this: the story begins after the wedding when you jet off on honeymoon to some remote location, your luggage gets stolen by an airport taxi driver, leaving you and your partner with nothing but the clothes on your backs and 20 dollars between the two of you. Your new partner starts crying. What do you do now? By the end of the story, you've landed yourself in a local jail for getting into a fist fight with an airport security guard, your passport is being detained, your partner has left you and returned home, you fall in love with a prison guard and decide to stay and start a school for migrant children. That, I'm afraid, is a miserable enough story to make a good travel article.

The World's Worst Places to Work

This love of negativity applies just as much for travel articles as it does for news. BusinessWeek recently published an article titled The World's Worst Places to Work in which they profile 20 cities around the world considered to be the worst places on earth for a foreign expat to work.  Lagos, Nigeria was found to be the worst, while Suzhou was listed in the 14th position. Four other cities in China also made it to the hit list: Guangzhou, Tianjin, Qingdao, and Shenzhen. 

That one out of four cities on the list are from China, seems a bit unfair. Yes, China is polluted and communication can at times be difficult, but are these cities that they mentioned really THAT bad? Suzhou is famous in China for being a garden city, and next to Hangzhou, perhaps third "under heaven", as the old saying goes.  And Qingdao is a coastal beach town, certainly not the worst compared to industrial cities like Wuxi. Shenzhen may be a hub of industry, but it's still within easy access of Hong Kong and a very safe place to live.  Poor Lagos. They might have a point there though.

Comparing Cities: Shanghai vs. Beijing

And when journalists and travel writers have exhausted themselves writing top ten/twenty/hundred lists, they take a break by simply comparing two cities-- the which-city-is-better-and-why article.

Peking Duck  provides his own take on the Shanghai vs. Beijing comparison based on James Fallows' article Shanghai, Beijing, and the face of Chinese cities:

Although Shanghai probably contains more people than Beijing, it feels smaller.   The roads are narrower, they're more likely to bend or twist, the city unfolds on a smaller scale of neighborhoods and courtyards and little houses. Beijing is bigger and squarer and broader and more grandly imposing... While I am grateful to be living in Beijing and to have the chance to travel widely in China, on sheer architectural grounds I enjoy the look and feel of Shanghai most of all. And therefore I am forced to wonder: Do I like these small streets and human-scale settings in Shanghai because I am foreign? Am I being like the French visitors who love Vietnam because it's so easy to find baguettes there? Does the Chinese version of me really appreciate the huge grandeur of the Beijing-style approach? Or do I like them because I am human -- and because something in human nature fits better with structures of a manageable size? And if this is so, what does it mean for the hundreds of millions of Chinese human beings living in these big concrete cities?

Both Peking Duck and James Fallows conclude that Shanghai is prettier and more livable than Beijing.  Well, ultimately, your experience of a city depends on many factors that can't be documented in a survey--things like a good group of like-minded friends, a stable relationship, a good salary, a favorite pub, a decent boss, a short commute to work and a sweet flat. If you have all of these factors in your daily life, chances are, you can be happy wherever you are.