Your Worlds

Authentic Tour Guides

In various blogs I’ve extolled the works of authors who write about the very different worlds they grew up with. Both Patrick Kavanagh’s The Green Fool and Laurie Lee’s Cider With Rosie tell of almost idyllic rustic childhoods of yesteryear, in a world so different from our own. There is a fascinating bit in The Green Fool where, in his Irish village in the early 1900s the author speaks about his family having “the only clock in the townland” and that “all the neighbours passing our house called in to inquire the time.”

Likewise Lee’s England, even though probably somewhat enhanced, is more of a foreign land to me than some of the places abroad that I have visited in the 21^st century. I’ve been to the Cotsworlds a good few times, it’s lovely, but I still see the other visitors at Stow-on-the-Wold more than I know what it would have been like to live there now, let alone a hundred years ago.

This is the wonderful ability of books. I love travel, being in lock down has meant I’ve not left the country since my expedition to Albania in January 2020, mentioned on here at the time. Whilst that might not seem a big deal I have a very strong sense of wanderlust, and whilst I have adventured to some amazing places in England, the urge to see foreign locations, whilst always strong, is getting stronger.

The thing is, travel guides and tour guides aside what does the traveller really experience? Most of the time it’s a tourist view of that land, not the real lives. I lived in Dublin for a long time and know it extremely well (well I would do if it didn’t keep on changing). However speaking to people who visited it, even many times, the places I know, the experiences I had actually absorbed in to the the day to day living of the city is far more than just sitting outside a bar in Temple Bar, a visit to the Guinness factory and walk along the Liffey. Even then my experience compared to a born and bred Dubliner pales. Which is why, if you really want to know a place you should speak to a local. Which in turn is why autobiographies can open up a country or a culture far more than a visit (although do both if you can).

I spoke on here a while ago about the books from people who lived in North Korea, it’s not a place I will ever get the chance to visit; and, politics aside, even if everything changed and it became possible, it would be a different world to the ones that exists now. The same can be said of the past, so put those things together…

I was trying to think of a book that lets us see not only a culture we would find so different from our own, but also in a time which pushes it further from our understanding. The book Wild Swans by Jung Chang was quite popular in the early 2000s amongst my friends; having read it I can agree.

Starting in 1924 in Yixian, Manchuria it follows the life of Jung Chang’s grandmother, then her mother and then herself, all the way through the changes happening within China. History books can tell us of events, it’s books like these that tell us of the real lives, the real people who lived with them.

“As a child, my idea of the West was that it was a miasma of poverty and misery, like that of the homeless ‘Little Match Girl’in the Hans Christian Andersen story. When I was in the boarding nursery and did not want to finish my food, the teacher would say:’Think of all the starving children in the capitalist world!”
― Jung Chang, Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

China today is not the China of 1924, or a lot of the other periods in which the action happens, so if we were to visit and even get to properly talk to a local it would still be different (and most likely just as worthwhile) as reading what happened from a local perspective. For how we speak and think can never really be picked up in a brief visit or a short chat, it works both ways.

There are many many more works that let us into worlds we could never dream of, maybe we can’t travel physically as much as we’d like to at the moment, but we can let our minds wander.

Buy Wild Swans by Jung Chang
Buy The Green Fool by Patrick Kavanagh