Seemingly overnight, travel writing has become a popular literary genre, and book stores specializing in travel books are all the rage in the Nineties. Airlines are giving travel writing awards, newspapers are printing travel sections and supplements.. Suddenly, with a rush and a roar the dikes have broken and we find ourselves awash in travelogues.
Since the early 90s, Taiwanese have taken five million trips abroad annually. That's one trip abroad for every four Taiwanese. "It's like some kind of mass vacation ritual, an extremely contagious popular movement," says Yang Tze, supplements editor at The China Times. Travelers are flitting from place to place carrying "Taiwanese culture," a culture which shares in the economic orientation of Asia's other Little Dragons (Hong Kong, Singapore and South Korea), abroad with them, and bringing back souvenirs such as the photographs they have worked so hard to collect on their journeys. But for most, the experience doesn't end there.
Returning home, many people, "want to talk about it, to share their feelings and experiences." But a traveler's experiences are personal, and as one such person says, "It's enough that you enjoyed it. Other people can't control what you do on a trip, and they can't share in the experience." What's a poor traveler who needs to talk to do? Both in Taiwan and elsewhere, this dilemma has produced an awful lot of writing about travel, and is the font from which "travel literature" springs.
A trail blazed by San Mao
It wasn't until 1979 that Taiwan liberalized overseas travel. Before that time, the only people who went abroad were students studying overseas, diplomats and their wives, and those who married foreigners. Such people included students such as Yu Li-hua and Pai Hsien-yung and diplomats' wives like Hsu Chung-pei and Chung Mei-yin. In the period before 1980, their descriptions of Europe and America opened up a window on the world for the then-shuttered Taiwan.
In 1976, the Taipei edition of The United Daily News began running a series of articles from the Sahara Desert. The writer was a woman named San Mao who had married a Spaniard and moved to Africa. Some 20-odd travel memoirs followed describing the primeval forests of South Africa, the plains of western Africa, the tropical rain forests of the Amazon and the snow-covered Andes, memoirs with titles such as Sahara Story, The Monsoon Won't Return, The Camel's Tears and Wandering Over a Thousand Mountains and Rivers.
The Taiwan of this period had just emerged from poverty. "People really wanted to understand foreign cultures. And women were discovering a latent desire to find their own space to roam," says social critic Nanfang Shuo. San Mao "wrote of her own experiences in the first person. Hers are genuinely moving works," says Hu Chin-yuan, an assistant professor in the English department at National Chengchi University. Hu says that for those many people who were unable to travel abroad at that time, San Mao's works provided a vicarious experience. In the 1970s, a poem by San Mao became the words to "Olive Tree." Popular at the time, the lyrics to the song ran, "Don't ask me where I come from, my home is far away. Why do I wander . . . . It's the olive tree in my dreams." It was romantic and reflected the hopes of the society of the day.
San Mao described her attitude to life as "not seeking depth, just seeking simplicity." But looking at her early works, a quest for "simplicity" doesn't seem to tell the whole story.
For example, in writing of a desert wedding, she mentions that the bride was a friend's 10-year-old daughter. San Mao didn't think such a marriage was proper. She asked her friend, "Isn't she a little young?" But her friend answered, "Young? When I married my wife, she was only eight years old."
She tells readers that one marriage custom of the desert required that the groom live with his in-laws for six years after the wedding. Another was that the bride had to leave home the day before the wedding. She would be brought back by the groom on their wedding day. San Mao says that while being led back, "She was expected to struggle, otherwise she would be laughed at." Coming back to the 10-year-old bride, San Mao says that the girl had to be pulled along by everyone and scratched the groom's face. The groom, unwilling to let himself look weak, twisted her fingers. Later, "It was quiet all around except for the sobs of Guka (the bride) echoing through the night."
The people of the desert whom San Mao described bathed only once every three or four years. When they did, they not only washed the outside of their bodies, but also the inside. In the book Sahara Story, she describes how the African women washed their insides in intimate detail. In another work, she writes of a medicine she kept in the house and often used. One time, she gave a few tablets to a sick neighbor who immediately felt better. From that time forward, she became known as the desert's lady doctor, a distinction which on another occasion almost got her lassoed into playing the role of midwife to a pregnant woman unwilling to go to the hospital to have her baby. San Mao also opened a tuition-free school in her home in which she taught women to recognize numbers, the denominations of the local currency and some basic gynecology. To encourage her neighbors to develop more sanitary habits, she provided them with mops, buckets and soap powder, and taught them how to wash their sleeping mats.
Moving from the civilized world to the primitive, this writer, who said of herself that she liked to sit in the drawing rooms of diplomat friends and chat with "cultured people" about the art of the Mayans, but that she also liked get out on the streets and haggle with vendors, seemed to leave her posturing behind. But at the same time, she seemed to unconsciously be looking at strange lands like a traveler looking for curios.
Sightseeing, but seeing nothing?
Is it the particular character of travel books that they seem to say that one can only come to an understanding of oneself by leaving the familiar and going to a strange place where one condescendingly observes "the romance of foreign lands?"
From 1976 to the 1990s, San Mao's works spanned more than a decade. It is a period in which much happened. In 1979, Taiwan began allowing trips abroad for tourism. In 1987, trips to visit relatives in mainland China were allowed. Beginning in the 1980s, books began to appear which told of the writers' experiences traveling rather than just what to see, where to stay and what to eat.
These more personal books don't cover the globe. Instead, they focus on the most popular tourist destinations-America, Europe, Japan and mainland China. And travel agencies send tourists on package tours to basically the same attractions mentioned in the books: to art museums in Europe; to the Grand Canyon in America; to the Aegean islands of Greece; and to Kyoto in Japan.
Although these "sights" take on a different appearance in the hands of different writers, as the Italian novelist Italo Calvino writes, "When people observe a city or scenery, they don't discover anything, but they confirm much. They confirm what they have learned from books. They confirm the image of some place's distinctive feature that already exists in their minds. They confirm a desire or a fear."
Chen Shao-tsung, author of Sailing to the Aegean, says that he went to Greece because "I'm certain I was a Greek in a previous life." Author Yu Kuang-chung says that he went to Holland to see the Van Gogh exhibition memorializing the 100th anniversary of the painter's death because "The first Van Gogh painting I saw was Sunflowers, and I liked it immediately." And painter Liang Tan-feng says that her travels in mainland China came about because she felt that "the E'erduosi Plateau is my 3.6-billion-year-old motherland. And I have deep feelings for the Yellow River; it's like my mother ship."
Chen Shao-tsung writes that when visiting Greece, "I climbed up to the Temple of the Sun again and again to pay my respects to Apollo, but he always kept his silence and his cold gaze. This god who represented reason and optimism, who was the god of poetry and music, sat there, a cold-faced stone image in an empty temple surrounded by crumbling stone columns." When Liang Tan-fung arrived in Daxing'anling to visit the Oroqen tribe, he didn't hear anything about the nomadic culture or the primitive music he had expected to find. Only then did he discover, "There are only about 1900 Oroqen tribespeople left in Daxing'anling, and the forest is all gone." Then, carrying this "China complex" of his, "the most complicated of any Chinese person's on Earth," back home with him, he "often had to struggle with the modern reality" of "people walking across ground covered in trash and sputum to fight for something to eat, and a bowl of noodles in which the sand crunched as you chewed."
Why go wandering?
"The proof that comes of travel is a kind of peace that comes of filling categories. When this peace comes, the city itself is forgotten. People are unable to describe a city until they have given it a distinguishing mark," says cultural critic Nanfang Shuo, quoting Calvino. He continues, "This is the era of 'the decline of the traveler and the rise of the tourist.'"
In the fifth century BC, the Greek historian Herodotus wrote his History. In the sixth century AD, the Chinese monk Xuan Zang traveled to India to gather Buddhist sutras. In the 15th century, the Imperial Eunuch San Bao Zheng He sailed to western seas, reputedly to spread the fame of China, but in fact to trade. In the 19th century, the English natural philosopher Charles Darwin sailed to the Galapagos Islands where he found evidence of his theory of evolution. The historic travelers spent the majority of their lives on the road in a search for some larger meaning. Why do the Taiwanese travelers of the 90s travel?
Is it to "find themselves" or escape the boredom of their lives? As Yang Tze says, living in a repressed Asian society, our desire to see what is abroad tends to be stronger than that of the people of other nations. Yang Tze thinks, for example, that the phenomenon of Taiwanese traveling to Europe and America is "a kind of ritual visit to the colonial mother country" for people who grew up in a Taiwan "long under [the influence of] a dominant western culture."
You can also read the confessions of some Taiwanese travelers:
"Travel represents a kind of reshuffling of life; it's a release. While on a trip, thoughts of work which must be completed by some deadline take a back seat, and the long-fermenting desire to buy things has a good reason to be released. We view the world with a child's eyes, welcoming a thousand new stories every day. We escape everyday life, and live out our dream life," says writer Sun Wei-mang.
"Everything about travel gives rise to beautiful images in my mind. It is as if at some fixed time, all those problems you don't want to resolve or face temporarily go to roost somewhere else. You let yourself go, soaking up the world around you like a sponge in water. You can worry about everything else when the trip is over," says Liu Shu-hui, a winner of China Airlines' travel writing prize.
"I have to admit that I have no instinct for survival in the wild. But though I may be a 'caged bird,' it doesn't mean that I don't need my freedom, especially my psychological freedom. I don't 'let go' when I travel. Nor am I looking for stimulation or adventure*. I just want to look at myself and this world quietly*. Because I travel, I am free," says Huang Ya-chien, also an author.
Study with a purpose
Is it transcendence* or is it escape? Shih Chiung-yu, author of Running Away from Home, says that she grew up, works and lives in Taiwan, but often feels stifled. "Taiwanese society is shallow and anemic. Sometimes it's even rude and uncivilized." To her, taking a bus exemplifies her point. She says you are just riding along, minding your own business, but you often see aggressive bus drivers shouting and getting angry with elderly people. After trying again and again to find some way of relieving this feeling of being stifled, she starts to feel that maybe she is just wasting her strength. So to get herself a breath of fresh air, she periodically goes traveling.
After traveling through war-ravaged Cambodia and ethnically torn Ireland, when she returns home to Taiwan and sees the conflicts between Chinese of different provincial origins, she realizes that "ethnic tension is an old story which has been replayed again and again on this planet." In the past, she often wondered why her father, a "mainland" representative in the National Assembly, always "viewed public issues as his own problems. I wondered why he was unhappy when he saw other people suffer." Growing up, she could neither understand nor forgive her father for being this way. She felt that she was always fighting with the "public" for his paternal affection. But after making several journeys overseas, "The things I didn't understand and couldn't forgive became fewer, and there were more things for which I respected him."
Does travel teach us how to be self-confident and how to forgive? Nanfang Shuo believes that in the 20 years that Taiwanese have been able to travel overseas, the "level" of the Taiwanese tourist has improved as tour groups made up of Taiwanese grandmothers bellowing to one another and shopping till they drop have given way to more relaxed, easy-going "senior citizen" tours. However, there is room for this "level" to rise still further in the 90s. At least in the area of travel writing, there can be a little more systematic comparison of cultures in addition to the ubiquitous reports on tourist spots and "meaningful" confluences of a writer's personal feelings. Nanfang Shuo's own opinion is that the meaning of travel is "purposeful study."
Seeing it with your own eyes
What about observing differences between yourself and "others"? Since the dawn of the era of exploration in the 15th century, this age-old problem has been discussed by many travelers. The Chinese say that one learns as much from reading 10,000 books as from traveling 10,000 miles and that one ought to travel some and work hard to gain seasoning. But is the information that your senses provide the whole of the story?
United Daily News editor Sun Wei-mang asked a friend to take him to Amsterdam's red-light district so that he could see for himself "the things that go on in different cultures and thus understand more of the possibilities afforded by human nature."
"Doesn't the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet make you envious? When the woman on the second floor balcony [in Amsterdam] is seen by the man, he climbs up a nearby ladder. The woman opens the glass doors and standing in the entryway talks to the man on the ladder about the price. It looks almost like Shakespeare's famous scene," writes Sun, describing this transaction for sex from a literary perspective.
In the red-light district's "display area," the tall, strong black woman pulls the blond-haired boy in his white shirt and pale jeans up onto the "stage." After toying with him, she pulls out an eyebrow pencil at the critical moment and writes "I love you" in black letters on his white chest.
"I choked on a scream. My heart was jolted as if I'd just been given tragic news, and I was overcome with sadness*. How many times have I said, 'I love you?' Each time with a different motive, or request, or prayer, or sense of gratitude, or regret, or sadness, but hoping for a response*. But here in Amsterdam the words appeared to me as a dark fear." Sun explains his understanding of Holland's sexual culture with a quote from his guide: "Prostitutes aren't encouraged, but they are allowed."
Sun's pen roams from Taiwan, which doesn't publicize it but is nonetheless rife with lewdness, to Amsterdam, where the buying and selling of sex is conducted openly. Though he writes as if he is startled by this situation, he also conveys a certain romance. In describing Holland's sex industry, Sun doesn't mention the child prostitution and the sexual abuse of children which Europe frequently criticizes Holland for. Is what you see with your own eyes necessarily the truth?
Learning from other cultures
The Swiss psychologist C.G. Jung once said that travel is like the collective unconscious in that when people are under a great deal of pressure, they try to use travel to escape from the pressure or to release it. Kung Peng-cheng, president of the Nanhua Management College, says, "Just as in many myths, dreams, cave paintings, carvings, pottery and poems, a bird represents transcendence, so too does travel."
From Jung's perspective, whether they deal with cultures or just what the writer experiences on his journeys, 1990s writings on travel would all be about the attempt to transcend something. The only difference between them would be in the depth of the writer's emotions.
In September of last year, Tsai Chu-er, a former news reporter, wrote an essay entitled "The Fragrant Point-A Short History of Zanzibar" for Chung-Wai Literary Monthly in which she described feelings she had on a trip to the East African island of Zanzibar. The essay was different from past portrayals of Africa as the "Dark Continent." In Tsai's work, Africa is "the place with the greatest variety of languages in the world. Each language reflects a unique set of cultural values and expresses a different view of life."
For example, all of the adult women in Zanzibar are called "Mother" regardless of whether or not they are married or have children. After a woman has a child, the child's name is added to her own, so she is then known as "Mother Ali" or "Mother Lydia," for example. "It's a little like what people in the northern part of China do, calling a woman something like 'Dazhuzi's Mother,' but it carries more respect," says Tsai.
Moreover, "In Zanzibar, you don't ask someone how many children they have. In East Africa, you can only count 'things.' People and other living beings are uncountable. If you do so, you are thought of as rude and uncultured," says Tsai. This caused serious culture shock for her. "In our [Chinese] society, we long ago became accustomed to having standard rules and a sort of mass production society. This has made individual persons indistinct from 'the crowd,' 'the masses' or 'people,'" she says. Zanzibar's language gave her a new respect for individual life.
The plants of Zanzibar also revealed to her the joys of the senses. On one occasion, she visited a spice garden where she tasted nutmeg, lemon grass and garden balsam. "It made me dizzy. I felt a little drunk, but my mind was clear. My senses were sharper than usual, especially my sense of smell; it was like a pencil freshly sharpened to an ultra-fine point. Coming out of the garden, I not only breathed in the scents of the flowers, grass, trees and earth, but also smelled the dampness of the forest, the smoke from the workmen's hut in the fields, the salt in the breeze blowing from the Indian Ocean, the plump, green fruit of the breadfruit trees, the yams drying in the sun two kilometers away and the body odors of those people walking on the road with me. I even smelled the sun and the clouds. . . ."
Traveling to Zanzibar was an unforgettable experience. After returning to Taiwan, she spent some time flipping through information on Zheng He's travels across western seas. A worker at the library in Zanzibar had told her, "I also have Chinese blood. Chinese people have come to Zanzibar before," and she was looking for information to confirm it. She discovered the Zheng He had not visited Zanzibar, but in looking through other information on Chinese travels by sea, she did find a record of Chinese trade with Zanzibar from the Tang dynasty through the Song and Yuan dynasties.
"I often think about that librarian who told me he had a smidgen of Chinese blood. What sailor or trader from what dynasty left behind a little of himself in that distant place? Did he load up with ivory and leave? Or did he live out his days there, far from his ancestral home? How many cases like this are there in the more than 1000 years that travelers have gone back and forth between Zanzibar and China? There must be many stories," writes Tsai. For Tsai Chu-er, perhaps this trip marks only the beginning of her relationship with Zanzibar.
Seeing people as they are
"Our motive for travel is to forget our own existence. When we're 'at home,' we're always the most important person around. At the same time, we're bound by customs, rules, habits and responsibilities. Our real reason for travel is therefore to relocate ourselves in a different society so that others will treat us like 'ordinary' people. And only when we are 'ordinary' people, when we are not viewed as someone special, can we see others as they really are."-Lin Wu-tang-The Art of Life.
What is the goal of travel? In this modern information era, if you don't find "broadening your horizons" or "relaxing" to be satisfying explanations, then what do you think of Lin Wu-tang's idea that we should stop posing and be "ordinary" people? For those traveling in the mainland, this is an idea worthy of particular consideration.
After Liu Hsuen, son of writer Liu Yung, was admitted to Harvard University, his father promised to give him a "meaningful gift": he would take Liu Hsuen on a trip to mainland China. They visited Beijing, Yungang, Xi'an and Guilin, among other places. They stayed in the place were the Empress Dowager Cixi used to listen to the rain. They saw "an old woman who looked like my grandmother with her hands out begging; an old man who looked like my grandfather carrying people's luggage; a child as young as my little sister [Liu Hsuen's little sister was four years old at the time] trying to sell things to me; and a tricycle cabbie with a deep scar across his thigh who, lifting his head and shading his eyes with his hand, took a look at the hotel I was staying in and remarked, 'That's a nice place. It must be pretty inside.'" When that happened, Liu Yung asked his son, "When you see this yellow earth, what do you think?" Liu Hsuen replied, "I want to plant trees for them."
In the introduction to The Shaking Continent, Liu Yung gives voice to his thoughts sharply, directly and perhaps even a bit condescendingly: "I think every Chinese person who has not been to the mainland should go see it. They should think about what China is and what it is to be Chinese. Doing so, they might learn about sympathy and gratitude, and perhaps even come to understand something about life and fate." Later he writes, "The purpose of going back to the mainland is to find oneself!"
Is this the way that most Chinese who visit the mainland feel? After visits to relatives in the mainland were allowed, many books about traveling to the mainland asked the same question: "Why do Chinese who speak the same language and look more or less the same have such different fates?" The words strung together by travel writers in their works can't do anything about the problems of different ideologies and different fates, but at least they can allow others to feel something of them.
Growing up on a different branch
In A Country Ruled by Gangsters, author Huang Pao-lien, who traveled in the mainland for a year in 1989, writes of the squeezing onto busses, the horrible toilets, the experience of being cheated and the other shocks that the mainland provides its visitors. But in her book she writes even more about her feelings on confronting these other Chinese, sprung from the same root.
Faced with a child-beggar asking her for money in Xi'an, "I ran out of sympathy and anger took its place. Anger that I could help one, but couldn't help them all, not for a day, much less their whole lives. I was angry at God for giving these children this kind of life*." A few streets further on, she saw another mud hut. There, "an old man was minding his shop from which he sold only hot tea for 20 cents a cup."
"The old man had nothing except for his gray cat tied to the door. Acceptance of their fate oozed from the four eyes of these two lonely creatures, linked together and mutually dependent. When he poured the tea for me, his attitude towards his work seemed to be 'as you sow, so shall you reap,'" writes Huang.
In Chengdu, when a taxi driver tried to overcharge her after having already agreed to a fare, Huang pretended to be calm and tried to slip away into a restaurant. She had hoped that by ignoring him, she could escape the problem. But the cabbie followed her into the restaurant, startling everyone there by grabbing her collar and slamming his fist against the counter. Suddenly, the chef, his white chef's hat on his head, came careening out of the kitchen with a meat cleaver in his hand. He fixed his gaze on the cabbie and told him very calmly to get out, bringing the situation to an end.
Later, Huang walked down to a noisy public tea shop to have some ordinary "flower tea." Huang writes, "Seeing everybody having such a good time drinking their tea, I thought about Taiwan. In Taiwan, if the tea is not the best oolung or chuncha, no one will drink it. It made me think that I was exceptionally fortunate."
Under the acacia trees by the Dayan Tower in Xi'an, Huang went walking along a street much like what one might have seen in Taiwan 30 years ago. There was a barber cutting hair with a strait razor and a pan of cold water. There was a person fixing zippers and another carving characters on chops. There was someone selling rat poison and a seamstress sewing long slacks*. "I fell in love with that street*. Even now walking on the streets of New York, when I think of those people under the acacia trees, getting by on their own and not struggling with others, I feel like I have lost something. Many of people's natural traits have been completely swallowed up by modern life."
In the La La Restaurant in Yunnan's Dali, she encountered a family that had no talent for running a restaurant. "The mother couldn't remember the names of the dishes her customers had ordered. The daughter delivered orders to the wrong tables. After spending an hour in the kitchen cooking, a fish would be sent to the wrong table*. But in the midst of this mess, the father looked at the mother, the mother looked at the daughter, and the three of them laughed together. "How did we do it again!" Amidst the laughter that they couldn't hold back, it was the only thing they could say.
"I keep mulling over this thought: Has this natural, simple, non-calculating character of the common man been lost under the capitalist system with its private ownership of property? When these three people begin to specialize, they will become more adept at running the restaurant and become more calculating. Will the three of them be as happy then as they are now?"
Huang's pen reveals the great variety of everyday events. Perhaps we should view the Chinese of mainland China with "sympathy and understanding." Nanfang Shuo says, "If you bring a little bit of egalitarianism, a sympathy for history and an attitude of self-reflection with you when you visit other places," then you will encounter far fewer events that make you unhappy on your journeys. Where is the true China? Nanfang Shuo says that maybe you should think about it in this way: "The record of my life will have a branch that is dry and withered. Its death is my fate today. But it is also the beginning of life and the beginning of an understanding of China." Who doesn't have a "dead branch" in their life? Not only for the mainland Chinese, but for the people of all nations, the wheel of life turns and the next time around, maybe you'll be in their shoes.
"People have their own talents within their breasts, and two eyes in their head." The experiences we have while traveling depend on what is in our hearts.
p.107
Many people travel to unwind, then use this relaxed frame of mind to create their own travelogues.
p.108
"An open mind and eyes which are prepared to see" are essential for travelers taking short trips abroad if they are to understand anything of the culture and lifestyle of the place which they visit. (photo by Huang Jung)
p.109
The Temple of Confucius is a popular destination for foreign visitors to Taipei, and the nearby statue of Guan Gong is not to be missed. Visits to such sites are a typical example of West meeting East.
p.110
Seeing a performance by a foreign troupe in a theater in your own country just isn't the same as seeing that same performance abroad. Seemingly then, the difference lies in one's state of mind when traveling.(photo by Huang Jung)
p.113
Why leave one's home and family to face hardships and struggles? Isn't it to see others as they really are by making oneself an "ordinary" person? This 1989 photo shows the Zhang Jiajie National Park in Hunan.
p.114
The Taiwanese of the 90s have a strong desire to see the world and Europe is one of their principal destinations. Yang Tze, editor of The World supplement at The China Times, thinks that this desire is the result of Taiwan's having been under the influence of European and American culture for so long. Such a journey is motivated by a wish to pay homage to the "motherland."
p.115
Latin America was the birthplace of the Mayan culture. San Mao's pre-1980 descriptions of it began a travel trend among Taiwanese.
p.117
Many young travelers who arrange their own trips keep a travelogue for themselves. Such young travelers are the main figures in the new travel literature. (courtesy of Shih Chiung-yu)
"An open mind and eyes which are prepared to see" are essential for travelers taking short trips abroad if they are to understand anything of the culture and lifestyle of the place which they visit. (photo by Huang Jung)
The Temple of Confucius is a popular destination for foreign visitors to Taipei, and the nearby statue of Guan Gong is not to be missed. Visits to such sites are a typical example of West meeting East.
Seeing a performance by a foreign troupe in a theater in your own country just isn't the same as seeing that same performance abroad. Seemingly then, the difference lies in one's state of mind when traveling.(photo by Huang Jung)
Why leave one's home and family to face hardships and struggles? Isn't it to see others as they really are by making oneself an "ordinary" person? This 1989 photo shows the Zhang Jiajie National Park in Hunan.
The Taiwanese of the 90s have a strong desire to see the world and Europe is one of their principal destinations. Yang Tze, editor of The World supplement at The China Times, thinks that this desire is the result of Taiwan's having been under the influence of European and American culture for so long. Such a journey is motivated by a wish to pay homage to the "motherland.".
Latin America was the birthplace of the Mayan culture. San Mao's pre-1980 descriptions of it began a travel trend among Taiwanese.
Many young travelers who arrange their own trips keep a travelogue for themselves. Such young travelers are the main figures in the new travel l iterature. (courtesy of Shih Chiung-yu)