Barbarians at the Gate x China Books Review: From Heaven Lake

In 1981, the Indian writer and poet Vikram Seth traveled from Nanjing, where he was studying literature, to his hometown of Delhi. Moving by train across China to Gansu, then hitchhiking southwest through Qinghai and Tibet, it was an itinerary that makes sense when a traveler has a surfeit of curiosity but a shortage of funds. Armed with half-decent Mandarin, a fistful of foreign exchange certificates, and a scrap of paper authorizing his route, he negotiated China just as it was emerging from the Maoist era. No WeChat. No Trip.com. No Google Translate. Just a student improvising his way home as the date on his travel pass crept ever closer: fording rivers in rickety trucks, suffering altitude sickness, dealing with roadside thieves and the occasional military checkpoint.

From Heaven Lake, the book that came out of that trip is sharp, observant, funny in places, bleak in others. A snapshot of a country trying to reinvent itself while one traveler tries to get home before his paperwork expires.

In this Barbarians at the Gate crossover with China Books Review, Jeremiah sits down with Alexander Boyd to talk about Seth’s strange, scrappy journey, what travel in China looked like in 1981, and how a writer from India saw things Western visitors of the same era tended to miss in the early 1980s.