We recently received word from an undercover Paper Republic field operative in the world of American academia, code name Julie H. (alias J. Hackenbracht). Pursuant to our earlier post on road literature she sends us links to two fascinating books available on Google. While they both fall squarely on the travel literature side of the travel literature/road literature divide, they’re not the average travelogues.

The first is The Silent Traveler in London, published in 1938, mostly interesting because it reverses the Theroux/Hessler paradigm of the western traveler writing for an audience back home. Here, Chiang Yee (presumably Yi Qiang in pinyin) describes London and British society for his compatriots. He comes off as having a delightfully turn-of-the-century combination of pluckiness and delicacy; I can’t tell if it’s because of the contemporary translation, or because of sensibilities that really were common to many nations at that time. He’s very sensitive to the weather (the book is arranged according to seasons), and provides many little prose passages and poems describing parks and wind and leaves – the Chinese and the British may have this in common. Somewhat surprising were his very modern meditations on the plight of British women:

Oh, life, it is difficult for everybody. But I am inclined to think it has been always even more difficult for women than men. Our Chinese women may have suffered a great deal from lack of freedom in the old days, but they all hoped to become the rulers of houses and to be served and highly respected by their sons and daughters. Now they enjoy equal rights and as much freedom as English women enjoy, and they can still expect to become rulers of houses as well, and to have filial children.

The second book is Great Women Travel Writers, which includes a tantalizing, sadly truncated chapter on Xie Bingying (1906-2000). Two pages are all that Google allows us – just enough to know that Xie was forced to experience footbinding as a child, but not enough to tell us where her damaged feet nevertheless managed to take her.