STUDY MATERIALS
Paul Hanstedt, Hong Konged: One Modern American Family’s (Mis)adventures in the Gateway to China (Adams Media, Avon MA, 2012)
Mark Z. Muggli
Department Head and Professor of English
2011-13 Jones Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Humanities
Luther College, Decorah, Iowa
July 2012
The full title of Paul Hanstedt’s recent book suggests the book’s comic, self-effacing charm, and also hints at the book’s connections with at least three kinds of writing: the travelogue, the memoir, and the blog. Perhaps providing some background on these literary types will help prepare readers for more fully appreciating Hanstedt’sachievement.
There are literary and historic antecedents for travel writing, but the genre has blossomed since the expansion of travel opportunities for all classes of people—tentatively in the Renaissance, with greater vigor in the eighteenth century, and with a full flowering in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The defining feature of the classic travel writing of the last hundred years has been the solitary traveler registering his (and since the late nineteenth century, her) reaction to the distinctive peculiarities of places far and near. Even when writers have in fact travelled with friends or lovers, they have typically written books with a solitary “I” at its center. And thus the traveler’s sensibility and character quite self-consciously determine the reader’s experience of place. But this iconic solo traveler has very often been a low-key, ironic, and even self-effacing character. This may be because so much of the greatest travel writing has come from the English (excuse the national stereotyping here), but perhaps travel writers have also tried to diminish their presence in order to highlight the particularities of the places they visit. Travel writers and readers all recognize that in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, no one much believes in objective travel reports, but travel writing generally has nevertheless exhibited a kind of reader’s contract that has privileged direct impressions over focusing on the travelling self.
The memoir is another kind of beast. Both travel writing and the memoir are subcategories of what is now called “creative nonfiction,” but while travel writing has typically repressed the “I,” the memoir celebrates its release—the memoir’s whole reason for being is for a writer to express his or her own self’s centrality in the world being narrated. And as the memoir has become the dominant rising literary genre of the last twenty years, it has become more and more explicit and self-revelatory.
As a term, “blog” most specifically refers to a medium rather than a kind of message. But the easy availability and quick turn-around of web logs and their high interactivity has stimulated some common stylistic choices: high writer visibility; a casual, slangy diction; and a high degree of audience visibility, typically achieved through direct address and sometimes by an almost pleading appeal for audience reaction, which on a blog a reader can supply by clicking “reply,” but which a hard-cover book doesn’t allow for.
Paul Hanstedt’sHong Kongedis a happy combination of these three overlapping genres, but readers will appreciate the book most if they don’t let their genre expectations control their reactions. The book does include some fascinating impressions of contemporary Hong Kong and of the China that will be increasingly imposing itself on the city’s character. But a reader who is most interested in a precise, holistic portrait of the city will be disappointed.The book has few outside sources and mostly steers clear of some obvious political/social issues. Similarly, Hanstedt’s emphasis on his family’s reaction to the city will strike the reader of classic solo travel writing as odd and perhaps even unsettling. No traveller’s impressions of food and architecture, for example, are objective reports, but the typical travel writer works to convince the reader of his or her qualifications, however amateur. But what are we to make of the food preferences of a two-year-old, or the architectural judgments of a ten-year-old who is happiest reading books?
Similarly, a reader hoping to read a memoir that provides a full portrait of the author and his personal world will be disappointed by this book’s silences: Hanstedt’s assignment as a Fulbright scholar is alluded to, but not explained; his relationship to his wife Ellen, which is described as having at some points been rocky, is treated somewhat evasively, at least if judged by the brutal honesty that has become a hallmark of the contemporary memoir; and Hanstedt’s past figures only sporadically in the development of his ethos within the book. At one point Hanstedt says to the reader, “It’s none of your business”—a phrase never imagined by the most committed memoirists.
In some ways the book almost over-fulfills the expectations of the blog: all blogs that become books have to deal with the fact that a short genre has become long, that stylistic choices that are effective in short pieces can seem repetitive in a long one, that the blog’s casual approach to structure is challenged by the demands of spaciousness, and that the indeterminacy that may be appropriate to a spontaneous piece can seem evasive in a book that by definition reflectsback on earlier experiences.
Having outlined the dominant genres at work in this book and emphasizing the danger of imposing inappropriate genre expectations, I want to re-iterate that part of Hanstedt’s achievement is the skillful, fluid way in which he combines elements of different kinds of books in order to create a compelling, thoughtful, humorous, moving work of art.
Take, for example, “Shanghai Surprised,” the chapter that begins the book’s second half.
The chapter’s dialogue is succinct but illuminating. As in the best fiction—Hanstedt is trained as a fiction writer and has published stories in a number of journals—the dialogue conveys character without additional commentary. In the opening scene, Hanstedt is the reluctantly pushy traveler, the woman behind the hotel desk represents the worst of China’s buttoned-up, self-serving bureaucratic machine, and Hanstedt’s wife Ellen is the sensitive mediator(her final contributions to the dialogue are the succinct phrase “I know”—repeated three times).This carefully-constructed characterization and dialogue are built around a portrait of the Hanstedt children at “play” (i.e., on the verge of collapsing after a long day of travel) and of the physical details of the 1934 art deco hotel where the Hanstedts are checking in. By the time this brief six-page section of Chapter 11 has come to a close, we’ve gotten a beautiful, travelogue-like description of the details of the Hanstedts’ spacious and elegant art deco room, a revealing, memoir-like portrayal of the author’s self-identified passive-aggressiveness, and all in the engaged, slightly frenetic style of the best of blogs.
By the end of the chapter, we’ve gotten even more of all of this. A lovely characterization of the Shanghai bund, a long, evocative description of an unexpectedly superb meal, an incisive portrait of the Chinese and of their dodgy living conditions even in public places, a characterization of the author’s childhood as a super-charged pastor’s kid, a subtle portrait of the differences between the couple’s three children, some laugh-out-loud comedy (Hanstedt’s comment on their use of the restrooms next to the official smoking area on the train: “We trade pee for lung cancer”), and some beautiful still moments when love and joy permeate the Hanstedt family’s complex relationships.
I would like to end by including a list of some features of Hong Konged that deserve careful study; in the process, I will suggest some features of the book of special relevance to the Lutheran Readers Project.
1.Hong Konged begins with the unexpected death of Ellen’s father in the U.S. This death is only mentioned a few times in the course of the book, but it serves as a backdrop for the book’s inquiry into the complex demands of being a father and a parent. You might ask, as Hanstedthimself does, when he and his wife are at their most effective and ineffective as parents.
2.Hong Konged includes lengthy portraits of each of the Hanstedt children. How can children from the same family be so different? How successful is the world (parents, schools, the community generally) at respecting and nurturing those differences?
3.The Hanstedt marriage is at the core of this book, even though it is not directly discussed at great length. Of course the book is Paul’s, not Ellen’s. To what degree is it possible to read through a memoir and gain the perspective of characters who are not the writer?
4.How does the experience of foreign places like Hong Kong and China both threaten and deepen family and married life? Is this year good for the Hanstedt children? (Don’t assume the easy answer—the book doesn’t!)
5.Books written in the first person, whether travelogue, memoir, or blog, present a writer’s self-portrait. Who is the Paul Hanstedt this book wants to present to you? What are the hints that this portrait is incomplete, partial, or even consciously being manipulated? What is the final overall impression, and how does that character succeed as father, husband, traveler, and working professional?
6.Humor is an important part of the whole book, but in the different situations Handstedt describes, the humor ranges from being joy-filled, helpful, defensive, or an evasion tactic. If you’re discussing this book in a group, it could be illuminating to test whether you agree in your assessments of different humorous moments.
6.All books to some degree posit their own ideal reader. Given this book’s constant direct address to the audience (“By now you’re probably wondering...”), who is this reader? Who are you? How does the book liberate you into being someone new?
8.Mark some of the passages where Hanstedt’salways-clear writing rises to the lyrically beautiful. Where in the book and in the chapters do these passages appear? On what are they most often focused? How do these lyrical moments affect your overall experience of the book?
9.Consider the book’s pictures and their personalized captions, which are important in setting the tone and approach of Hong Konged. In what ways are they consistent (and inconsistent) with the book as a whole?
9.Hong Konged includes many revelations and a good number of mysteries. What does Hanstedt most fully explain, what does he seem willing to leave unexplored, and what seems most to elude him?
10.Religion appears sporadically in this book—in Paul’s and Ellen’s family backgrounds, in visits to religious sites, in the observation of or participation in religious rituals. At the risk of being reductive, it may be worth asking the holistic question: To what degree is the book religious (and what does “religious,” in this context, mean?)? What is the relationship between the various deaths mentioned in the book and the book’s inquiry into the spiritual?
500 word Newsletter version
Mark Z. Muggli
Department Head and Professor of English
2011-13 Jones Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Humanities
Luther College, Decorah, Iowa
July 2012
The full title of Paul Hanstedt’s recent book Hong Konged: One Modern American Family’s (Mis)adventures in the Gateway to China (Adams Media, Avon MA, 2012) suggests the book’s comic, self-effacing charm, and also hints at the book’s connections with at least three overlapping kinds of writing: the travelogue, the memoir, and the blog. The book succinctly conveys some aspects of both Hong Kong and mainland China, but the cultural experiences are all filtered through the narrator’s eyes and, even more prominently, through the complex set of lenses carried by Hanstedt’s family—his wife and their three children (ages eight, six, and two as the adventure begins).
Hong Konged documents a year in which Paul Hanstedt, a professor of English at Roanoke College (Virginia),was awarded a Fulbright award to help Hong Kong University develop its general education program. But the book’s focus is on his family and the challenges they faced— in their apartment far away from the city center, at school, in restaurants, on public transportation, on touristic jaunts to other cities and countries, and in a host of improbable situations in which they found themselves. Hanstedt is a skilled writer and in some sections allows himself to include highly lyrical and evocative passages. But in the end, the greatest pleasure of Hong-Konged is the skillful, fluid way in which it slips between different genres and covers so many different experiences. The book is compelling, thoughtful, humorous, and moving.