Cousin Felix Meets the Buddha: And Other Encounters in China and Tibet FROM THE PUBLISHER
Long caricatured as a land of stagnant traditions or lockstep Maoist conformity, China today is a country on the move -- literally (China's new migrant labor pool, known as the "blind river," logs more road miles and piecework hours than any other workforce in the world) but also mentally and spiritually, as more and more Chinese search for some new faith, whether Buddhist, humanist, or laissez-faire, to fill in where decaying Party ideology leaves off. The new China, where religious pilgrims cross paths with born-again capitalists and uprooted communards, is a chaos of true believers pursuing different and often conflicting visions of fulfillment. The author and the illustrator, an American journalist and his Taiwanese wife, trail a series of such pilgrims: wandering farmhands, itinerant actors, a qi gong guru, a careerist policeman, a muckraking lawyer, a death-dealing paramedic, a die-hard revolutionary agitator, a Taiwanese con man, a Tibetan lama, and many more. The result is neither a travelogue nor an analytic set piece, but a moral panorama, lit from within by the divergent hopes of Chinese citizens today.
FROM THE CRITICS
The Washington Post
In Cousin Felix Meets the Buddha, Far Eastern Economic Review correspondent Lincoln Kaye tells a delightfully original and freewheeling story devoid of a single nasty incident with the Public Security Bureau. (Indeed, a policeman Kaye encountered on a bus found him a room with relatives when hotels were booked up.) While this freedom may have much to do with Kaye's cultural fluency and choice of subjects, his book, illustrated by Mei-lang Hsu, his Taiwanese wife of 25 years and comrade in adventure, demonstrates refreshingly the degree to which it has become possible for foreign journalists in China to live ordinary lives. — Judith Shapiro
Publishers Weekly
Set free from editorial constraints that have bound him in his 15-year career as a journalist at the Far Eastern Economic Review, Kaye takes the time in this account of his adventures as a China correspondent to devote long passages to rarely noted attributes of the country, from the fragrance of Beijing's subway system to the gastronomic sensations of yak fat. These digressions, while at times meandering, are redeemed by Kaye's ample knowledge of China and his childlike excitement over his subject. Kaye's edifying narrative can, during a brief train ride to Xian, the middle kingdom's ancient capital, entertainingly skim across a range of subjects throughout China's long, complicated history. The book's most revealing observations come not from Kaye, but from the people he speaks and travels with across China, a diverse cast of characters that includes a reincarnated lama, a Shaanxi cop, a fast-talking city lawyer and a die-hard Communist revolutionary. Among them, his travel companions have seen China's recent revolution and reform from significantly different perspectives-upper- and lower-class, rural and urban-and Kaye's record of their experiences is valuable. His deftness with the Chinese language, helped in part by his Taiwanese wife's occasional stint as translator (she is also the book's illustrator), enables him to capture subtle insights into his interlocutors' personalities and motivations. This allows Kaye to capture the conflicts and contradictions of a country that is so often depicted as a teeming, homogenous mass. (Feb.)
Foreign Affairs
A popular practice of foreign correspondents upon finishing a tour is to write a book analyzing the big-picture developments in the country they are leaving. At the end of his China assignment for the Far Eastern Economic Review, Kaye went against that tradition by focusing instead on the personal and private encounters he and his Taiwanese wife had with an extraordinary cast of interesting and eccentric personalities. The title refers to a previously unknown distant relative who turns up for dinner and travels with the Kayes and their Tibetan lama friend to West China. Their adventures include meeting with a troop of itinerant actors, religious pilgrims, wandering farm hands, a police officer, and many others. Even while visiting standard tourist spots, such as Xian and the terra cotta warriors, they managed to have unlikely meetings, and Kaye is able to turn their visit to a Beijing hospice into a touching account of old revolutionaries preparing for death. The book reads more like a novel filled with fascinating characters than an attempt to explain current developments in China.
Library Journal
Kaye is an American journalist and longtime resident of several Asian cities. Along with his Taiwanese wife, who contributes the illustrations, he records four journeys in some detail into areas a bit off the conventional tourist tracks to find a China that is simultaneously traditional and yet changing in some respects. He skillfully weaves history and commentary throughout his narratives of people met. Readers will be surprised by his encounter with a new-breed civil rights lawyer, disturbed by his graphic account of a hospice, troubled by the struggles of Tibetans to maintain their culture, and amused by his descriptions of McDonald's and the smells of the Beijing subway system. Kaye goes deeper and better informed into China and the Chinese way of life than do most travel writers. This is not a book on politics or economics but rather one for those with more than a passing fancy for the cultures of the world's most populous nation. Recommended for larger public libraries and academic libraries supporting Asian interests.-Harold M. Otness, formerly of Southern Oregon Univ. Lib., Ashland Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
A literate journey into some remote corners of Asia in a puzzling time. Call this one big "enterprise story," that being the term employed by old-school journalists (the kind who chewed cigars, stayed up all night drinking whiskey, and banged out great stories with two fingers) to describe a junket somewhere in the hope of turning up an accidental bit of news. A restless traveler, veteran Far Eastern Economic Review Asia bureau chief Kaye was stationed in Beijing just after the Tiananmen Square massacre, a time when "there was nothing to cover but official lies and bluster." From this base, he took the entire nation of China as his beat, turning up odd stories for the Economic Review and the Wall Street Journal. Here he recounts his experiences in "the new China" after Deng Xiaoping mandated a turn from insular socialism to a state-controlled, quasi-capitalist economic system that has made fortunes for some individuals while leaving others in feudal poverty. The modernization of the economy, Kaye observes, has been accompanied by the restitution of traditional practices such as ancestor worship, which had been all too easily suppressed under the regime of "Red dynast" Mao�after all, he writes, "totalitarian snitch culture encouraged betrayal of your living intimates; how much easier to forsake your dead ones." At the same time, modernization has meant shedding old ways of doing things and shrugging off some, but not all, of the shoddy communist past. Following the tracks of homeless farmers, day laborers, Buddhist pilgrims, bureaucrats, and budding entrepreneurs, Kaye explores this dichotomy of conservative restoration and creative destruction, illustrating his points with tellinganecdotes and apt quotes. Consider this comment from Cousin Felix, an overseas Chinese businessman and master of the influence-peddling art of guanxi who seems to be on a constant quest for both "mainland babes" and spiritual enlightenment: "Imagine the hot flashes when an ancient Dragon Lady like China goes into menopause!" Well-written, humorous, and instructive: a useful resource for China-watchers and travelers. (17 b&w drawings, not seen, by Kaye�s Taiwanese wife, Hsu Mei-lang)
Home
