An off-orbital man, dangling around the world
Is life a wilderness or a track? Today's young people are asking more and more questions.
The track is a way of life that has been designed for a long time: going to school, taking public examinations, getting married and having children, working hard until retirement, a simple and stable happiness.
The wilderness is an adventurous life that deviates from the standard answers of the mainstream, full of excitement and unknown, but also with danger and uncertainty.
In 2016, Liu Zichao, who had not yet become a writer, resigned from the media and began to work as a freelancer, or as a jobless person.
He left orbit and chose the wilderness.
From the first trip to India, he chose to write while traveling, exchanging the manuscript fee for the travel fee, and he persisted for more than ten years.
He was like an off-track man, wandering around the world.
Now, Liu Zichao has become one of the most high-profile travel writers of the moment, and his travel literature trilogy "In the Direction of the Monsoon", "Arriving Before Midnight" and "The Lost Satellite" takes us to the magical India and Southeast Asia, the elegant Central Europe and the mysterious Central Asia.
How do you turn travel and writing into a way of life?
With these questions, Liu Zichao was a guest on the podcast "Untimely", and chatted with the anchors Wang Qi and Ruohan about the specific experience and methods of leading to the wilderness - maybe after reading it, you can also get some inspiration for nomadism in the wilderness.
This article is selected from the podcast "Untimely" program "Chinese writers see the world more, and the future will have their own<纽约客>", the guest is Liu Zichao, and the anchors are Ruohan and Wang Qi. The text has been edited, welcome to search and listen to podcast platforms such as Small Universe and Himalaya.
Travel as a way of life: all concern for distant things will eventually connect with you
Ruohan: You have a quote in "Arriving Before Midnight": "True travel should not only witness wonderful wonders, but also witness dullness and suffering." Just knowing that 'there are people in the world who live like this' is enough to open up your heart. I was particularly struck by this sentence, and many listeners also expressed great feelings. You feel like traveling is a way of life for you, don't you?
Liu Zichao: I probably want to explain something, to write about this event, to write about these people. I think that no matter how far away their lives are, they are actually related to me and will have an impact on our lives. So I want to see and understand the world and life of those people, and I will go there.
I've been reading The New Yorker since 2008, and the best thing about that magazine is that it's very open-minded, and each writer is looking at a different, far-flung region. Some writers write about Latin America, some write about Afghanistan, some write about the Middle East, and some write about Russia.
Everybody cares about the world, the world, the world, and I feel like it's always affecting me. I also feel that it is important to care about these distant things, because it will affect you in the end, and we will all be connected to you.
When you travel with the eyes of a journalist, a writer, you force yourself to do things that you might not have done in your personality. But if you stick to that process and then output it through words, it will nourish you, and the impact on you in that place will be greater.
As Freya Stark says in the inscription of my book, once you've been to this place, after you've written about it, "no matter how many ridges, rivers, and scorching dirt roads you have to get between you and it," it's always been a part of you.
Wang Qi: In the process of traveling, sometimes there are small expectations for the unknown and uncertainty. One of the things I envy when I look at your work is that you have the ability to quickly mingle with passers-by, not just to say hi, but to have a deeper chat so that they are willing to share the story with me. Do you have any tips on this?
Liu Zichao: This may be the improvisation component of travel. I don't think I'm a particularly good person to deal with, and I'm pretty clumsy in that regard. If you want to talk about your experience, I think you should first judge whether the person has more to talk to through some simple questions, and if so, you continue to chase after it. Even if for some reason he can't talk to you longer this time, you can leave his contact information and make an appointment with him for another time.
Some of them are encounters by chance, some of them are found through introductions or others, and some of them are interviews, trying all kinds of possibilities as much as possible. Your contact with anyone will not be in vain in the end. Even if he wasn't written into the book, he actually helped you get to know the place and helped you know what questions to ask or what questions to avoid when asking others.
I met these people, I wrote about these people, and I did my best to feel that they were the most wonderful and representative of one side of the city or country. Maybe from a more macro perspective, there are people with better stories, but some people can't touch it, and some people just miss it.
Travel is like that, in the staggered moments, can he catch you, can you catch him.
Wang Qi: What preparations do you make before you go on a serious trip?
Liu Zichao: I will look at related things for a long time, which is equivalent to having a metaphorical filing cabinet, with different drawers, and I will put things from different regions into different filing cabinets. There are many places that I may not have been to yet, but I have been following them for a long time, and when I am going to go, I will have a certain certainty of which framework to put them in.
When I decided to go to a place, I actually felt that I had accumulated enough to arrange this trip. For example, I haven't been to Iran yet, I just don't know how to get into this place, and I don't have enough things to make me feel that this framework is formed. But after the assassination of Soleimani, I suddenly saw more things and had a certain idea of the area, and I felt that I could arrange this trip.
If I want to go, I usually walk in a panoramic way, sweeping the whole country, maybe from south to north according to its territory, or from east to west in a long horizontal place like Uzbekistan, and I don't miss too much.
A "idle" Chinese wanders around the world
Wang Qi: China's influence abroad has been the subject of a lot of discussion over the years. In the process of traveling, you will feel that your Chinese face or Chinese identity has brought some plus or minus points to your trip?
Liu Zichao: It's hard to say whether to add or subtract points. In Central Asia, if an ordinary person is not engaged in trade or production, it is likely that he will not easily meet a Chinese, wandering there in a state of idleness.
So from this point of view, it may be a plus, because he will be curious about what is going on with this person, why has he never seen this kind of Chinese? Some of the people I have met have similar questions, and he feels that the impression of Chinese people is more practical and works harder, not like me.
Ruohan: I know how to write my profile if I want to go to Central Asia, I am an idle Chinese!
Liu Zichao: There is a French word called flâneur, the idler. Edmund White wrote a book, Paris: Memories of a Wanderer, which seems to be the story of an American loitering in Paris. Benjamin also wrote a book on the meaning of idleness in modernity. I think this character is pretty good.
Wang Qi: "Idleness" is simply similar to our "untimely"!
Will you be in a more extroverted state during your travels?
Liu Zichao: One of the beautiful things about travel is that your identity can be exchanged. You are not usually this kind of person, but you can become this kind of person when traveling, because no one knows who you are, and this sense of free identity is actually a fascinating place to travel. Even if you don't write, it's good to enjoy the process.
Wang Qi: Do you have any moments when you feel lonely and want to end your trip?
Liu Zichao: I often feel lonely when I travel. For me, if I get back to the hotel at eight o'clock, there are still four hours until twelve, and I really don't know how to deal with myself during the four lonely hours facing a hotel in a foreign land.
To combat this loneliness, I would go out and see all sorts of different places, bars, sometimes clubs, weird places, maybe a little bit of an illegal hangout, or some dangerous places. Because it is unbearable to be lonely, you have to find something for yourself, forcing yourself to turn loneliness into a motivation to explore these places.
Ruohan: Have you ever encountered any very dangerous places, and how would it affect you?
Liu Zichao: The danger brought to me by the city is relatively small. But once, I went to visit some Arab enclaves at night, and I took a lot of photos that I thought were awesome, the rare kind of labyrinthine Arab alleys, and the local life at night. On the way back, I was still thinking about posting a circle of friends, and as soon as the nine-square grid was filled, I was directly robbed.
But another time in the Tianshan Mountains, I was faced with a completely natural danger, and when I looked around, you could not see any traces of modern civilization in this world, and everything in front of me was an eternal and unchanging natural existence. At that time, you were so small in that natural environment, and you didn't need the familiar things at all. At that time, I did feel a kind of panic, overwhelmed by nature.
So the second time I went to the Kazakh side of the Tianshan Mountains, I hired a Kazakh magistrate to join me. Locals may wonder how the road is to go, isn't it obvious? But you, a person who hasn't lived in that environment, can't see the road. But those nomads, they are in the steppe, in the wilderness, they can still choose the road.
In the golden age of Chinese writing, be a writer with a "subarctic zone" physique
Wang Qi: I also have a methodological question, when you come home after each trip, it is very different from the state of entering new input every day during the trip, will you also need some adaptation? How do you get into the writing state, and what is the writing rhythm?
Liu Zichao: I will need a temperature. I felt like a "subarctic" person, and then I thought about why I used to travel because I wanted to avoid places that were very hot. When I was in the country, I needed a temperature below 20 degrees Celsius to calm down.
When I come back from my trip, I take about three days to adjust and then I get into writing.
Wang Qi: In such an era, as a Chinese writer and a Chinese writer, do you think that this is an era with many opportunities? Are Chinese readers' interest in the outside world different?
Liu Zichao: I think so. Because anything you write, no one has ever written in the Chinese world, and that's a big opportunity. For example, I have six or seven projects that I want to write, and I may not have any Chinese works. This kind of way of measuring with footsteps and then writing is rare.
Including the large-scale translation of world history in the past four or five years, some readers in China have become more and more deeply aware of the world, and they will also feel that these different things are related to them, and I think this is a particularly good change, and there will be more and more readers, and eventually we may have something similar to the New Yorker. Young writers should go out and write more.
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