COUSIN FELIX MEETS THE BUDDHA
And Other Encounters in China and Tibet
By LINCOLN KAYE
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003. 394 pages, $27.50

reviewed by Tony Giffone

Journalism is often seen as the first draft of history, or as Matthew Arnold famously states, as "literature in a hurry." Lincoln Kaye's Cousin Felix Meets the Buddha, a journalist's account of life in Beijing, in China's Shaanxi and Hebei provinces, and in Tibet in the l990s, proves the truthfulness of both statements. Kaye, who has worked for the Far Eastern Economic Review in several Asian countries, including five years in China, has written an account of four different journeys he took, accompanied by his Taiwanese wife, Mei-lang Hsu. Beautifully detailed, his chronicles of these journeys raise journalism to the level of history and literature.

Kaye's starting point, and what unites the four essays, is the inquiry how "after decades of enforced conformity, [the] Chinese were leftfor better or worseto shift for themselves economically and spiritually." This is indeed history from the bottom up: not a chronicle of decisions made by those in power, but a study of how decisions made by those in power affect daily life; it's a study of what people felt and thought while great historical changes were taking place. As one of the many people that Kaye encounters states, "After all, what's the People's Revolution but the sum total of a thousand million personal revolts? You pick yours and I pick mine and it all adds up to history."

Kaye brings to the book an eye attuned to the ironic and to what writers often refer to as "the telling detail." Each of the four essays provides portraits of individuals who embody the complexity and contradictions of contemporary China; as such, the essays often take on characteristics of a finely rendered short story. Unlike many foreign correspondents who confine themselves to Beijing, Kaye and his wife traveled widely. His book includes an account of a trip to Shaanxi Province, via a group package tour, where he discovers history as it is being marketed for mass consumption. His visits to a Shaanxi archeological village as well as to the famed terra-cotta warriors of Xian convince him that the Chinese practice of ancestor worship is alive and well on a national scale, thanks to the tourist industry. He also describes a trip to a mountain village in Hebei Province where citizens petitioned to sue the local politicians in order to hold free elections; and a trip to Tibet, the setting for the book's title essay, a title far too cute to indicate the prevailing tone of the book itself.

Kaye's real-life characters provide a microview of contemporary China. There is a former student radical who works in the public security bureau of a small provincial town and who now believes that the only way to bring democracy to China is by building up "the material foundation of the nation." As part of his job, he is in charge of policing college campuses. There is a self-educated, public advocate lawyer in private practice who epitomizes the new professional class working independently of the government; when asked what motivates him, he reveals himself inspired by Mao Zedong Thought. There is the director of an independently run hospice for the dying who lies to his patients so that they can die in peace. Just as there are fancy new highways that bring "country" and "city" closer together, blurring the distinction, there's a fine line that separates the earnest reformer from the charlatan in these portraits; sometimes the two exist side by side, sometimes they coexist in the same person.

What emerges from these journeys is a portrait of a China that is rapidly changing but is not sure in which direction it is headed. This is a China caught between those reformers who advocate "incremental, orderly improvement to allow social change for once without a bloodbath," as one of the individuals he meets puts it, to those who hope for a more radical change, affirming, as Mao did, that "a revolution is not a tea party." The local election in the Hebei mountain village may not have been as totally aboveboard as it seemed and, in any case, hasn't produced the drastic changes that everyone hoped for; Kaye finds the village residents much less enthusiastic than he had anticipated. Do privately run hospitals in China represent a step forward, or are they, in the words of Kaye's acupuncturist, "pill mills . . . the hottest racket going on in medicine . . . [it's what happens] when you drag medicine into the marketplace"? Because Kaye has no ideological axe to grind, he honors the emotional complexity and moral gravity of each situation.

Some of Kaye's most acute observations are in digressions. He describes a McDonald's as being "more than just a meal; it's a quick affordable jolt of American energy and optimism" and then goes on to compare the arrival of American fast-food outlets in China in the 1990s to the appearance of Chinese restaurants in American suburbs in the 1950s. Affirming that to really get to know a city, one must get to know the smell of its subways, Kaye goes on to compare the smells of the subway in Beijing with those in London, New York, and Tokyo. Throughout, Kaye's descriptions of places that I have been to in China struck me as essentially accurate and truthful, so that I felt I was in the hands of a trustworthy guide when he took me places (like Tibet) where I have not been.