Listen in to the podcast talk "Sense of Place" at the Beijing International Literary Festival.

Audio and sound recording courtesy of the Bookworm.

7:45 | And we're off: We are introduced to our two speakers. Rob Gifford, an NPR correspondent, has been going back and forth to China for 20 years and in 2007 published his first book, China Road, a nonfiction account of a road trip from Shanghai to the Kazakh border. Justin Hill was a VSO volunteer in China and Eritrea and has written about both, with much critical acclaim.

7:50 | Turning locals into foreigners: Rob Gifford explains that he is an “accidental writer” who didn’t intend to make writing his career, but Justin Hill says he always wanted to write. Hill came to teach in a small town in China at the age of 21. He explains that he thinks travel writing is nice since it gives you a story, unlike in fiction where you must create one. Travel writing, he points out, “turns locals into foreigners.”

7:53 The authors discuss some of the problems or questions around travel writing. For instance, in Gifford’s China Road, two trips to China have actually been fused into one. Hill chooses in some places to leave himself out of the writing and recreate real conversations he had as conversations between other characters, and he also plays with the chronology of events, thus “fictionalizing” the book. Are these strategies suitable for a ‘non-fiction’ genre?

7:55 The authors agree that the answer to this question depends on the aim of one’s writing. Is the goal simply to tell a story as well as possible? Hill asks Gifford to talk about the differences between working in radio and writing a book. Gifford replies that with writing a book he had much more time to take notes, and that it was easier to talk to people without a big microphone with him. With radio, he explains, one is constantly thinking about sounds, and it can be a relief not to worry about every background noise and how it can be worked into the story.

8:00 Hill talks about how he likes a place to function as a character in his writing, with its own distinct mood and feeling, always in the background, like a thunderstorm in the background of a horror film. In writing about small town China, he used details of things he saw (for example: a MacDonald’s cup being run over by traffic again and again, trash bags that look like they’re “drowning,” or a dead pig floating in the local river) that summed up his feelings towards the town, or he uses bit characters to help with description of a place.

8:05 Gifford asks: can you write about a place without having been there? Hill explains that his second book is set in the Tang Dynasty, and he did find it harder to get specific details that would bring the story “off the page.” He called upon his travels to very undeveloped, rural areas of China to help his imagine what life would have been like in pre-modern times.

8:10 Hill reads from the first chapter of Ciao Asmara, a book about Eritrea. The chapter begins by describing Eritrea’s historic vote for independence from Ethiopia in 1996 and then moves on to Hill’s kitchen table in the UK, when he tells his mother his decision to move to Eritrea and volunteer.

8:15 Question from the audience for Hill: Is it harder to write about Eritrea or China? Hill says he feels he knows China better, and that Eritrea needs more of an introduction, but this perhaps makes it easier to write about, since many people know something about China already so you have to find something new to tell them. Rob Gifford asks: Does the traveler have to be in travel writing? During revisions of his book, he was told he needed to put more of himself into the writing, completely different from his journalistic work. Hill replies that the narrator is important because he or she serves as a “touch stone,” and that the reader has to understand the narrator as a basis for understanding the rest of the story.

8:20 How much description is too much? “Things need to lead to something,” says Hill, explaining that description or characters should relate to the larger story or picture.

8:23 | A man and his pipe Gifford reads from China Road. The passage describes the highway out of Shanghai and his guide Tin Tin, a successful young pipe smoking, jeep-driving Shanghaier.

8:29 | Pump up the volume! Especially for foreigners living in China, how can we avoid forgetting about the mundane, every day details of life here to which we become accustomed and putting too much stress on the unusual? Gifford replies that it’s a question of balance. Good writing, he says, is that which makes the mundane interesting. Also, what seems unusual to a foreigner may still be considered mundane by a local. Hill adds that good writing is like life with the volume turned up, or TV with brighter colors.

8:33 | Fact of fiction: Where should writers draw the line between fact and fiction, especially in relation to things like Gifford’s two trips merged into one for China Road? Gifford replies that he doesn’t like to mix the two, especially because of his journalistic background, where writing the exact truth is imperative. Hill disagrees, stating that he’s more relaxed and prefers not to draw the line [between fact and fiction]. Description is partial anyways, he says, depending simply on what one includes or leaves out.

8:37 | China Roads: In regard to characters in the book, how is it possible to not be too judgmental or too neutral? Specifically mentioned is a woman in China Road who performs late term abortions. Gifford replies that in his day job, he cannot be subjective, so adding his own views to China Road was a new experience. Although some have said the book is too moralizing, he still thinks it could have been much more subjective. This also connects to the question of how much of oneself one chooses to reveal in travel writing.

8:40 | Last question for Gifford: How did writing a short chapter in the recently published Beijing: Portrait of a City compare to writing a long book? Gifford explains that for Portrait of a City he decided against a detailed look into one aspect of life and instead wrote a short conceptual piece on China’s place as the center of the world historically and in present times.