Fiction
China Bound
A story of one young American's discovery of modern China and ancient truths.
Reviewed by Larry Tritten
Sunday, April 4, 2004; Page BW04
HEAVEN LAKE
By John Dalton. Scribner. 451 pp. $26
Returning from a trip to China, I remember thinking that any book, fiction or nonfiction, describing travels in China would be very much like the typical picaresque fantasy novel, i.e., the kind of novel traditionally described by aficionados as a "travel among wonders" story. China is vast, exotic and, from a Western perspective, significantly alien. John Dalton's novel Heaven Lake illustrates my observation perfectly, at least in its second half when the protagonist leaves Taiwan and undertakes a journey across mainland China.
Heaven Lake is the story of Vincent Saunders, a young American "Jesus teacher" (to use the phrase with which the Chinese describe him) who has opened a ministry house in Taiwan. His low-key life changes when he meets a rich businessman, Mr. Gwa, who offers him $10,000 to go to mainland China and marry a woman Mr. Gwa loves and bring her back to Taiwan, something he can't do himself for various personal and political reasons. Vincent, thinking of marriage as a sacrament, rejects the offer. He gets a day job teaching English to teenage girls and is forthwith seduced by one of them, then violently beaten by her brother, who threatens his life. There seems to be no other option but to accept Mr. Gwa's offer, and so begins a trip that is both a personal odyssey and a travel odyssey, with its events underscoring the original meaning of the word travel, which derives from the Old French word travail.
The first half of the novel, describing Vincent's life in Taiwan, is essentially uneventful, and Dalton portrays Vincent as innocent, naive and downright monotonous, something of a cross between a naif and a schlemiel. In a comic novel like Bruce Jay Friedman's Stern (arguably the funniest English-language novel of the 20th century), a schlemiel serves his author's purpose aptly, but in a straightforward, realistic novel like Heaven Lake, he can seem merely annoying.
Vincent is anything but a compelling character. Heaven Lake stirs much more engagingly to life when some of the subsidiary characters are in the spotlight -- especially Alec, the cantankerous, pot-smoking Scot with whom Vincent shares a house in Taiwan and whom, fortunately, he also meets up with on the mainland. Alec plays the live wire to Vincent's dial tone. His appearances are the fictional equivalent of a show-stopping tune enlivening a slow-moving musical.
Vincent becomes somewhat more worldly and self-assured as the journey develops, but only somewhat. Dalton never substantially explains Vincent's religious convictions, which are profound, so the reasons for them remain sketchy and remote. Dalton does, however, skillfully handle the novel's Chinese characters. Stereotypes notwithstanding, national characteristics do exist, and the author's portrayals get at certain truths behind the old phrase "inscrutable Oriental" while effectively capturing the Chinese drive to excel. He is also very good at giving a sense of the size of China, and describes its geography with panache: "He had never seen anything quite like it, and again could only compare it with places he had heard of but never actually been. Heaven Lake then was a thousand acres of Canadian Rockies or Swiss Alps gathered up by an appeasing god and toted over continents and oceans to be set down here, as indemnity, maybe, for the heat and bareness of the Xinjiang Desert."
Dalton's descriptions of cityscapes are also powerful and well tuned: "Privately he thought Urumchi an ugly city. Its older buildings all looked hard-baked and vanquished. Many of its newer constructions were still cocooned in knobby-jointed scaffolding. Not far from the merchant districts the city gave itself over, ungrudgingly, to the rigors of industry, to fortresslike petroleum refineries, to mills and chemical plants, and beyond that, to several outer boroughs ravaged by heavy machinery and thus in a near-constant state of dust-blown commotion. In this regard Urumchi appeared similar to Lanzhou, as bustling and as reckless, only much hotter and with a clear, yawning sky that pushed away clouds of smokestack soot before they could turn weighty and plummet back down upon the factories that spawned them."
Dalton, who lives in North Carolina with his wife, Jen Jen Chang, spent several years in Taiwan, where he himself was once offered $10,000 to become a surrogate husband. Fluent in Mandarin, he knows China and shows it to us with meticulousness and enthusiasm. If Vincent is a less than fascinating character, the story of his adventures in this intriguing country captivate our attention and hold it throughout. *
Larry Tritten is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper's and Vanity Fair.