When an ‘idiot’ turns his gaze back home
It has been a while since I traveled on the Chinese mainland, so in order to refresh my memory of some of the sights there I decided to go back to one of the most authoritative sources on world travel — the global hit TV series An Idiot Abroad.
Watching again the show’s debut episode on China, it is fair to say that the presenter Karl Pilkington, the idiot of the title, does not entirely paint a rosy picture. But then this can be said of pretty much everywhere on the planet that he visits. As British as cut-price supermarket sausages or grimy station platforms, Pilkington is a comic misanthrope, a bald and glum fish out of water in the tradition of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels or Voltaire’s Candide, whose one real desire is only ever to go back home.
In the Swiftian tradition, the China show features Pilkington visiting a real-life Lilliput — Kunming’s “Dwarf Village” — populated entirely by little people in tiny homes. And at stops along his Great Wall journey, there are treats such as fried locusts, scorpions and cockroaches on sticks from a street market, and a scorching fire massage during which he thinks he’s actually being immolated. I must admit, I never experienced anything like this in Shanghai — or even in Harbin!
Of course, once Pilkington does get back home to England, the fish is back in the water and everything is normal to him. But what if this slap-headed savant could see the UK with the same suspicious eyes as he sees the rest of the world? What would amaze, or more probably, appall him?
I am guessing he might balk at the UK’s crazy kids. In London last week, a phalanx of feral teens several hundred strong gathered to egg on two girls from rival schools who were fighting over the same boy. While most were initially drawn to the well-publicized “event” by social media — to catch the fight on their camera phones — it rapidly degenerated into a mass brawl that terrified the local community of Walthamstow and blocked off the high street for over four hours. One resident later remarked of the charmer at the center of the storm: “He’s a very lucky boy!”
Fortunately this was not a gang-related incident, and not too serious. But violent crime among teens is a serious problem in the UK. Another serious problem is the number of homeless on the streets of towns and cities, ever rising as more people are priced out of the buyers’ and private rental markets and social housing is sold off. I imagine our hypothetical Pilkington might do a double-take at one response to this phenomenon — “anti-homeless spikes”. These are metal spikes which have been installed in concrete by some upscale residences and businesses to stop people from sleeping rough on the ground outside.
It is of course part of the pleasure of travel to poke fun at cultural differences and foreigners’ funny habits. But we must remember that oddity is really in the eye of the beholder.
Contact the writer at jon.lowe@ chinadailyhk.com