Chaos and Grime: A Year in the Life of a Chinese City by Jacob Acerbi
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
I enjoyed much of this book, and the author’s honesty in showing the less pleasant aspects of his own behaviour and personality should be applauded IMO. I don’t condone his nastier actions, but he can be commended for not self-censoring and giving us a warts-and-all self-portrait. That’s hard to do, and it rarely happens.
At times, because of the jarring scene transitions and small army of characters, I got lost and felt I was reading an experimental post-modernist work. The indecipherable chaos of The Third Policeman came to mind, as did the grotesque character descriptions in Nightwood. I’m guessing the experimental feel was unintentional.
I’m ambivalent about writing courses. My impression is while they teach you concrete skills, they also stifle originality, and if taught at a Western university only value content that leans heavily to the left.
Does Acerbi vote Republican or Democrat? I don’t know, nor care either way. What am I getting at, then? I believe he wouldn’t have been well served in a creative writing program at a college/university. His content largely centres on a white man in his late 20s in Asia dating local girls. That wouldn’t be well-received by his classmates and tutor. To say his work is inherently right-wing by today’s standards doesn’t sound right. But if I say it’s not the kind of material today’s social-justice focused left would support, you’d probably agree I have a point.
The feedback from classmates and tutor would be, I’d wager, focused on communicating Acerbi’s basic and innate odiousness in their eyes, rather than on improving his writing. However, Acerbi should’ve recruited beta readers to critique his draft.
Everybody has their influences. I follow the Hemingway style of limiting adverbs and adjectives, and the Orwell dictate requiring crystal clear prose. Orwell discouraged the use of a ten pound word when a one pound word would do. Acerbi’s use of perambulate instead of stroll, or walk, for example, is a big no-no for me.
I’m no stickler for rules, but he breaks them all! Info dumps, telling not showing, head hopping, useless detail, and WAY too many characters…are a few of the problems here. And if it’s a memoir, can it be in the third person? The protagonist is not Acerbi but his stand-in, Jim. I’m more comfortable calling this a novel.
In 2013 Acerbi/Jim studied Chinese at Wuhan University. He carried out an obscure research project at a hospital too. Obscure because he tells nothing about it. Many of his fellow students were African…and we get the odd interesting morsel about them. Jim attracted the attention of perhaps twenty Chinese women but seemed more interested in their admiration than getting physical with them.
He made a terrible choice for a girlfriend. However, he couldn’t see this and as the relationship went sideways, so did his mental health. Likewise, he greatly overestimated how much others were interested in his relationship problems. Through questionable actions, he called a lot of negative attention to himself. I wouldn’t recommend that in China. Jim obsessing about a woman all wrong for him recalled John Fante’s Ask the Dusk. He just didn’t know when to give up.
As an example of a jarring transition, at one stage, he gets very sick and lies down on the ground to die. But he leaves us hanging, in the next chapter he has miraculously recovered, and returned his normal routine: sending disturbing text messages to various women, not attending class at uni, and teaching English at schools that never pay him on time. Presumably, he went to the hospital in Wuhan? Surely, that was worth writing about? Instead, we get endless details about house parties and nights out clubbing.
I lived in Wuhan a decade before Acerbi, so I have some sympathy for the troubles he went through. I, too, found that city hard on my mental health. Wuhan was grimmer than the three other Chinese cities I lived in. What rankles though is his apparent opinion that he didn’t need an editor. He had great material but didn’t acquire the skills or ask for the help he needed to tell his story coherently. Despite all my reservations, I think the effort of writing this was worth it. I’d definitely read another book by Acerbi. There were a lot of cringy passages in this book, below is one example:
“This foreigner was wearing a surgical mask and sunglasses. He had on boots and was dressed in blue jeans and a form-fitting white T-shirt. Sweat glistened from the rippled surfaces of his lean muscularity. Black hair peeked from the V-neck of his shirt. He projected a rugged vigor, an otherworldliness of a strange and sensual creature that had inexplicably landed here after a harrowing odyssey through and from the great unknown.”
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Chaos and Grime: A Year in the Life of a Chinese City
