Jennifer Steil on Foreign Memoirs

How would you describe the books you’ve chosen?

They’re memoirs. They’re five of the books I read when I was writing my own memoir of the time I’d spent in Yemen editing the Yemen Observer. I wanted to read a lot of other memoirs by Westerners who were travelling to Eastern places: how they structured their books, how personal they made their experience, how funny or serious… So with the exception of Three Cups of Tea, which is closer to a biography, they’re all written in the first person.

Which would you like to talk about first?

Let’s start with River Town by Peter Hessler. River Town is his memoir of two years teaching for the Peace Corps at a teacher training college in China in a very remote city – a small city of 200,000 people or so, very few of whom had ever met foreigners. So Hessler really was in a very isolated, alien place. I love this book for many reasons. Firstly because he’s a beautiful writer and he gives you this wonderful sense of what it’s like to actually be there: the landscape and the people and the hustle and bustle, the pollution and the way the city’s built in the mountains with stairs going up and down, and the porters to carry your stuff that they call ‘stick-stick men’. He makes it really easy for you to visualise this foreign place.

The chief influence for you was the visual aspect?

I liked that part of it, yes. But for me the most relevant thing to what I was doing was that he was teaching – in his case Shakespeare and other English and American literature to Chinese students – and a lot of his students wrote in ways that were similar to the way my Yemeni reporters wrote.

Not very well?

Their English wasn’t fantastic, but I mean in terms of the way the misunderstandings he’d have with his students reminded me of the misunderstandings I’d have with my reporters: differences of culture. So, for example, he was teaching with another man, Adam, who would ask his students to write about anything they wanted – ‘Write about anything you want!’ – and what he got from them were shopping lists. Everyone wrote: ‘What I want is a new TV, I want a new computer, a car…’ He talks a lot about how his relationship with his students changed as he learned Chinese, and how, as he learned the language, his own personality changed as well as his relationships with Chinese people.

He’s also very frank in criticising what he sees as political group-think in China. They’re very homogenous in many ways, and easily brainwashed with ideas about what the outside world is like, so he’d get a lot of essays about the sexual habits of Western women, about how they are bad women compared to Chinese women who are elegant and poised and refined.

What’s your next book?

Three Cups of Tea – I felt incredibly daunted when I read this book. When you’re writing a memoir, you’re put in the awkward position of being in the story and not wanting to come off as narcissistic and yet you must think your story’s interesting or you wouldn’t be writing a book about it. But the thing is that while my reporters changed my life and I hope I changed theirs, there were about 16 of them, and Greg Mortenson has changed literally thousands and thousands of lives.

So what did he do?

Well, he had a failed attempt to climb K2 back in the early 90s and when he was wandering down the mountain he got lost and wound up in this little place called Korphe, a village, and the people took him in and helped him get his strength back. And while he was there he watched the children at school, except they didn’t have a schoolhouse so they knelt on the ground outside, often in the snow, and drew in that or the mud. So these villagers said they wanted a school and he promised he would come back and give them one.

So he goes to the US and launches a fund-raising crusade, and he gets his money, but now he needs to get together the materials, transport them to this very remote location in Pakistan and get the thing put together. There’s bargaining, there’s this very tricky region, there’s stuff that’s stolen along the way, and it takes ages to build the school, but it does get built, and after that he builds dozens of other schools, especially schools for girls, who haven’t had much of a chance for education in Pakistan.

It’s the most incredible story. He gets kidnapped in Waziristan, in the northwest, where he had no real contacts, and that taught him that schools only get built where you’ve got contacts, because otherwise you’re in big trouble. There’s a fatwa against him at one point, but he gets a letter from one of the highest imams in the country saying the fatwa’s nonsense. He keeps persevering. He learns Urdu, he becomes obsessed – he comes across as a Christ-like figure really, though he’s always late for things…

A very appealing quality…

The writer, David Oliver Relin, admits that he’s not an objective observer, he’s very in favour, and it is a mission. It feels like a religious devotion and it made me feel that my story was very, very small in comparison. But that really is the sort of thing that Yemen needs. I mean we’re just as in danger of uneducated people falling into the hands of terrorists, people with no jobs and no schooling. This book explains why this is a better way to fight terrorism than the military. This is how you fight it: by widening people’s horizons, not with planes and bombs.

Third book?

The Zanzibar Chest – these first three books are all about people doing good in the world. This time the author, Aidan Hartley, worked for Reuters as a freelancer for many years. He has an interesting family history: his father lived in Yemen and I was lent Aidan’s book by a Yemeni general, who recommended it to me.

It’s two stories in a way: Aidan’s reporting in Africa, including Rwanda – serious crisis reporting – and then the story of this friend of his father’s, Peter Davey, a British diplomat who practically went native in Yemen and who died in mysterious circumstances. They’re almost two different stories and they possibly don’t even belong in the same book, but I love the book. There’s so much material from Aidan’s journalism, a lot of it horrific, a lot of it very personal. Aidan Hartley took a lot of drugs and slept with a lot of women, and if you’re a woman memoirist you’re going to find it harder to get away with that kind of material.