XPost: alt.zen, soc.culture.china, soc.culture.indian   
   XPost: talk.politics.tibet, tw.bbs.soc.politics   
   From: peterterpstra@versatel.nl   
      
   Finding Zen and Book Contracts in Beijing   
   Ian Johnson   
      
   It’s a Sunday afternoon and Beijing’s biggest bookstore is preparing for a   
   major event: the launch of a new book by a   
   bestselling American author, who will be on hand for the occasion. Six-foot   
   banners on the sidewalk out front announce   
   the talk, along with posters in the windows and a big display of books in the   
   foyer of the 170,000-square-foot store.   
   Up on the sixth floor, a conference room filled with sixty people quietly   
   awaits….Bill Porter.   
      
   Few people in the West have heard of Porter, a translator of Chinese poetry   
   and religious works whose books in print—   
   many of them published by a small non-profit, Copper Canyon Press—rarely   
   sell more than a thousand copies each year.   
   For most of the past decade, he says, his annual income has hovered around   
   $15,000. Several of his books humorously   
   thank the US Department of Agriculture—for providing food stamps that have   
   kept him and his family going.   
      
   But Porter, who translates under the pen name Red Pine (赤松), has also   
   published two minor classics of Chinese travel   
   writing, Road to Heaven: Encounters with Chinese Hermits and Zen Baggage: a   
   Pilgrimage to China—works that have   
   recently gained him a huge Chinese following, thanks to a small but growing   
   new publishing culture for foreign authors.   
      
   For Porter, it all started several years ago, when he was visiting the   
   Monastery of the Cypress Grove (Bailinsi) in Beijing   
   to research Zen Baggage. He happened to meet Tang Xiaoming, the manager of   
   Beijing Reader Publishing, a private   
   press dedicated mostly to business topics. Like many entrepreneurs, Tang was   
   developing an interest in religion and was   
   fascinated to hear that Porter had found hermits in China’s Zhongnan   
   Mountains—a range south of Xi’an long famous as   
   a home for recluses seeking enlightenment. In fact, Porter’s book had been   
   published in China in 2001—as Secluded   
   Orchids in a Deserted Valley (空谷幽兰), a poetic reference to people of   
   noble character—but had only sold a few   
   thousand copies. Tang thought that it had been poorly marketed.   
      
   “I knew it would work if people realized what he had found,” Tang told me.   
   “It seemed like the time was ripe.”   
      
   The book, which Tang re-released in 2009 under the same title, became a   
   sensation in China, selling 100,000 copies   
   and spurring interest in hermits and other traditions that many Chinese   
   assumed had vanished. The book launched   
   hermit tourism and turned Porter into a celebrity, with his own page on Baidu   
   Baike, China’s version of Wikipedia.   
      
   That prompted Tang to publish Zen Baggage last year, which has sold 50,000   
   copies, and to commission from Porter an   
   original work on his travels through China’s cultural heartland that has not   
   appeared in English, Yellow River Odyssey,   
   which has an initial press run of 20,000. Another new work of Porter’s is   
   due out in Chinese later this year on the Silk   
   Road. Best of all, the publisher is paying advances and royalties. Last year,   
   Porter says, he earned $30,000 from his   
   China book sales, pushing him out of the world of food stamps and into the   
   realm of the tax-paying lower-middle class.   
      
   Porter’s new status reflects the growth of China’s own middle class. Many   
   are willing to pay for real books, movies and   
   music, and not just make do with cheaper, pirated editions. That’s allowed a   
   growing number of foreign authors to   
   make real money in China, as long, of course, as they do not discuss political   
   themes overtly—explicitly political works   
   would not pass China’s censors. Porter’s books do have a political   
   undertone, with his characters ignoring or seemingly   
   ignorant of Communist Party efforts to control religion, but he is an observer   
   rather than a commentator. And while he   
   makes humorous references to local officials (he calls them “trolls”) and   
   the indignities that sometimes accompany   
   travel in China, his principal focus is on the country’s culture and   
   religious traditions.   
      
   On the recent Sunday afternoon, walking into the Beijing bookstore conference   
   room for the launch of Yellow River   
   Odyssey, Porter looked the role of eccentric foreign prophet. Short and   
   barrel-chested, he has a thick grey beard and   
   twinkling eyes—a cross between a mountain-top sage and department-store   
   Santa Claus. Although he is 68, he looks   
   about a decade younger. He quickly won over the crowd with humor and candor.   
      
   “I became interested in China for money,” he said in answer to the   
   most-asked question he receives. He went on to   
   explain how he had been a doctoral student in anthropology at Columbia   
   University and took Chinese because it was a   
   way to get a scholarship. Around the same time he became interested in   
   Buddhism and eventually found it more   
   spiritually rewarding. In 1972, he dropped out of the program to move to   
   Taiwan and live in a Buddhist monastery. He   
   stayed in Taiwan twenty years, making the translation of Chinese poetry into   
   English his spiritual practice—for him,   
   sitting down in front of the classics and figuring out what a writer from a   
   thousand years ago was trying to say is a   
   meditative experience. In 1993 he moved back to the US with his Taiwanese wife   
   and two children. They settled on the   
   outskirts of Port Townsend, about 40 miles northwest of Seattle, where Porter   
   lives today.   
      
   Tang, his Chinese publisher, had arranged for 20 interviews during the week of   
   the book launch, and a television crew   
   was documenting his visit. A subtext to many of the questions was why he finds   
   so much value in Chinese culture when   
   so many Chinese themselves don’t. It was a question Tang brought up when he   
   introduced Porter.   
      
   “Our culture is really broad but how does it affect our daily life? Today   
   we’re very westernized—our food, clothing and   
   so on—but here is someone from the West who finds value in China,” Tang   
   said in his short introduction. “Why does he   
   do this? What does it say to us Chinese?”   
      
   In the travel writing that has made him so popular in China, Porter’s tone   
   is not reverential but explanatory, and filled   
   with humorous asides (such as the traveler’s need for a good laxative, or   
   his twenty-year pursuit of a Guggenheim   
   fellowship). His goal is to tell interested foreigners about revealing byways   
   of Chinese culture. Unexpectedly, this   
      
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   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)