Simon Lewis: Comrade Hack

I’d rather people did not know what I was doing. Not wishing, though, to actually lie to people who I might end up hanging out with, I have to construct a tower of evasions, which breaks under the mildest of inquisitions:
‘You’re a writer? What do you write?’
‘Travel stuff. Novels. Screenplays.’
‘You mean films? Have you written any films I’d have seen?’
‘No.’
‘Do you make a lot of money writing films?’
‘None at all.’
‘Well how do you make your living?’
‘Writing stuff for.. travel publications.’
And the amateur Poirot declares, ‘You work for Lonely Planet!’

At which point I sheepishly declare myself. And then they say, ‘I really like your books, the history is good, they’re well laid out, the maps are good, the level of writing is really high, but of course I use Lonely Planet’. I get asked a standard set of questions, including ‘Do you stay in all the hotels?’ ‘Do you get paid expenses?’ (No and no.)

I find myself saying, over and over again, ‘It’s not actually like being paid to be on holiday because, unlike you, I have a schedule’, ‘I just fell into it, I speak a bit of Chinese and I’m a writer.’ ‘It doesn’t actually pay very well.’ ‘I did a bit of India but it was horrible’, ‘The difference between my company and the Lonely Planet is that they employ researchers and my company employ writers.’

From then on, to those people, I feel that I have turned into a representative of my company, so ought to be seen to be looking busy and competent and up earlier in the morning and don’t want to be caught out sleeping in or skipping a bit.

I was sitting in a bar in Dali and a load of foreign residents were sitting around discussing the really interesting villages in the area when a certain ex Lonely Planet guidebook writer said, ‘Shh! There’s a guidebook writer here! We have a traitor in our midst!’

He was teasing of course, but yes, sometimes that is the attitude: Stealer of secrets, despoiler of the pristine, stormtrooper for the backpacker hordes. I understand; after all my job is to inform people about the places that the elitists want kept to themselves.

The really embedded travellers, of course, don’t need guidebooks. They buy a map and talk to locals. In another bar elsewhere, someone said: ‘don’t take this personally, but when me and my friends were in India, we built a fire in the middle of the road and ritually burnt our Lonely Planets.’ I was very amused. The ritual burning of the Lonely Planet – a necessary step, surely, on the road to travel enlightenment.

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I would love to be still in Yunnan being in the sunshine and meeting more interesting people. But feeling the pressure of deadlines, I returned to Shanghai. All it has done is rain. Rain rain rain, more rain, and then more rain and now some rain to rain rainily. Voluptuous Asian rain, wetter than English rain, more definitive, altogether rainier. Roofs leak, cars splash, gutters overflow. You can’t get a cab, everyone is miserable, wet, ill. This is how rainy it is – Shanghai girls, some of the most image conscious on the planet, are wearing plastic bags over their slinky shoes. Water drumming and dripping keeps me awake at night. I have caught a cold. I washed all my clothes when I got back and they just wouldn’t dry, so I had to go out and buy a whole new set. One morning I banged on my walls and shouted, Canute like, ‘stop raining, please just stop raining!’

While the patter and drip continues outside I sit and flick through the Tatler 120 best Shanghai restaurants. Some pages I could just lick. It’s a whole other world. The wine section begins: ‘the kind of wine a person chooses says a lot about the kind of person they are’ Does it? Gosh. What’s a lobster bisque and how can it be outré? It tells you if you can get your car valeted while you eat. How civilised and decadent and upper class the whole venture is. Now there’s a guidebook to work for.

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I’m going to Magic Shool. It’s this little Mister Ben type shop in the basement of a shopping mall. They teach eight tricks for twenty quid in all. I know from my mate D the magic man, you couldn’t get taught one trick for that in London.

I learn one every morning as it’s near where I eat breakfast. They’re good tricks too, or they are when my teacher M does them. Even when I know how she’s done it, I still can’t see how she’s done it, if you see what I mean. Every time it’s the same: I watch her do a trick over and over again until I have to say ‘Ok, stop, stop, how did you do that? Damn, it, how did you do that?’ And then she shows me, and I’m like, ‘why, is that all?’

She has a degree in physics but instead of being a small town physics teacher, as her family wanted, she ran away to Shanghai and became a magician. She lives with the other magicians from the shop, in some kind of magic commune, where they have a monkish routine of magic training and perfection.

The atmosphere in the shop is studious as when they are not teaching the teachers work over and over on their sleight of hand skills. There’s a polystyrene target that they skim cards into and Houdini posters on the wall. Their uniform is an ‘I love magic’ t-shirt. But a life dedicated to magic has its pressures, it would seem; M has trust issues, she worries about boyfriends trying to steal her secrets.