An Interview with Tom Bissell, Author of Chasing the Sea: Lost Among the Ghosts of Empire in Central Asia
When Tom Bissell was growing up in the isolated town of Escanaba, Michigan, the idea of traveling anyplace as far as Milwaukee was enough to incite intestinal trauma. Now that he has entered the circle of elite young travel writers, Bissell often experiences the same sensation, but for very different reasons - say, the appearance of a baked goat head with a side of eyeballs on some foreign dinner table. Such details are in ample supply in Chasing the Sea: Lost Among the Ghosts of Empire in Central Asia, Bissell's new book, which paints a wonderful picture of his adventures into territory unfamiliar to just about anyone who doesn't consider Tashkent and Karakalpakstan top travel destinations.
Bissell first got the Uzbekistan bug, if such a thing exists, during a short stint in the Peace Corps, which ended when he decided that he preferred his Stateside girlfriend to poorly appointed outhouses and the bulky Uzbek language. As he took up residence in New York and started work in publishing, Bissell found that he couldn't get Central Asia out of his head. He pitched a story to a magazine about the rapidly disappearing Aral Sea, which he saw as a chance to describe what is perhaps one of the greatest ongoing environmental catastrophes of our time. It was also a chance for Bissell to return to the land he abandoned and reacquaint himself with the people and customs that he found so wildly, and excitingly, foreign.
Bissell has a particular knack for taking readers directly into a situation - he skillfully negotiates Uzbekistan's major cities and introduces us to an immensely appealing cast of characters, most notably his "dude"-speaking Uzbek translator, Rustam. We go inside awe-inspiring (yet dusty) religious towers and get a first-rate lesson on how to deal with corrupt cops. Bissell even tries his hand at a bit of subversion as he attempts to deliver money to the wife of an imprisoned journalist. Though he has a tendency to slow the narrative by performing a survey of the literature on whatever he's seeing, Bissell more than makes up for it in riveting accounts of his travels, particularly that of a police checkpoint gone awry and his encounter with the retreating Aral Sea. A few passages about towns and ships that saw the water vanished from under them are devastating.
Bissell's not finished traveling yet-in addition to voyaging to Southeast Asia and the Arctic, he is a fiction writer whose stories often chronicle ventures to other far-flung lands. He's certainly beaten back any Milwaukee-induced phobias he once had, but to just be on the safe side, don't even think about calling him an adventure journalist.
AT ONE POINT IN THE BOOK YOU ARE ASKED FOR YOUR TITLE AND YOU SAY YOU'RE AN ADVENTURE JOURNALIST. WHAT DOES THAT MEAN, EXACTLY?
YOU FACED A LOT OF DANGERS IN DOING THE REPORTING FOR THIS BOOK. WHAT IS IT ABOUT UZBEKISTAN AND CENTRAL ASIA THAT INTERESTS YOU SO MUCH?
WHAT ADVICE DO YOU HAVE FOR PEOPLE WHO WANT TO TRAVEL TO REGIONS LIKE CENTRAL ASIA, PLACES THAT MAY BE LESS SAFE AFTER RECENT EVENTS? SHOULD THEY JOIN THE PEACE CORPS? BE A MISSIONARY?
AFTER GOING BACK TO UZBEKISTAN FOR THE SECOND TIME, DO YOU NOW REGRET LEAVING YOUR PEACE CORPS POST THERE?
IT'S INTERESTING TO READ HOW AMERICAN CULTURE TRICKLES INTO A PLACE LIKE TASHKENT - FOR EXAMPLE, AT LEAST TWO NON-AMERICANS IN THE BOOK ARE FANS OF THE OFFSPRING, AND MAYBE MANY MORE WE DON'T KNOW ABOUT. DID YOU SEE A LOT OF THAT? HOW DO YOU EXPLAIN WHICH PARTS OF OUR CULTURE GET THROUGH AND WHICH DON'T?
YOUR TRAVEL WRITING IS ABOUT MORE THAN JUST TRAVEL - YOU SURVEY THE LITERATURE, YOU EXAMINE THE POLITICS, YOU ARE CERTAINLY CONCERNED ABOUT THE ENVIRONMENT. DO YOU THINK OTHER TRAVEL WRITING TODAY GOES DEEP ENOUGH?
AFTER EVERYTHING YOU EXPERIENCED THERE, I CAN ONLY IMAGINE WHERE YOU'RE GOING NEXT. WHAT'S ON YOUR ITINERARY?
I'm going to Vietnam with my dad next month. He saw a lot of action - in '65 and '66, he was there as a Marine. I'm going to write a travel story about my dad and I going to Vietnam for GQ, which I hope I'm going to expand into something vaguely like Chasing the Sea: Just a boy and his dad and the legacy of the war, and the whole generation of young people our age over whom the Vietnam War has thrown this enormous shadow. I also have a short-story collection coming out next year.
WHAT'S IT ABOUT - IS THERE A THEME?
Several reviews have latched onto that phrase, which is extremely lamentable to me. It's just a joke. It's an ironical kind of self-description. It means nothing of that kind of hairy-chested, Sebastian Junger-ish adventure journalism. I like his work, but the notion of a guy jetting around the world and putting himself in perilous situations and tearing the truth from these situations - I hold that idea in total contempt, because very few of the guys bother to go back to the places to get a deeper understanding of them.
Part of it is the fact that there's just very little known in the West about that part of the world. So much of it was caught up in Soviet archives, a part of the world that was basically blocked off from the late thirties to the early eighties. I knew virtually nothing about it when I first went there. I like that sense of being one of the few Western people who have experienced that part of the world - everything seems very fresh to me as a writer there. I feel like I'm bringing back something very new, not just to readers but to myself.
Let me say that Central Asia is not really an unsafe place. There are far less safe places that the Peace Corps is posted to. Central Asia has some of the most hospitable, welcoming people that I've encountered traveling. Things that make it unsafe are the corruption of the police - most of the time I just have had very bad luck. Friends have traveled all over Central Asia and never had problems. A Peace Corps post in Central Asia is difficult, but it's one of the best places to be posted. As a quitter, it may seem strange for me to say that, but I joined at a bad time for me. Now that I'm a little older, I think it's really a great place to be.
I don't, because I don't think I ever would have written this book or been the kind of person or writer that I ultimately became. I certainly wouldn't have ended up in New York. Leaving at the time was devastating personally, but it worked out for me as a writer, in a way. Central Asia basically gave me my career.
It's pretty sad. In a few Soviet apartment buildings, in most Soviet apartments actually, there's always a big bookshelf which will have all these incredibly handsome Russian-language editions of classics, but there's basically no one on speaking terms with high American culture. I think the stuff that appeals to people - the explosions, the ninja movies, X-Men, hard rock, gangster rap - appeals to them because it's exciting. It sells a vision of America as this volatile, dangerous place, and young people like volatile, dangerous places. It's Quentin Tarantino-ism. It's just cool. I say in the book that these tiny cultural Scuds may be bad, but X-Men movies are probably vastly preferable to the alternative, which is a sort of totalitarian cult oppression.
I'm going to make an admission here and admit that I don't read that much contemporary travel writing. The writers I really admire - Paul Theroux, Jan Morris, Redmond O'Hanlon - those are all writers whose books I try to emulate because they are so deep. These people make a very serious attempt to write about places like they're not Martian places. The kind of travel books I really find foul are the Under the Tuscan Sun brand of travel books, which basically sell an equally fraudulent view of a sunlit paradise.
I was in the Arctic for a month this summer for Harper's. They just accepted that piece after many weeks of my failing miserably. Hardest piece I've ever written - ten drafts. About 100 pages went right into the toilet. They just accepted it yesterday, and it's one of the greatest reliefs I've ever had. Man. I was going to write a whole book about cold isolated places, a travel book. I'm not going to do that anymore, because I don't have enough emotional connection to it.
They're all Central Asia-themed, including the title story, "Death Defier," which is a novella about two journalists stuck in Afghanistan during the war. I think the title story is so far my favorite thing I've written yet. We'll see. I started out as a fiction writer, and if I read any reviews that start with, "Journalist Bissell tries to . . . ," I'm going to scream as loud as I possibly can.