Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven

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This memoir details the author's 1986 post-graduation trip to China with a classmate from Brown University. It's a great read, with good writing and a brisk pace (as they say). Though her story is a little more extreme than most people's tales of their first independent trip abroad, in essence it's quite familiar: meeting other travelers, trying to get "authentic" experience, being disappointed by the banality of most locales. The fact that she makes her story interesting is a testament to the loyalty she retains to her younger self. She reconstructs with great care how it feels to be that age and experiencing these things for the first time.

But what I most admire about it is the way the author, Susan Gilman, balances the immediate perspective and the long perspective. Writing some twenty years later, she's clear about how foolish and unprepared she and her friend were. Painfully, cringefully clear. But she also gives due to the romance of travel and the way it can change a young mind---they way it can be, in short, everything a young, naive mind hopes it will be.


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