This is a provided review of Tom Carter's American Bum in China published by Camphor Press and reviewed by former the Beijinger editor Mike Cormack.

It usually takes time for fiction to handle current events; the wheels of publishing turn but slowly. There is therefore a first-mover advantage to getting a work out which captures recent political drama or strife, converting news reports into something a bit more lasting. If newspapers are the first draft of history, literature aspires to be eternal, and so stories of major events can come to greatly shape the public’s knowledge, or understanding, of what occurred.

With the current unrest in Hong Kong having now been going on for many months and with no resolution yet in sight, the first book to cover the 2014 Umbrella Movement in a storytelling format is a welcome read. Here I should clarify: An American Bum In China is not a novel; the disclaimer page emphasizes that it is “a work of creative non-fiction.” This genre, in taking known events and writing a narrative based on them, has a fine lineage, with Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood being perhaps the most famous example.

Here, American Bum is non-fiction in that it deals with the true story of an expatriate named Matthew Evans as he bumbles his way through China, Myanmar, and Hong Kong at the time of the Umbrella Movement. But it is creative insofar as its author, Tom Carter, shapes and organizes the material, evokes place and atmosphere, and draws out the significance and implications of what is happening to Evans. It is not a diary, still less a travelogue – it has higher literary aspirations than that, despite being slight, at just 130 pages.

The drawing out of the implications, in this book anyway, is the most interesting aspect. Evans is certainly a bumbler – in fact he’s almost Forrest Gump-like naif, ambling through scenes of historical significance without realizing what the hell is going on. In one sense, it’s useful and timely to have what some expats rather cruelly refer to as a Loser Back Home as a protagonist. Evans is not appealing: he’s slow, haunted by ill-health, and unattractive: when Carter first meets him, in 2010, Evans is “missing some teeth, he slouched defeatedly, he wore rimless spectacles, his jowls were pudgy and scruffy, his wheat-blonde hair prematurely thinning and the left corner of his bottom lip permanently dropping.” He comes from Nowheresville, USA (actually Muscatine, Iowa, pop. 22,002) and has no skills or talents to speak of. He is almost a cipher or Zelig character, or perhaps a fleck of flotsam carried on enormous geopolitical currents, too large for him to detect personally but which yank him hither and thither. On the other hand, he is not an appealing character: his actions are mostly worth reading about because of the setting, rather than because of him. For a story with no real secondary characters, that’s a pretty major problem.

His story, however, starts in the middle, with an illegal crossing from Yunnan (in China’s far southwest) to Myanmar, where Evans hoped to sell his passport but is picked up by police, shaken down, and sent through the border back to China. Then we’re taken back to the beginning, explaining how Evans came to be in China in the first place, drawn in by conversations on the internet and then swept up in the wave of Eastward US diaspora following the financial crash of 2007-08.

There is a broader symbolic point to Evans’ hometown, however: it was where Xi Jinping visited as part of an agricultural delegation, in 1985. Twenty-seven years later, Carter notes, Xi returned to visit as part of his “cornfield diplomacy.” But this was perhaps not entirely fraternal: Evans “believed the Chinese president’s visit to his hometown was intended to insidiously reveal to the world the ‘ass-backwardness’ of Middle America.” By this time in Muscatine, “all the family-run shops were shuttered, all the strip malls were empty, factories closed,” Evans says. There’s a good point here about how economic growth is the greatest ideological force, decline the greatest political condemnation – though of course one could find similar locations in China’s Dongbei rustbelt to make similar points.

Perhaps inevitably, Evans is first drawn to China through sex. It’s cruelly hilarious how he meets a girl, Xiao Hong, through Myspace but on arriving in China, she turns out to be a lesbian – or, at least, poses as one in order to repel his advances. He immediately goes back home, but still smitten by her (and the absence of anything else in Muscatine), he returns to China 18 months later. He subsists in Shanghai through Chinese messaging platform QQ and the charity of older women who use it, though one such woman captures the gap between Chinese dreams and Evans’ reality: “You’re not handsome! Foreigners are supposed to be handsome!” Having outstayed his visa, prison beckons, then deportation. But, muleheadedly, he returns to China yet again.

Evans’ adventures subsequently lead him to teaching at an agricultural university, then teaching English at another Shanghai college, posts for which he is painfully unqualified. Drummed out and penniless, he goes through Yunnan to Myanmar to sell his passport, is ejected, then subsists in southern China, skirting laws and the enforcement thereof.

Probably the main interest of An American Bum In China is Evans’ experience of Hong Kong during its previous tumultuous period in the Umbrella Movement in 2014. Arriving almost arbitrarily (on a visa run which is denied), Evans “hit bottom” there. Hong Kong is far less forgiving than the Chinese mainland: its laws are black and white, and being Caucasian offers few privileges. But the territory has its own problems, namely homelessness because of a lack of affordable houses, even for white-collar workers, so Evans hunkers down amidst workers sleeping on cardboard by the clock tower.

From here he is drawn into “listless vagrancy” (surviving on leftover fries from fast-food joints) until the concurrent unrest. Here, as always, Evans is a passive bystander rather than participant, an “idiot savant” insufficiently aware of the enormous events going on around him. He lives in the camp, saying, “It was kinda like arts and crafts class at a kindergarten: they just sat around colorin’ ‘n’ makin’ posters.” His total obliviousness keeps him there as the unrest dissipates, before eventually he finally heads home. You sense he learned nothing, felt nothing, noticed nothing.

While An American Bum in China is a fun read, the torpidity of the protagonist is a hindrance. Having minor characters to convey huge events and explain a radically different environment to the audience is a familiar enough tactic: C3PO and R2D2 in Star Wars and the hobbits in The Lord of the Rings provide a similar function. But the point there is not that they are unimportant, but that in times of tumult great deeds can be performed by anyone, great or small. Evans however is a truly inconsequential person and so his tale, despite the verve of Carter’s storytelling and the genuine feeling for both smalltown USA and modern China, feels inessential. It’s like being in a bar with strangers but a great band: you like it well enough, but you’re waiting for someone to really appreciate it with you.

Tom Carter does very well to draw out Evans’ story, to capture the declining towns of the Midwest, to narrate his friend’s exploits with humor, pithy realities, and insight, and to emphasize the political significance of China’s events. His prose is deft and his observations show an excellent knowledge of what he speaks. Fine imagery includes drunken faces “red as the People’s flag,” the “high-waistbanded” delegates of Xi’s agricultural delegation, and Shanghai’s “Shangri-la-di-da of space-aged skylines.”

However, there are one or two examples of misused words: “jurisprudence” does not mean “law” or “jurisdiction,” and “populous” does not mean “population.” But overall, An American Bum In China is entertaining, interesting, and illuminating of the interaction of the United States and China at that seminal period between 2008 to 2014, at the lesser end of their populations. I just wished for a tale that was more absorbing, which had an appealing foreground as well as background.

READ: What I Wish I’d Known Before I Moved to Beijing

Images: BioGamer Girl, Hanny Naibahao (via Unsplash)