Although I have not been writing a lot this summer, I am doing a lot of stuff. I have five jobs (yes, five, I am not exaggerating) and I have an entertaining family, all in a city that I adore. On one afternoon outing with the family, we stopped in a new bookstore next to my old high school. My sister picked up a book to show me, because it was about China, and I was starting to annoy her about how much I talked about China. I flipped open the book to a random page and started reading. The author was explaining how Chinese people see themselves as the center of the world, just like we Americans do. “Great!” I thought. “A guy who wrote a book about my exact thoughts!” I made a mental note to get the book from the library, since libraries are a fun new part of my frugal lifestyle.

A few weeks later I got my hands on the book: Lost on Planet China, by J. Maarten Troost. Before I started reading, I read a few reviews of the book on Goodreads.com, a website I like to check once in a while. Most of the reviews raved about how funny this guy was. A few people wrote that this book convinced them not to visit China. Warning signals went off in my brain. Then I talked to a friend who was reading the book, and she said that it also made her reconsider any travel plans to China. Uh oh. Time to read this thing.

The situation is this: A guy leaves his family in California for a seven-month jaunt around China to see what it’s all about, and most importantly to write a book. He travels through many cities I visited: Beijing, Tai An, Nanjing, Hangzhou, Shanghai, and Hong Kong. Plus he got into Tibet and other western regions that I didn’t reach. The book is a 380-page account of his experiences, woven in with a bit of history, and capped off with strong judgments and sweeping assumptions. The first word that comes to mind when I think of Lost on Planet China is “boring.” The subtitle of the book is The strange and true story of one man’s attempt to understand the world’s most mystifying nation. And while I agree that China is mystifying, I do not agree that Maarten’s story is strange. In fact, for every “strange” tale that he told, I could one-up him with one of my own much more interesting tales. And that is with my only being in China for one month, compared to his seven months. I don’t think I did anything dramatically different than him in China, but somehow he came out with the book deal.

But beyond my assertion that my book about China would sell a lot more copies than his, I am concerned about the accusations and assumptions in this book. The two rules of writing are to be interesting and accurate. He blew the interesting part by having sub-par stories, but he reaches new levels of ignorance when it comes to accuracy. All of his claims play into the fear Westerners have of places like China, which is completely contradictory to his goal of “understanding” the nation. For example:

Maarten whines about the dangers of crossing streets in Beijing as a pedestrian. While Chinese drivers are indeed fast and furious, the pedestrian rarely faces danger. Anyone who is walking in Beijing for one minute realizes that all those bridges and tunnels above and below the streets are for pedestrians. He should go spend some time in Vietnam or Cambodia, where there aren’t even traffic signals, much less pedestrian bridges.

One of the biggest stereotypes about China is the spitting. Maarten mentions dodging puddles of spit and ducking out of the way of flying spit multiple times in his book. It’s true that spitting is a cultural bad habit in China. But with the arrival of both the 2008 Olympics and the scares of SARS and bird flu, the public crackdown on spitting has been huge. Sure, you will see people spitting in China; it will almost certainly be a man and he will almost always be old. But the habit is dying, and it has reduced a lot since Maarten wrote his book.

Here’s a fun one! Babies in China don’t have diapers; they have slits in their pants, and their parents just take them into the bathroom and hold them over the toilet. Now I know there are a million questions running through your head about this one, and I regret not asking my Chinese friends about the logistics of this system. But while I see this as a fun cultural difference, Maarten saw it as a health hazard. He claims to have seen kids pooping and peeing on the streets wherever he went. I never saw a kid do that and never saw piles of poop suggesting that it happened.

We all know that water is unsafe to drink in most of the world. Travelers also know that bottled water can be unsafe if the seal has already been broken. But Maartin suggested in his book something much more terrifying: that 50 percent of bottled water is contaminated. Whoa. First of all, what does contaminated mean? Is he talking about bottles that were being resold and resealed? Second of all, how did my friends and I drink multiple bottles of water a day and never get sick? I searched and searched for any documentation about contaminated bottled water in China, and I found none. Instead, I found an article about high school kids drinking contaminated bottled water…in California.

China has a billion people (literally) and sometimes the crowds are awful (Forbidden City) and that can get overwhelming. A solid guarantee for being overwhelmed is traveling during Chinese holidays and festivals. Maarten traveled during Golden Week, a time when all Chinese get the week off. Because of obvious complications with crowding, the government ended this holiday in 2007. If you know in advance where you are going and when, avoiding crowds in China is possible, just like other major tourist destinations around the world.

J. Maarten Troost is a writer, so I understand when he wants to use colorful phrases like “beseeched by beggars and hounded by pimps.” But when I realized he was talking about China, I was horrified. Granted, since I am a woman I was not approached by men asking if I would like a night with a hot Chinese girl. But Maarten’s references to beggars and shady characters are just baffling. Compared to my experiences in Washington DC, New York City, Paris, Barcelona, and countless other world-class cities, begging in China was nearly non-existent. I was never approached by anyone, especially not children.

One aspect of non-Western travel that people either love or hate is haggling. After a month in Southeast Asia, I was already used to haggling by the time I got to China. It was much easier in China, actually, because there were not as many Western tourists, so the shopkeepers weren’t really used to ripping people off. Maarten reportedly was ripped off all the time, by food-sellers, taxi drivers, and hotels. This really irks me, because I was robbed and cheated so many times in Southeast Asia by drivers; when I got to China, taxis put on the meter. Not only did they give us a fair price by locals’ standards, but when we would try to tip drivers for being extra helpful, they would refuse the money!

Maarten writes about everyday Chinese people as if they are tricky and cold-hearted, as well. I could not disagree more. No where else on earth have I met more strangers willing to help me. Every day in China I was blown away by a random act of kindness. Maarten mentions a few instances of people sharing food with him or having friendly conversations, but they are presented as an exception as opposed to the norm. He tries to make you really scared of Chinese people.

Here comes the big one: pollution. Yes, China is polluted, especially Beijing. Yes, people wear masks (in the summer) and people have reactions like coughing, itchy eyes, etc. However, Maarten uses terrifying vocabulary to describe the pollution; “apocolyptic” was his favorite term. While I cannot dispute that China is one of the most polluted places on earth, I can play a fun game to dispute his claims of “swirling clouds” of orange toxins throughout the country. The game is called “Find the Swirling Orange Toxins in my Photos of Beijing.” Go:

The point of all this is not to say that I am 100 percent right and Mr. Troost is 100 percent wrong. I do not think that he is guilty of fabrication, only of exaggeration. But that is a big problem and a disservice to his audience. Most of his audience for this book has never been to China. Maybe they were thinking about going, so they picked up this book to get some insight. After reading this, I don’t even want to go to the country he is describing! But his experience was not my experience. And your experience will not be his experience. He was writing a book, and the more shocking and sweeping statements he could make, the more likely people were going to think he was smart.

I do strongly agree with him on one thing: China is extremely mystifying and mind-blowingly complicated. You will read and see things in China that will shock your system. You can either reject or embrace it. There are huge aspects of China that I find disturbing, from human rights to pollution to personal freedom. But China is changing faster than any nation in history, and I am confident that these things will change in my lifetime. While I was traveling through China, I was reading The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. It’s that classic about the awful conditions of the meat packing factories in turn-of-the-century Chicago. So many of the issues in that book are relevant to China today: overcrowding of big cities, unchecked pollution, low standards of quality, inhumane working conditions, corruption and extreme gaps in wealth…the list goes on and on. As Americans, we have been through these exact same challenges. All nations have serious issues to deal with; the way we will all succeed is by working together, not pushing each other away. And I am afraid this book pushes us away. If you open this book, you may be closing your mind.