Shenzen Zen: An Accidental
Anthropologist’s Decade of Life, Love, and Misadventure in the Middle Kingdom
Justin Mitchell
Telford Garden Press
2018
The
only reason you need to purchase and read Justin Mitchell’s new memoir of his
journalistic adventures in China, Shenzen
Zen, is that it contains this sentence:
“I
never thought that at the same time next year I’d be spending the afternoon of
my 51st with an apparently autistic 4-year-old Chinese child on a
beach with signs forbidding ‘Whoring and feudalism.’”
OK,
there are more reasons.
Mitchell,
long-time reporter and editor for American publications wholesome and unsavory,
found himself living and working in China from 2003 through 2012, moving from
one journalism gig to another as one does — or rather, once did back when there
was a plethora of publications to drift among. The resulting adventures could
have filled a book, and did.
(Please
note, I have been reading Justin for 40 years or so. I grew up reading his music
writing for Denver’s late lamented Rocky
Mountain News. Years later, I met him in a drug-fueled haze somehow
associated with our mutual involvement with the pioneer regional TV program HomeMovies, and have tracked him ever
since, through gigs at such stellar rags as the Weekly World News, where he crafted lifestyle pieces such as “Melt
Flab Away with the Roadkill Diet!.”)
His
chronicles are great — like the best journalistic prose, his writing is snappy,
to the point, and insolent. There is not one scrap of high-minded analysis
here, nor the stench of any self-righteous soul-searching. Instead, Mitchell
does what one is supposed to do. He tells us his story in as straightforward,
honest, and entertaining manner possible, and succeeds.
Mitchell
doesn’t tread on the ground of history here (although he did dub Hong Kong’s somewhat
infamous “milkshake murderer”). He stays in the zone of real life, at ground
level, dealing in the daily details that define a life no matter where it’s
lived. He looks for a decent place to live, tolerable food, cheap bars, and
lively female companionship and even affection.
The
politically correct will not tolerate this book; a few chapters in they will
shriek and puff themselves inside out like a kernel of outraged popcorn. The
rest of us will thoroughly enjoy it.
To
be sure, Mitchell doesn’t hold back on sarcastic commentary, skewering the hypocrisies
of the Chinese system, the ugliness of the Western visitor, and their mutual
cultural incomprehension. Above all, he doesn’t kid himself, and we get a
warts-and-all self-portrait as well. The result is an eloquent, raw,
sharp-toothed take on a life, in a style that bears far more resemblance to
reality than that of many memoirists.
Journalists
and comics are a lot alike. Both populations consist of inveterate gossips,
excuse-makers, lowlifes, guttersnipes; bitter, twisted, sociopathic, and
bitterly funny humans. Neither profession sports a union, for the simple reason
that there is no solidarity in them besides at the bar rail. And both know how
to tell stories. Mitchell’s books is crammed with them, and most are
laugh-out-loud funny (OK, he’s not a clown — he breaks down and gets serious
when appropriate).
So
do yourself a favor and read someone with no redeeming social value, but plenty of human value. Shenzen Zen is a good time.
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