Globe Corner Blogs

J. Maarten Troost  has been Lost on Planet China, caught Getting Stoned with Savages and adrift in sea of The Sex Lives of Cannibals. Although he isn’t presently floating on a raft off a remote island in the South Pacific, it took some sleuthing to find him. When we did track him down, he was nice enough to respond to some of our questions.

1) Do you prefer aisle or window? (Please explain.)

Window, which is kind of odd because flying is essentially one long cardiac event for me. I do not like to fly. It is what it is and I try to live with it. But whenever I find myself looking down upon Afghanistan or Iran or the Kamchatka Peninsula I find that I feel all warm and fuzzy inside, unless there’s turbulence, in which case I whimper and sway as I try to find my special place.

2) According to your bio, you were born in The Netherlands to a Dutch father and a Czech mother, lived in Canada during your youth, and then moved to the United States. What do you identify as? Does this ever change depending on circumstances?

Yes, I suppose my sense of nationality is still malleable. Whenever I encounter Dutch backpackers I settle very easily into the rhythms of the cheese-eaters. Ditto the Canadians. And the Americans, of course. And I feel a certain fraternity with the Aussies and Kiwis too, probably because of my time in the South Pacific. But applying for American citizenship is very high on my list of things to do. I shall get around to it very soon, possibly this week.

3) What does the “J” in J. Maarten Troost stand for?

Jan, with a soft J. As a lad, I was called Jan-Maarten, which works just fine when you say it with a hearty Dutch accent. But once we moved to Canada, teachers began to call upon me as Jan with a hard J, which was unacceptable. And so I became Maarten, but I retained the J for publication purposes because to lose it – for me, in any event – suggested a renunciation of familial history and this I did not want to do.

4) That tiny Baltic Island whose ferry is never running, or the pueblo in Taos that is always closed for an indigenous ceremony – we’ve all got a place that fate doesn’t want us to get to. Is there a destination that still eludes you?

There’s so much of the world I haven’t seen – South America, Africa, the polar regions, Cleveland. I have a little family now, and they are finally of age when taking them to the far corners of the world is worth the rigmarole, though my youngest remains a finger-sucker, which could be problematic. Lately, I have been trying to convince my wife that in light of the debacle that is the real estate market, we should just abandon home ownership and instead buy a sailboat, a big one, a 45-footer or so, and spend a year sailing the Caribbean and then onward to the Seven Seas, where we’d homeschool – or sailschool – the kids and show them the wonders of the world and allow them to experience the magnificence of life at sea. So far, she is having none of it.

5) Bill Bryson, Julia Child, Mark Twain – which one would you have dinner with? Share a train cabin with? Step into a boxing ring with?

Dinner? Well, Julia Child, duh. Train? Tricky one. I think I’d go with Bill Bryson, whereupon I’d ask him how exactly was he able to write a book – a good, very entertaining, informative book – about walking the Appalachian Trail, a trail which he did not come anywhere close to finishing and which consisted largely of him ambling through a forest. I’m thinking for me, a walk through a forest, that’s seven pages, ten pages max of material. And yet he writes this really fun book – a whole book! – which to me is an awesome literary feat, given that – let’s be honest here – trees really aren’t that interesting. So that leaves boxing with Mark Twain. I think I’d just raise my arms, concede defeat, and then we could talk about all the different times we tried to give up smoking.

6) In The Sex Lives of Cannibals, you describe La Macarena as constantly blaring. If La Macarena is the soundtrack for The Sex Lives of Cannibals, what would the soundtrack for Lost on Planet China be? Did you sing it at a karaoke bar?

I have sung Hotel California at a karaoke bar in Beijing, an act of dissonance I have yet to surpass. As for the soundtrack to Lost on Planet China, perhaps What’s Going On by Marvin Gaye, something that would express my complete bewilderment at the goings-on around me.

7) Everyone eats weird crap in China. What was your strangest culinary experience?

See, the funny thing about wandering around China when you don’t have an aptitude for reading Chinese menus is that more often than not you really don’t quite know what you’re eating. This can be very exciting when traveling in a country whose unofficial motto is “We eat everything with four legs except the table and everything with two legs except Man.” I was largely reduced to a point and hope diner, and on the occasions when I’d share a meal with a native companion very often they’d begin the meal by saying that they’d only inform me what, precisely, I was eating once I’d consumed it. And so I found myself munching through donkeys, frogs, goose intestines, cow veins, yak (loved the yak momos in Tibet), the mysterious Fish That Tastes Like Pork, and lord knows what else. As for a really memorable meal, it’s hard to top the squid special on the island of Putuoshan. The squid, well, the squid were not dead.

On an experiential level, China is a polarizing country of contradictions and sensory over-stimulation. You have been described as, “never once pretend[ing] to understand the sprawling inscrutable mess that is modern China.” Did you have any redeeming experiences of China?

Well, the book is based on a three month trip (odyssey?) to China, and as I’m sure any Sinologist would agree, I think it would be a trifle presumptuous to pretend that in such a relatively short time I’d somehow be able to peel through every layer of the onion that is China. So I wrote about the country as I experienced it. Some of it was a downer – pollution, repression, pollution. Did I mention the pollution? But much of the experience was exhilarating or baffling or mystifying and that alone – those sensations – makes it all very redeemable IMHO.

9) Hemingway Challenge: Ernest Hemingway was once challenged to write a novel in six words. What’s your six word travel story?

The six word Hemingway story is very sad. And also very good. And kind of un-topable as far as six word stories go. All I can offer is : One-way ticket. Be back later.

Read more: Author Crush, Author Interview, Book Reviews, China, J. Maarten Troost, South Pacific, The Sex Lives of Cannibals, Travel


Lisa can usually be found staring longingly at the Eastern European shelf at the Globe Corner Bookstore. However, she really wants to go to Colombia.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS