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Beachcomber in the Orient
Journalist, storyteller, and ragtime piano player Harry Foster is back. From a mugging in a Vietnamese opium den to hopping a freight train down the Malay Peninsula to a waterfront bar in Singapore to a sing-song theater in China, Foster never fails to show the squalid side of life in a glorious adventure to the wild countries of Southeast Asia during the Roaring 20s.
Hardcover
First published January 1, 1923
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
August 9, 2022
My second Harry L. Foster travel book. And the two I've read are feature works from the Golden Era of Travel Writing (the interwar years, 1919-1939). In the earlier work of Foster's I just finished a week or so ago, he traveled throughout Mexico and Central America. This time, the focus is on the year long trip he took to Southeast Asia and East Asia. Also as a matter of coincidence, a few days ago I completed E. Alexander Powell's Where the Strange Trails Go Down, another Southeast Asia travel book published a couple of years before Foster's. Even though both authors tend to reach similar conclusions about the places they visit, their style could not be more different. Powell, who had the support of the American governor-general of the Philippines and the use of a US Navy coast guard cutter, writes more in the manner of someone documenting the first draft of history. Foster, on the other hand, provides a personalized account of things--his book seems like a novel most of the time. He travels on his own and several times ends up penniless along the trail he marks.
Foster was aware of Powell, it should be mentioned, and even quotes him, while noting he took the same steamer Powell took between Siam and Saigon. Foster, however, went in the opposite direction. Whereas Powell jumped off in the Philippines and then going to Borneo, Sumatra, Java, peninsular Malaya, Siam, and Indochina before embarking back home, Foster landed in Hong Kong only briefly before setting off to Saigon, where he is waylaid and loses all his money in an opium den. He then took a remarkable journey through the interior of Cambodia and through Siam to Bangkok. At that point, without any funds whatsoever, he pulls on his backpack and begins to walk the 1000 miles to Singapore. Yes, Harry L. Foster may have been the first backpacker to go through what is now Thailand. He sure sounds like one, eking out a few coins here and there, but all the while able to get himself in with American consular officials and wrangling invitations to meet royalty and high ranking government officials.
Many a contemporary reader will likely blanch at Foster's blunt remarks about nationality, race, and ethnicity. But to be fair, he attests to liking everyone. Except the Chinese. And he is always reminding himself of his own flaws in generalizing stereotypes, in almost every case admitting that he ran into people who undermined his prejudices and dislikes. Most of all, Foster seems to like the Siamese, Filipinos, and Japanese. Like Powell, he is an enthusiast for American colonialism in the Philippines. In fact, he is eager to contrast American colonialism, which he calls philanthropic, with British colonialism, which he declares to be nothing but economic exploitation. Moreover, if there is one group of people Foster dislikes more than the Chinese, it is the British. I'll leave this review with a comparison, he makes, between the English and the Americans:
"The Englishman is never glad to meet you until you've proved that you're quite all right; the Yankee is glad to meet you until you've proved that you're not all right."
Like Powell, Foster notes the dismissive and corrupt goings on in British North Borneo and the looming trouble brewing in French Indochina, because of both European people's treatment of their colonial populations. He ends up saying, in fact, that the White Man will deserve everything bad coming to him, because of his high-handed ways and indifference to humanity's wellbeing.
Foster died young, at age 37, in 1932. so he never lived to see the Pacific expansion of Japan, which he predicted, and the coming war it would ignite. Nor did he live to see China emerge united and turning its numbers of people into a commercial giant that would threaten American and European hegemony, although he predicted it. Too bad, because there are a lot of "I toldya so's" that Harry Foster could have delivered to the contemporary American/European expatriate in Asia.
Foster was aware of Powell, it should be mentioned, and even quotes him, while noting he took the same steamer Powell took between Siam and Saigon. Foster, however, went in the opposite direction. Whereas Powell jumped off in the Philippines and then going to Borneo, Sumatra, Java, peninsular Malaya, Siam, and Indochina before embarking back home, Foster landed in Hong Kong only briefly before setting off to Saigon, where he is waylaid and loses all his money in an opium den. He then took a remarkable journey through the interior of Cambodia and through Siam to Bangkok. At that point, without any funds whatsoever, he pulls on his backpack and begins to walk the 1000 miles to Singapore. Yes, Harry L. Foster may have been the first backpacker to go through what is now Thailand. He sure sounds like one, eking out a few coins here and there, but all the while able to get himself in with American consular officials and wrangling invitations to meet royalty and high ranking government officials.
Many a contemporary reader will likely blanch at Foster's blunt remarks about nationality, race, and ethnicity. But to be fair, he attests to liking everyone. Except the Chinese. And he is always reminding himself of his own flaws in generalizing stereotypes, in almost every case admitting that he ran into people who undermined his prejudices and dislikes. Most of all, Foster seems to like the Siamese, Filipinos, and Japanese. Like Powell, he is an enthusiast for American colonialism in the Philippines. In fact, he is eager to contrast American colonialism, which he calls philanthropic, with British colonialism, which he declares to be nothing but economic exploitation. Moreover, if there is one group of people Foster dislikes more than the Chinese, it is the British. I'll leave this review with a comparison, he makes, between the English and the Americans:
"The Englishman is never glad to meet you until you've proved that you're quite all right; the Yankee is glad to meet you until you've proved that you're not all right."
Like Powell, Foster notes the dismissive and corrupt goings on in British North Borneo and the looming trouble brewing in French Indochina, because of both European people's treatment of their colonial populations. He ends up saying, in fact, that the White Man will deserve everything bad coming to him, because of his high-handed ways and indifference to humanity's wellbeing.
Foster died young, at age 37, in 1932. so he never lived to see the Pacific expansion of Japan, which he predicted, and the coming war it would ignite. Nor did he live to see China emerge united and turning its numbers of people into a commercial giant that would threaten American and European hegemony, although he predicted it. Too bad, because there are a lot of "I toldya so's" that Harry Foster could have delivered to the contemporary American/European expatriate in Asia.
May 24, 2024
Probably the first western backpacker account of Asia. Foster's racial prejudices are typical of his time. If one can overlook this, this travelogue is highly entertaining and humorous.
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