Reading Gould H. Thomas' memoir on his years working for Texaco in China of the mid-to-late 1930s is stepping into a world that simply doesn't exist any longer. It's a wonderful read: the pace moves well and while, beyond Gould, you don't meet many characters you feel much attachment toward -- the book is, after all, taken from the author's diary -- you come away with a good sense of what life in the 1930s was like for an articulate young man with a high sense of adventure.
Thomas is a innocent abroad of sorts. As a Western businessman in China, he lived the good life. But as a first-time traveler truly interested in the "Orient'' of the 1930s, he also reveled in documenting all he saw and felt, and in seeing and experiencing as much as possible. That's what makes reading this memoir 70 years on such a marvel. Thomas really wants to understand this strange new world and its creatures, and happily ventures into the rural hinterlands on Texaco assignments with only a Chinese office helper as companion. Taken along for the journey via his dairy, you're allowed a peak into a past that is lost to us now. Mass communication and travel have erased both the intimacy and the reckless abandon of Thomas's age.
Where today can you find a major city without any Western presence? Where today would an entire hotel staff come out to greet a customer because he hails from a distant land? When's the last time you became "jolly good friends'' with a fellow travel mate?
On his way to China, Thomas writes of walking the streets of a Toyko where not another white face was to be found. He writes of watching a Japanese hotel staff at work and of realizing that "Western superiority'' might not be as claimed. Yet he is also a man of his era. It's jarring that he is hardly bothered by the multitudes of missionaries he meets at the best restaurants and hotels in a clearly impoverished China, or by the fact that the countries's finest port cities, where businessmen are based, are "international zones'' where Chinese laws do not apply.
But here I'm imposing my much more jaded 21st-century mindset on Thomas's open 20th-century memoir. Thomas clearly loved his years in China and recorded them well. As he put it, writing as a brutal war with Japan loomed, "I have to admit there is quite a bit of zest to living over here just now.'' From the tales he has to tell, I'd have to agree.