John's blog

Coming from a village outside of the city of Riga, Latvia, Boris and Irina were not ready for the metropolis that is New York City. From the minute they landed on their gigantic 747 airplane, they felt like they were in a completely different world. Maybe the couple needed this completely different world in order to awaken themselves. Although they had been married for 3 years now, Boris and Irina seemed to have lost interest in one another. So one day, Irina decided for them to go to New York City (“the capital of the world“) so that they can experience the youth of their lives once again.

The taxi cab pulls up to the airport and Boris and Irina settle in their car. On the drive from JFK airport to their posh Midtown hotel in NYC, they were completely in awe with what they saw. The enormous skyscrapers that towered above their heads and the cars navigating the city’s vast networks of highways were too much to handle at once. They couldn’t believe how different their hometown was from this huge metal and concrete city. Once they arrived, they decided to start their stay off with a romantic encounter. Boris and Irina’s love life was a simple one coming into their stay in NYC. But once the couple saw the lavish hotel room, something clicked inside them. Boris and Irina indulged in twisted fantasies which included locking one another in handcuffs and aggressive forms of passion. The journey to New York had sparked something inside of them that they had not felt since before they were married. Once they were done playing their love games, the couple headed to one of the many buzzing cafes in Midtown and discussed their plans for the following day in New York.

“Would you like some coffee?” Boris asked Irina.

Irina who was too busy studying the map at the moment simply nodded.

“I cannot wait to visit all of the bars and exciting nightlife that New York City has!” she exclaimed.

“It will bring back the days of our youth,” Boris answered.

After consuming their espresso and having a salad, the couple went back to the hotel and prepared for a night out on the town.

“I think we should take the subway,” Irina exclaimed.

“You really want the real experience of New York I guess,” Boris answered.

After getting on the downtown 6 train the couple traveled to Greenwich Village and got off the train at Astor Place. When getting out from the subway, they saw a younger couple staring at them.

“Do you needed directions?” asked the younger man.

“We are looking for the Greenwich Village Lounge,” Irina answered.

“Oh its about 7 blocks from here. Why don’t you follow us?” the young woman responded.

“Thanks so much for your help,” Boris said.

The couple looked at one another and a grin appeared on their faces.

“You must be from out of town,” the man said.

“Yep. We are from a small town just outside of Riga, Latvia,” Boris exclaimed.

“Are you two related. Maybe you’re her uncle or older cousin?” the young woman asked questioningly.

“No! We are actually married,” Irina said with an annoyed tone.

“Oh. Sorry about that. Its just your husband looks so much older than you I didn’t even realize,” the woman said blushing.

The four people then walked through the city heading towards the nightclub. Boris and Irina looked up at all the skyscrapers and snapped photos of some of them. When they arrived at the nightclub, Boris and Irina let loose. They ordered drink after drink and shot after shot while the young couple simply watched them with grins on their faces. Irina wanted to dance and quickly pulled Boris to the dance floor. Irina danced provocatively to the hip hop beats being played in the club. Boris could hardly stand and went to sit down. After a while, Irina followed him and sat down on a couch. The young couple then made their move. They asked Boris and Irina to join them in their apartment in Brooklyn. Irina thought it would be a great experience because they would get to see NYC from behind the scenes in the outer borough. After all, Boris and Irina embarked on this trip to experience a new, yet real experience.

Boris and Irina awoke the next morning in a daze sleeping next to the young couple. All of the people in the bed were naked with their clothes remaining outside of the apartment door. Boris and Irina looked shocked at first and then tried to recollect what happened. Slowly but surely, their memories began to come back to them. Irina pictured in her head the wild escapade that the four had the night before. The couple noticing that Boris and Irina had awoken and begun to remember moved towards them again. NYC had changed Boris and Irina and you could tell this because of the way they were so accepting. Before Boris and Irina left the apartment, the four had an even wilder escapade than before this one filled with vodka, patron, grey goose, Budweiser, Heineken, Coors Lite. Boris and Irina thanked the couple not realizing they were taken advantage of headed back to their hotel room in Midtown.

Boris and Irina spent the next couple of days traveling the city and visiting the most famous sights such as the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, the World Trade Center and Times Square. The couple avoided the nightlife for a few days and returned to their hotel at midnight the latest on certain nights. The day before their vacation was set to end, Irina came up with an idea to visit another club while the couple was at the hotel restaurant eating dinner. So that night, the couple embarked upon another adventure, this time to Lower Manhattan.

Boris and Irina took the R train to Rector street and walked around the city with one of their many maps. Once again, like that other night when they went to the bar, they couldn’t find their destination.

“Lets ask for help,” Boris told Irina.

“Why? So we can find two freaks like last time,” Irina said laughing.

The couple decided to ask for directions and this time encountered a couple about the same age as Boris, around 40 years old. They seemed a lot more friendlier and normal then the first couple they encountered a few nights ago. They helped bring Boris and Irina to the nightclub and then decided to join them as well. Boris and Irina behaved the same exact way they did the first night at the nightclub. They drank excessive amounts of alcohol and even smoked a few cigarettes. They danced provocatively to almost every song and seemed to really be improving their relationship. After a fun night of dancing and partying, Boris and Irina were invited by the couple, Alex and Nicole back to their apartment up in the Bronx. Irina and Boris not learning from the last time politely agreed to come.

After arriving in the apartment, Boris, Irina, Alex and Nicole wined and dined while listening to music. It was a much different atmosphere from the last time they had stayed in an apartment. Irina didn’t like it though. She thought there was something fishy about the couple. She looked around the apartment and saw satanic references all around. All the rooms were painted a dark and uninviting color. She signaled towards Boris and spoke to him quietly.

“I don’t like the way this house looks.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“I don’t know maybe I’m just hallucinating but I’m getting a bad vibe.”

“Maybe you should take a nap? We are having a nice conversation going on over there and that will give you some time to relax and rest.”

“Alright that’s what I will do. I was feeling dizzy and queasy anyway so that might be the best thing for me to do.”

Irina slept peacefully until she was awoken by the shrieks of someone. She looked up and there was her husband bleeding profusely on the floor. She tried to intervene and help but she was whacked in the head with a kitchen pan by Nicole. As she struggled to get up she made a gruesome discovery. Her husband had been stabbed with something in his chest. He was gasping for air while Nicole went to help him. She had one last look at Alex and Nicole before Alex punched her right in the face.

It was sometime before she got up from the brutal punch but when she did she immediately dialed 911. She looked at the dead corpse of her husband and then looked at the empty bags that had their valuables in it. She transitioned into a dazed state and didn’t know what to do. When the cops arrived, they asked to talk to her but she couldn’t say a word. She wouldn’t drink or eat anything. The cops were left with only one choice and brought her to the hospital for an evaluation. Irina was distraught without her husband and her parents flew into NYC to come and get her. Irina walked like a zombie to the airplane waiting to take her and her family back to Latvia and left a completely changed person then what she was when she first arrived in NYC.

---THE END---

Interviewer: How did you come about writing the story?
Me: I came about writing the story because of my interest in NYC. Since I lived here all my life, I wanted to write my travel story on a place that I am faimiliar with. I also wanted to put a new mix into my story. Instead of having the main characters travel to remote places, I wanted them to travel to one of the biggest cities on Earth and then I wanted to show the effect of the big city on them.

Interviewer: What were your intentions in writing this story?
Me: When writing this story, I wanted to incorporate some typical themes of travel into my work. I intended this story to be a work that incoporated the elements of S&M, miscommunication, death, authenticity, drinking, romance, sickness, asking for directions/getting lost, maps, transformation and interacting with locals.

Interviewer: Why did you make the story the way you did?
Me: I structured the story in a unique way. I wanted to include some dialogue but let the focus of the story be on describing what the characters were doing. I incorporated all of the elements I mentioned above so that my story would follow the guidelines of most travel stories.

Interviewer: Why did you leave out the names of the first couple?
Me: I left out the names of that couple because I wanted that scene to seem like a quick blur for the readers. I wanted them to get the sense of miscommunication and obscurity that the characters in this scene were feeling with their encounter with the couple. 

Interviewer: Why did you start the story and end the story with coming from and going to the airport?
Me: I started my story with Boris and Irina coming from the airport so that I could put their transformation into greater light. I wanted to show the readers what they were seeing was astonishing to them and that it was completely different from their home. I ended the story with Irina going to the airport with her family because I wanted to show another transformation at the end as well. Irina wasn't the same person she was before she arrived in NYC and wasn't the same person that was in NYC either.

Interviewer: Was your age difference in the relationship a reference to Sputnik Sweetheart?
Me: Yes. I wanted my main characters to have a lot of years seperating them so that the readers can understand they didn't have a normal relationship. I wanted their relationship to be one of the main focuses of the story.

Interviewer: Why did you decide to not elaborate on the good parts of the trip in NYC but instead describe the unfortunate moments?
Me: By describing the worse moments of the trip I think this fit in with the themes that I was trying to imply in my story. These themes are used in most travel stories such as The Comfort of Strangers, Death in Venice, Sputnik Sweetheart etc. I didn't want to write a story that had to do with the pleasures of travel. My main focus was to present the dangers of travel that are accompanied with the search of transforming one's self and finding a new centre. By having my main characters go to a foreign land, this would show the longing they had to experience this change. However, foreign places may not always be the best answer to these themes. Often the natives of the lands these tourists visit can prove to be deadly which is what I wanted to expose to my readers.

Interviewer: Why did you choose to write the story in the 3rd person?
Me: I thought that it would be easier to convey the thoughts and discussions that the characters had by writing my story in this way. I wanted the readers to really gain knowledge on my main characters Boris and Irina. This is something they would have been unable to do if I wrote the story in the 1st person. By having the readers able to understand Irina's actions, this gives them a clearer interpretation of the story and they are able to see the change in the romantic lives of the main characters along with the change in thoughts of the main characters in general. 

Interviewer: You seemed to make many references in your story to The Comfort of Strangers. Why is that?
Me: The Comfort of Strangers was a big influence of mine. I wanted to put my own twist on this story and thought that NYC would be a perfect place to set a similar story. I also wanted to add different elements of S&M to my story then to what was put into The Comfort of Strangers. I also wanted there to be violent scenes and I wanted the story to culminate in death just like The Comfort of Strangers.

A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers by Xiaolu Guo is a unique novel. Unlike the past novels we have read, this novel features a different main character. Zhuang is a 24 year old girl who has not experienced much in her life so far. All she knows is China and its communist practices that were currently installed in that country at the time. She is very different from past main characters that we have encountered so far in this class because of the learning process that she must go through. Other main characters that we have encountered have came from Western Civilizations and traveled to the lesser civilized eastern populations of the world carrying with theme some knowledge and common sense that will help them travel the world. Zhuang however doesn’t have much of these characters and goes to London in search for language and love.

The novel follows the exact growing process that Zhuang undergoes throughout her year away from China. It starts off with the “prologue” in which the readers are introduced to the language that Zhuang currently knows. She says things like, “But I at neither time zone” (3) and “I on airplane” (3). Immediately we are introduced to the extent in which Zhuang will undergo a personal transformation in order to become “civilized” into the western culture that she is about to visit. We then see the cultural clash that develops in Zuhang‘s mind. Zhuang must deal with sorting our her past beliefs and customs in order to learn the “English” way of things. One of the most striking conflicts that Zhuang encounters is how to deal with the loneliness that accompanies traveling to a new and foreign place. Xiaolu Guo describes this by saying, “I always alone, and talking to myself. When sky become dark, I want grab something warm in this cold country. I want find friend teach me about this strange country” (33). Zhuang struggles with being alone because this is a concept that isn’t practiced in China. Zhuang goes on to describe how people work together in China but in England, people are totally out on their own. Zhuang is forced to discover how lonely people are in the western world in order to help her understand the broader conflict that she has an even tougher time uncovering which is love.

The most deepest conflict that Zhuang encounters during her stay in London is love. It is like Zhuang is a young teenager exploring love for the first time. Guo describes her by saying. “I need somebody protect me, accompany me, but not staring at me in darkness. I longing for smile from man…”(36). Zhuang is only interested at first in someone’s presence in order to keep her away from the lonely feelings that travel can sometimes have. This search to cure her loneliness instead turns into pure love with a man twenty years older than her. Zhuang is always trying to learn the language and at times this causes problems in the relationship. Her lover is sick and tired of explaining everything to her which causes the first real tension between the two of them. Their relationship becomes driven by sex like so many of the novels so far have displayed. Guo describes Zhuang’s feelings towards sex as, “I never really knew what is sex before. Now I naked everyday in the house, and I can see clearly my desire” (57). Their relationship becomes a lustful one in which they don’t really communicate as people in love would. It is a relationship that is more about sex than it is about anything else.

As the novel progresses, Zhuang continues to deal with western concepts such as “privacy”, “intimacy”, “surprise”, “custom” and “home” that are very foreign to her. She is like a child in that she must learn all of these principles for the first time. This impacts both her search for language and love because of the way that other people perceive her. After her lover suggests she travel to explore her self more, she sets out on a month long journey across Europe. Even throughout her journey through Europe, her passions and desires are not much different. She meets a man who she barely knows and has sex with him. She mingles with and stays with many different man whether in Berlin or Venice or even while waiting for the train to leave from the station in Amsterdam. All this is new to her and so she doesn’t know how to act properly in front of these men that she encounters. As the novel progresses towards the end, Zhuang realizes what her journey has done to her. Although she has searched for self-discovery and a transformation, she sees herself as lost. Guo writes, “But I must leave. I am losing myself. It is painful that I cant see myself” (272). Like the other novels we have read thus far, this one ends in a negative light in which Zhuang returns heart broken and perhaps even more lost to China then before she set out on her journey to “learn the English language” in England.

The Elephanta Suite is a novel that offers a unique interpretation on travel. It focuses on the individual journeys of two Americans in India. Both Dwight and Alice have different events encompass their journeys but each of the journeys follows the theme of using India as a way for them to discover themselves and as a way to exert power on the country in which they could not do back in the United States. Both Dwight and Alice also share the assimilation into the Indian culture as a prominent theme in each novella. They don’t simply travel to India and act as tourists while there. Both Dwight and Alice use India as a way to forget about their past lives and start new ones.

In “The Gateway of India” Dwight experiences new life while traveling to India. Paul Theroux writes, “Second trip, the life changing one” (85). On his first trip to India, Dwight goes about India through the view of tourists or foreigners who don’t take the time out to appreciate a foreign place. His viewpoint on India changes after encountering the real people that live in India. Behind the scenes of the glamorous business world, Dwight is exposed to the vicious nature of the Indian people. They are not into anything but making money and acting upon foreigners who are gullible. This is exactly what happens to Dwight in this novella. Dwight uses his desire for power and control to live in India. Theroux describes this by saying, “His sexual experiences in India had opened his eyes and given him insights. The world looked different to him” (133). Dwight becomes enraged with exploring his sexuality here. His life becomes controlled by visiting Indru. He uses her as a way to express his power and control over another human, something that he didn’t have back in the states. This is what the entire novella centers around is Dwight’s oblivious use of power and control. This need or desire to express his power and control eventually leads to him getting taken advantage of multiple times. He realizes that he may have not been in power this whole time at all. What seems like complete control and personal satisfaction to him, is viewed as foolery and mockery by the natives of India. The way in which he is humiliated however leads to him realizing the only thing he ever wanted. The novella ends with Theroux saying, “Craving nothing except more life- happy, seeing things as they were” (186). After his emotional and experimental journey throughout India, Dwight realizes what he wanted all along was a spiritual finding that will guide him throughout the rest of his life.

The third novella, “The Elephant God” is no different. Like in “The Gateway of India”, this novella features another oblivious American traveler, Alice. She acts similar to Dwight in that she thinks the people of India as her friends. She is unable to realize the true motives of the Indian people who are out to make careers and money and who stick together and trick foreigners into doing things that will profit them. I thought Amitabh’s description of his people proved this point well. Theroux writes, “Its funny how people come here from overseas- Americans, like you- and don’t realize how we are in constant touch with each other” (240). Like Indru and Shah realized in the second novella, Amitabh uses Alice’s oblivious nature against her. She is left with nobody to side with her except an elephant. This is where I think the title of the book becomes relevant. The elephant is the spirituality that Alice has been looking for all throughout her journey as well. Like Dwight who after traveling and undergoing misfortune, humiliation and manipulation by the Indian people found the centre that he had been looking for, Alice finds this at the end of the third novella. The elephant is her key to accomplishing freedom and the spiritual accomplishment that she had been looking for while in India. The novella ends by Theroux writing, “Then she pulled the long pin from the ring on the post, releasing the chain, releasing the elephant, releasing herself”. (274). After dosing out revenge towards Amitabh and getting that sense of power back like Dwight had at the end of his journey, Alice can be happy again and rejoice in song as she has found the fuel to help her proceed in her life. She has found the meaning behind her travels that she had been looking for.