Gaiman meets China
China was absolutely fascinating. I spent about five weeks traveling across China and I have to go back there early next year for round two. It’s all for a nonfiction project. […] I’ve been feeling my nonfiction wings atrophying. I’ve turned into some kind of penguin. So I thought it would be really interesting to write about China and I’ve been fascinated about the legend of the Monkey King and that became the sort of starting point for me.
The story is one of the four great Chinese classical stories from the 16th century. And I got to investigate the real-life people that story was based on in the 7th century. I also got to travel across China where I had a variety of strange and wonderful events including bribing an elderly watchman to allow me into a closed-down amusement park filled with dark and dusty monkey statues. The park takes you through a story that ends in hell. This thing was an amusement park inside a warehouse so it was very incredibly dark and it closed down because people simply weren’t coming back. I did this walk where you start out in this fun, lovely, happy monkey story and you walk through that to the end of the warehouse where you are in hell and you watch all these demons crushing people before you stumble out into the daylight. I really can’t imagine any little Chinese kid turning around to their dad and saying, ‘Wow, I can’t wait to come back.’
from the LA Times
Very cute how the interviewer paraphrased that as "you start out with ‘Curious George‘ and end up in ‘Dante’s Inferno‘". To which Gaiman replied:
Yes, exactly, that’s it. I also had an old man try to sell me a human elbow by a ruined temple. But I had a wonderful time. Obviously with something as huge and old as China, you can only cover a little bit. I’m looking forward to getting back there and writing more about it.
