New 06.25.05

For Christmas, my sister from Eugene, Oregon sent me an autographed copy of Lynette Chiang's book, The Handsomest Man in Cuba. I bet you've never heard of it. Every hear of a Bike Friday? Neither had I. But there was a Bike Friday brochure in the book when I unwrapped it. Bike Friday first, since it's easier to explain. Bike Friday is a company in Eugene, Oregon that makes Bike Fridays (perhaps it should be Bikes Friday?). The product is a "performance travel bicycle." some models of which can be packed in suitcase that airlines will accept as luggage. The bikes are custom made for your size and claim to be superb road bikes even if they are small and foldable. Lynette Chiang's book is subtitled "An Escapade," and it describes her three months of travel around Cuba on her Bike Friday. The story she tells is intriguing on several levels. She was biking and travelling cheap. Many times she found private unlicensed homes that rented her a bed or a place to pitch her tent, so she paints a picture of Cuba that Americans are not going to get from US media. She meets people in poverty with the wealth of family, love, and community. She finds unexpected generosity toward a foreign (and presumably affluent) tourist. It is a sympathetic portrait of Cuba unlike anything this American has read before. It's also interesting because of the way Chiang comes to terms with accepting generosity from people who live in poverty more debilitating than the voluntary "simplicity" she has chosen for herself on her trip. Back in her home in Sydney, Chiang was a computer programmer and a hotel manager. In her adopted home of Costa Rica, she was creative director of a branch of a large New York advertising agency. Yet, she adopted the frugality, but not much of the generosity of her Cuban hosts, and she agonized over her decisions. Finally, the tale is intriguing because it is the story of a young woman seeking a way to fit in naturally somewhere. Having a Chinese father meant she didn't fit in easily in her native Australia. As a Spanish-speaking, Chinese-looking Aussie, she didn't fit in easily in Costa Rica. Nowhere she traveled in the UK or Europe offered places to fit in. She did not belong in Cuba, no matter how much she tried to live in poverty. Toward the end of her tour around that island, she has a couple hours, dressed in floppy pants and shirt and dark glasses when she feels people are not staring at her. Then a young man whispers as she passes, "China, bella, linda" (lovely, beautiful Chinese girl), and her bubble bursts. The only postscript to the tour is on Chiang's web site. I enjoyed her book even though it wasn't as reflective or conclusive as I'd have liked. The book was not written at the end of some defining moment, but rather at a rest area on the route. Joe Kurmanskie, under his pseudonym the Metal Cowboy wrote in the preface that the book is "by turns, introspective, charming, and thoughtfulä[it] packs in what so many travel adventures discard; the emotional landscape of a country and the interior map of the person exploring it." I second that thought.