Last year I had written, in a horribly rambling manner, of my fascination for what I call "American Gothic", not just the painting by Wood, but the whole feeling about New England as a place haunted by witches and Puritans. I've never been to the US, so I guess my ideas will seem lamentably cliché. But maybe the very existence, in my mind, of that huge junkyard of ideas about the US and New England in particular could be material for a story.

I imagine the tale of someone who lands in Boston and from there makes his way first through Massachussets and Connecticut, visiting the old little towns and Ivy League campuses, and stopping at cliffside scenes, topped by a lighthouse, that look like straight from a Hopper painting, then goes up North to the great forests of Vermont and Maine.

The odd numbered chapters in his travel journal describe what he really sees: Hartford, Connecticut, the insurance capital of the world, with neat gleaming skyscrapers, traffic jams in the Big Dig at Boston, hardworking young people in Harvard, cheerful forest rangers in Maine. Travelling combines a huge amount of boredom and frustration ( complaining about hotel rooms, waiting for trains for hours then rushing in them to stare at the window for more hours) with some beautiful moments. In the odd numbered chapters, he dutifully records the quaint sights and conversations he has with some people who, he guesses, "are representative of the spirit of the place”.

The even numbered chapters will, you probably guessed it early on, record his imaginary travel in a New England where the sky is eternally overcast and all nights are thunderstorm nights. He is continually roaming in old cemeteries, hunting for epitaphs amidst the tumbled mausoleums of whaling magnates, hunting for mysterious cues of a hidden, long buried monstrous secret. We even see him scaling the walls of windowless bunkers of Greek fraternity buildings at Harvard and Yale, and somehow making his way inside where, stepping lightly next to drunk, deep sleeping frat boys, his trembling fingers reach for a dusty tome on the ancient bookshelves. As he opens the terrible Necronomicon and recites its blasphemous verses, the very air seems to shiver, and a hairline crack appears in the old streets of Providence, Rhode Island…

Well, Gao XinJiang already used this technique in “Soul Mountain”, in which he travels in the remote valleys of Sichuan, and the chapters alternate between realistic ethnography and a tormented soliloquy/ dialogue with an imaginary girl. Frankly speaking, you get quickly bored of the soliloquy bits, and start to skip over them. It is the same with this story I’m thinking of : realism and fantasy are bad sleeping partners, and the reader would quickly start paying more attention to the journey in the real New England, while the imaginary bits would sound childish ( just the above few lines in the preceding paragraph, already....). Reading a story asks for a suspension of disbelief, it is a mild form of hypnotism. But travel writing is a hybrid genre, it mixes the romance of travel with the grave concern of journalism at the state of the world. It is hard for a reader to keep switching from one mood to another, and in the end he settles for the realistic part, the way someone who cannot go back to sleep finally puts on the light and starts reading a newspaper.

Yet clichés, like all deeply entrenched ideas, have a powerful hold on reality, as they influence our view of the world. We spend enormous amounts of time and money to travel to places because of images of temples in India, palm trees in the Tropics and romance in Paris. However much I may try to put aside my odd obsession with New England, it keeps lingering in my mind, like the sleepless man who, though he keeps on reading his newspaper, yet cannot forget a tenacious dream.

Given that a trip to New England would be a rather expensive therapy, I guess a cheaper way out of it would be to ask myself what it is about the place that fascinates me so. Its prestige, I think. It has quite some of the allure of England (the Ivy League universities, the writers like Thoreau, Melville and Poe, the pretty old towns) combined with a pretty grandiose landscape too: huge forests, beautiful coastline. I’m especially fascinated by its coast - I who live in super duper palm beach island, have a bizarre craze for cliffs and lighthouses in cold countries. I keep remembering that old footage of Kennedy at the helm of his yacht, off the coast of Hyannis, Massachussets. Maybe for me, New England combines some of the allure or snobbery of Europe, and the rugged grandeur of America. It sounds so pat when I spell it out.

Let’s leave it at that and not talk of the other things that New England evokes for me - Lovecraft, the witches of Salem and all that. Some things are better left unsaid....