Encountering Chiang Yee: A western insider reading response to eastern outsider travel writing

In this qualitative study, using reader response methodology, I examine my own written responses to the travel writings of Chiang Yee, "The Silent Traveller." My objective is to explore and delineate the personal dynamics of reading intercultural travel writing, that is, travel writing in which one's own culture is the object of the outsider's gaze. Chiang Yee (1903--1978) authored twelve Silent Traveller volumes in English between 1937 and 1972. He offered a Chinese painter-poet's view of his experiences in the West, primarily in cities. I review his works as travel literature in the context of his era---both in China and the West. I then examine author/reader issues in insider/outsider situations, particularly in light of Edward Said's orientalism thesis, which is treated as a theory of reading and response. I also review the applicability of reader response theory and methods to non-fiction literature.; For the study, I selected for response text samples and paintings from five of Chiang Yee's works. I wrote thirty-two interrupted reader response logs of approximately 800 words each. These response logs were subjected to a sentence-by-sentence analysis using the Purves and Rippere system of elements of writing about a literary work. Results of this analysis yielded clusters of statements which were grouped thematically. The themes illustrated the complexity of reading intercultural writing: (1) the process and perception of reading unconventional texts; (2) shifting planes of author/reader identification; (3) dilemmas of cultural representation and comparative values; and (4) instances of author and reader figuratively testing each other's tolerance. Dilemmas of difference in home and away, familiar and strange, superior and inferior are contrasted with axes of similarity, cosmopolitan tolerance, and the role of art in mediating cultures. The conclusion summarizes emergent themes in the personal experience of reading and responding to intercultural texts and discusses new directions in the pedagogy of writing and reading in a world of converging, incongruent cultures and identities.