Barnes and Noble Essay — 12 May 2012

Me and My Bicycle

Writing a novel takes a long time: manuscript and life twist around each other like a wisteria trunk on an ancient arbor. I circled the idea of writing A Lady Cyclist's Guide to Kashgar while doing a creative writing MA at Goldsmiths, University of London. English missionaries, I thought, deserts, China, camels...You have to be kidding.

Halfway through the course I got married and spent my honeymoon driving around New Mexico, Texas, and Arizona. We stopped off at a curious-looking bookshop/art gallery in a place called Van Horn. It was a very meta-experience. This was the small town of all the cowboy films and American road movies I'd ever seen. I was after a copy of Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire and the bookshop owner-who introduced himself as Ran Horn of Van Horn-went out back to get me his own personal copy to sell.

I read it as we covered miles of Texan desert and it was during this magical, slightly unreal journey that I came across this quote: "A man on foot, on horseback or on a bicycle will see more, feel more, enjoy more in one mile than the motorized tourists can in a hundred miles." Although it was quite a leap from reading Abbey in Texas to missionaries in China, something connected and the bicycle was the link. A voice in my head said: "Go for it."

This was my first taste of what I now (pretentiously) call the Apophenia Zone, or an attack of the apophenics. This is the part of the novel-writing process in which the whole world-everything read, seen, spoken, thought, wanted, or wished-is connected and meaningful to the book. Messages and stories come from all directions, each detail insisting on its relevance and inclusion. During this time I found a manual from 1896 called Bicycling for Ladies. I remembered the 1920s and '30s travel writing I'd been obsessed with a few years earlier. Each drawing in my sketchbook, each pigeon flying past the window, and each turn of my own pedal as I cycled through London dripped its essence into the novel.

Eighteen months later: I am sitting in the Special Collection basement of the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and I am eight-and-a-half months pregnant. In front of me are letters, diaries, and journals. The manic apophenics are replaced with calm historical research and I am trying to answer a question: Why did women missionaries choose to travel so far from home?

It is rich material. After World War I, with so many men gone, the viable alternatives to marriage for single women were few. There was a surge in applications to the missions and when new recruits arrived in Peking or Sinkiang they were confronted with huge city walls built to keep desert storms out; with houses that appeared to be inward-looking, with no external windows; with closed gardens and unimaginably confusing souqs and bazaars. In the midst of this exotic strangeness the missionaries shed European clothes and with them the modes of behaviours and restrictive social codes of home. They carved out radical, even revolutionary, lives.

Down in the basement, though, I am still trying to find a trapdoor in that will open up my story. I am looking for a pathway that will lead me towards the necessary architecture of my own novel which grows ever bigger. It is weighed down by too many ghost-words. With a kick in the stomach and a rush of heartburn, the idea comes to me: a baby, into one of these houses of childless, husbandless women, and the overwhelming emotions that come with the responsibility of doing everything in one's power to not lose such a creature.

When my son was one year old I knew there was nothing for it, I had to visit Kashgar. On the plane I wrote and rewrote a passage in my notebook, wrestling with a knotty plot problem. I needed my character to escape from a city with a baby in a bicycle basket, but was this feasible? I was worried. I was a lot more worried, however, when I arrived in Kashgar. In nearby Urumqi a riot was occurring. Muslim Uyghurs were uprising against Chinese authorities, and the tensions had spread to Kashgar. The entire region was in lock-down: no internet, no international calls out, and soldiers everywhere. When I did speak to my husband (he could call in) the line clicked: we were being listened to.

Alone in that hotel room I unwillingly became my character. She lived in the 1920s, sure, but I knew how it felt to be stranded in an ancient city, unable to comprehend the complex wars that were occurring outside. To calm myself I read a book I'd brought with me and was relieved to discover that when Lawrence Durrell and his wife Nancy fled Greece (in 1941, fleeing the Nazis) they carried their three month old daughter Pinkie in a pannier basket "like a loaf of bread." That, at least, was possible.

There was a knock on the door; it was a serious looking Chinese official. He informed me that foreign journalists had been requested to leave. I told him that I was not a journalist. He peered into my room where an open laptop, a notebook, and a camera were splayed across the bed.

On the long flight home I thought of Iris Murdoch's "bicycles are the most civilized conveyance known to man." For months afterwards I circled the city, with notebooks in my basket, until eventually the sense of freedom, flight, running away, and migration settled into my words and I found my way into the story.