Xu Xi, novelist Xu Xi is in the habit of dividing her time between New York, Hong Kong and, well, the world, and has long advocated a “transnational approach” to literature. Sequestered in upstate New York during the pandemic, she hasn’t found adapting to sedentary life easy. And, she says, she longs for Southeast Asia. “Although I was born in Hong Kong, I travelled for years on an Indonesian passport, which was funny because I couldn’t speak the language. I decided to address that in 2018 and started studying Bahasa Indonesia in Yogyakarta. During the lockdown I have been doing my classes online. If I make a trip [back to Indonesia] I’ll do it via Singapore and Malaysia, places I love.” Until that is feasible, Xu will be wallowing in regional fiction. “Over decades travelling, I saw the changes [in Southeast Asia] and I’m mostly reading novels that are set in those transformative moments. I’ve been reading Tash Aw’s We, the Survivors (2019). He’s interesting because he writes not just about the glamorous world of the transnational but of the ordinary world of Malaysians. He describes place, geography and background very well, so you get lost in this world. Even though he’s based in London, he has a kind of Southeast Asian sensibility, he shows us […] there are a lot of worlds woven into it. He doesn’t just describe the region, he actually makes you feel it. You get inside the characters and that’s why I feel like I’m there with him.” Xu also finds contemporary writing emerging from the Lion City fascinating. “Young Singaporeans are very cosmopolitan, they really understand the world. Plus the nature of the city is such a wonderful backdrop, all those skyscrapers – the modern world – in a rainforest, essentially. And that forest still exists, as do the old shophouses and colonial villas. I went there in the 1960s as a child and when I worked there in the 1990s, I could still sense what had been; it’s not all gone.” Xu says one of the stand-out contributors to a book she’s co-authoring, The Art and Craft of Asian Stories: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology , which will be released this year, is Inez Tan. The author’s debut collection of short stories, This is Where I Won’t Be Alone (2018), was a No 2 bestseller in Singapore. For Xu, Tan’s stories “evoke the language, history and people of Singapore”. She says, “A good example is the one titled ‘Lee Kuan Yew is Not Always the Answer’, where a teacher in a secondary school must contend with all her girls giving ‘Lee Kuan Yew’ as the answer to all their test questions. It’s a very funny story that manages to pinpoint quite a lot about the culture of the city, the significance of its independence struggle, and how that colours the way its people reflect on themselves, and what makes Singapore, Singapore.” Greece has also been on Xu’s mind during the pandemic. “I was invited last year to teach a summer school of creative writing at the University of Western Macedonia,” she says, of a course she ended up teaching online. “I would love to have gone back to Greece. I had a wonderful gap year there from 1980 to 81. If you studied literature, as I did, you can’t help but feel that influence. It’s not unlike the enduring power of Chinese culture and literature, especially poetry of the Song and Tang dynasties. Many ancient civilisations influence the literary imagination, and Greece is foremost among those for English-language writers.” Magnus Bartlett, publisher Like Xu, Hong Kong-based publisher Magnus Bartlett has found himself travelling vicariously to Greece and other foreign lands and centuries while grounded by Covid-19. “I find a lot of comfort in reading the Tang poets,” he says from his home on Lamma Island. “They understood that to reach peaks of joy you must cross valleys of great melancholy.” Bartlett has been publishing guidebooks about China since the late 1970s and is understandably keen to return. When asked where to exactly, he reels off the list of a seasoned Sinophile, including “breakfast in the art deco Peace Hotel, along the Bund in Shanghai”, and the “ancient cities of the Yellow River, which nurtured the great poets”. Bartlett’s literary gaze, however, has been drawn back to an old favourite, Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts (1977), considered a classic due to its evocation of youthful frivolousness. “Some people don’t like Paddy’s language, which is baroque, even flowery,” says Bartlett, “but I like writing to be like a good hike in the hills, with exertion required and some excursions inevitable.” A Time of Gifts is the first volume in a series that chronicles an overland journey from the Hook of Holland, near Rotterdam, to Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul) and on to Greece, where Leigh Fermor would settle and which would become his muse. “That’s the best way to go, overland,” says Bartlett, who travelled to Athens by boat and train as a boy. “My father had a house there and me and my sisters would visit each summer.” Overland European travel remains hampered by Covid-19 speed bumps, although tourism-dependent Greece is in the process of opening up to overseas visitors. “Greece is a lovely place to come up for air, especially if you spend a lot of time working in China. At its height, the scale of the Greek empire was equitable to China’s. Mary Renault’s historical novels, like The Bull from the Sea [1962], really bring that world to life. I think the Chinese admire this historic depth and like to travel there for that reason. But they’re quite different today. China is so very busy, industrial, but I would describe Greece as evanescent, everything matters but nothing matters too much. “You can just sip your coffee and lazily wait for your island ferry to arrive.” Jeremy Bassetti, podcaster Often mentioned in the same breath as A Time of Gifts is Laurie Lee’s As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (1969), a book to which Jeremy Bassetti, host of the Travel Writing World podcast, recently returned. “I think the secret is that the book captures a moment of innocence for both the character and for Europe,” says Bassetti, of the travelogue, which recounts the youthful Lee’s journey from a village in Gloucestershire, England, to Spain in 1934, and captured the zeitgeist of the 1960s hippie generation when it was published. “It is just inspiring to read a picaresque story of someone interested in making his or her own way, getting lost, and discovering the world. Inspirational to the young, the book also pulls the old into a wistful reverie about what could have been. Lee travels far, light and cheaply. He teaches us that we don’t need much, certainly not much money or baggage and perhaps not even a plan, to have meaningful experiences in the world.” Orlando, Florida-based Bassetti’s cerebral journeys have also taken him to China during the months of Covid-19 isolation. “I was planning to fly to Beijing before the pandemic shelved everything. I even downloaded WeChat,” he says. “I’m interested in the sacred mountains, in ways people think about mountains, not just as scenic places but as something spiritual or nourishing. All over the world, not just China, people look at mountains as sacred spots. Only in the West did we perceive them as warts on the land, something to be overcome.” Bassetti prefers to “steep himself in a place” before he sets off and has been reading Identity Reflections: Pilgrimages to Mount Tai in Late Imperial China (2004), by Brian R. Dott, and Stairway to Heaven: A Journey to the Summit of Mount Emei (2007), by James M. Hargett. “These two books chart the histories of the mountains. But they also touch on the ways other travellers and pilgrims have approached the mountains both literally and figuratively. As someone interested in travel writing, the context fascinates me, for spaces are meaningless without context.” Gareth Phillips, photographer Another mountain lover to have had his activities curtailed by pandemic restrictions is photographer Gareth Phillips. Before the Covid-19 outbreak, he had been working as a photojournalist in, among other places, Ladakh, India, as well as pulling together a documentary project on the Hindustan-Tibet Road. “Travelling the road to the Indian frontier, I read The Great Game in the Buddhist Himalayas: India and China’s Quest for Strategic Dominance [2019], by Phunchok Stobdan,” he says. “I was trying to get context of the complex geopolitical forces at play in the region. “I was also leafing through Ruskin Bond’s Landour Days [2002]. He’s a native of Mussoorie [in northern India], a hill station where I went to study Hindi for a while, and I actually got to meet him. His life and work is all about the Himalaya.” Nevertheless, it is a book about his mother’s native Scotland that has most inspired Phillips’ love of mountain travel. “When I first read Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain [1977] I was so affected by it I started buying it for everyone I knew. Anyone going to Scotland will have their journey greatly enhanced if they read this book first,” he says. “The book has a deep philosophical backbone. She writes as if the mountain has a heartbeat. It taught me how to meditate on the seasons, the subtle changes. That it was never about reaching the summit but a journey that didn’t need a beginning or an end.” However, as he settled into a flat near the south Wales coast for the duration of the pandemic, Phillips looked out to sea rather than up at the mountains “During the initial phase of [Wales’] lockdown, I picked up The Long Way ,” he says. Bernard Moitessier’s 1971 classic sailing travelogue begins in Plymouth, England, as the Frenchman embarks on the first round-the-world race for single-hand yachts, but takes a dramatic turn when he abandons the race while in the lead and carries on sailing far beyond the finish line, all the way to the Pacific. “I saw the pandemic in the text. Being alone and facing danger – you didn’t know what was happening, how big that storm was going to become. “Moitessier is someone who is able to articulate what it feels like to just aim for the horizon. I felt I needed to mind-wander back to some kind of freedom. I would look at the sliver of sea visible beyond my window as the long way to Tahiti and the French Polynesian islands where Moitessier eventually ends up,” he says. “Now that’s part of the world that is definitely on my list.”