Guy Delisle, Shenzhen: A Travelogue from China (Drawn & Quarterly, 2006); $19.95, hardcover.

By Taylor Nelms and Eva Yonas

Guy Delisle is bored. He works as director to an outsourced animation team in Shenzhen, China, and has found himself isolated in a strange land without anything to do or anyone to talk to. Shenzhen is his travelogue—a loosely-structured depiction of his temporary stay in the Far East. He struggles with the language barrier (he is a French-Canadian who converses mainly in English), cultural differences, and general feelings of alienation. Unfortunately, in part a result of his boredom, the book quickly loses focus and degenerates into a series of unconnected and uninteresting anecdotes.

Shenzhen is the follow-up to Delisle’s 2005 critical success Pyongyang, which relates Delisle’s time in the capital city of the secretive communist nation of North Korea. Delisle’s observations have changed little since Pyongyang, and he treats North Koreans and the Chinese with the same dismissive attitude. Full disclosure: even though Pyongyang received many well-deserved accolades, we often found its treatment of the complexity of the North Korean political situation rather shallow. That said, there is much to be learned from Pyongyang, especially in Delisle’s careful depictions of the city and the lives of its residents. In Shenzhen, however, we are provided with little to contemplate except Delisle and his boredom.

The one thing that does come across in Shenzhen is the tedium of Delisle’s stay. Delisle occupies his (and the reader’s) time sleeping at his desk, fiddling with light switches, and even watching mold grow. In fact, the colors and patterns of this mold are a major point for Delisle and one to which he returns regularly and with great interest. That is, until a maid cleans his desk. Oh well. Back to sleeping.

To be fair, this persistent boredom may indeed be Delisle’s point. In that sense, perhaps Shenzhen is a success: we wander aimlessly through the book, just as Delisle does through the city. As an accumulation of randomly compiled vignettes, the novel reads quickly, but it suffers from this lack of narrative cohesion. With often up to three separate stories on the same page without any transition, Shenzhen can be jarring for the reader to follow. Eventually, the episodes seem to blend together, just as Delisle’s three months likely did for him.

Perhaps the most interesting stories in the book take place outside of Delisle’s experiences in Shenzhen—either memories of stays elsewhere in the world or narratives about the short vacations he takes while in China. He is clearly enchanted with the Sino-Western experience of Hong Kong, and he thoroughly enjoys himself on a weekend trip to Canton (“It’s a city I think I could have grown attached to”). It is clear, however, that Delisle dreads living in Shenzhen, which he characterizes early in the book as one of the levels of Chinese hell (á la Dante’s Inferno).

Many of the book’s redeeming moments are found in the few points of connection with Chinese society (such as a touching Christmas spent with a coworker) or in Delisle’s descriptions of animation techniques. At one point, Delisle comes across a collection of children’s stories and is motivated to begin his own Chinese-inspired graphic novel, producing one of the most visually stunning sequences in the book. Generally, however, Delisle’s art is evocative of the rhythm and grime of Shenzhen and of travel in general. Shenzhen reads like a sketchbook, composed of rough, smudgy pencil drawings that at times feel unfinished. They are not, however, simplistic. Rather, Delisle is a skilled and flexible draughtsman and his compositions evoke a variety of moods, situations, and expressions. In fact, the large architectural splash pages that approximate chapter divisions are perhaps the best window Delisle provides into life in Shenzhen.

Delisle extends the detail he uses in reconstructions of the urban environment to the many characters who populate his book. His own self-portrait, however, is highly abstract: an oval with a point protruding from its side, two dots for eyes, and some dark markings for hair. This almost cubist interpretation comes as a stark contrast to the individualized features he creates for those around him. One splash page is devoted to a large crowd scene—a sort of “Where’s Guy?”—but he stands out not because he is Canadian or white or a foreigner, but because he has relatively few facial characteristics. This attempt to create an everyman persona, however, serves more to further isolate Delisle than to make him an accessible narrator.

Outside of a few accidental encounters and his adventurous culinary decisions, Delisle never moves beyond the boundaries of his comfort zone, and the result is a trip that is for the most part unremarkable. Indeed, the most generic experiences define the novel: watching a man slip on a banana peel or meeting someone with six fingers. What excites Delisle is not cultural difference, but neither is it cultural similarity. Instead, what captures his attention, and what he presents for us to read, are experiences he could have had anywhere in the world with the exact, humdrum response. Delisle’s days begin to blend together for him so much that at one point he attempts to have two completely similar days. Unfortunately, his experiment fails. “Oh well,” he writes, “at least that makes one day less left to go.”

So goes the reading of Shenzhen. While not poorly written, and at times beautifully drawn, Delisle says nothing. Superbly rendered and artistically interesting, Shenzhen leaves the reader without a coherent message or any deep understanding of China or life in Shenzhen. In the end, it feels rather like a forced follow-up to the much more interesting Pyongyang.