What The On The New Silk Road Substack Is For
Where I've been and why I'm doing this.
I started this Substack at the end of 2019 with the goal of covering the New Silk Road / Belt and Road in a deeper, more conversation, and, hopefully, more entertaining way than I could on Forbes or The Guardian or the other, more conventional publications that I was writing for at the time. I felt that there were a lot of stories not being told during my three years of Silk Road travels and I really didn’t have a platform for talking about the cultures that I interacted with and people that I met.
No one publication, book, or writer is going to be able to fully cover something as vast as the New Silk Road. Some of us go out there, find out what’s going on, and report from the ground. Others sit in cubicles at news agencies or offices of universities and read every article, book, and report that’s published on this topic. It’s difficult — probably impossible — to do both. So we all do our part, contribute the type of information that manifests our strengths, and work together to present a broader picture of a colossal movement that’s shaping our world. This Substack is an attempt for me to enhance my contribution.
I also had an idea of being able to provide stock interviews, images, and videos that other journalists and researchers could use. I tend to collect massive amounts of content when traveling, and I only ever use a small fraction of it, so why not share it? It’s also a way of adding something a little more to justify a $5/ month subscription fee.
This intent seems to have resonated, as this Substack started growing fast right from the beginning, bringing in a surprising amount of free and paid subscribers. I looked at the metrics after those first few months and I was like, “This is going to work.”
Then you all know what happened next.
I’m not the kind of reporter who’s going to sit in his room and act like he knows all about the world outside. You can say what you want about me, but I’m not a frog in a well. So I put this Substack on hold and paused the paid subscriptions until the pandemic was over and I could start traveling again. I was thinking a three month hiatus. It ended up being three years.
Up to that point, my entire career (and life) was based on travel. I literally spent 20 years on the road, traveling through almost 100 countries. I didn’t have a plan for not being able to travel, and I didn’t handle it well. I basically shut down everything — I put a lid on everything that I was doing before and just tried not to think about it. I moved on to other intrigues: I started a film company called Real Life Cinema and finished editing a documentary about Melaka Gateway and the upheavals of the “culture wars.” I had a front row seat to J6 as part of the only professional film crew that was there, on other occasions I filmed people beating each other, stabbing each other, screaming at each other, and ultimately acting not much different than I imagine the Red Guards did during the Cultural Revolution.
It was the kind of clusterfuck that I thought I was made for documenting. But I couldn’t stomach it. There was no middle ground, no nuance — you were either on this side or that side. I looked to my left, I looked to my right, and they didn’t look too different to me — two groups of morons manifesting a perverted take on class war. As you probably can tell, I’m kind of a lone wolf out here; I’ve never been in this camp or that camp about China, or anything really. While I believe this benefitted my reporting in Asia, in America nobody wanted to hear it. There was a fight to be won, and someone pointing out the rationale of the other side really wasn’t helpful. So I dumped my footage with another film company for one of their documentaries and bailed.
I went on to work on some other film projects in New York — helped start up a cable news opinion / comedy show, made a bunch of videos for alcohol companies, comedy clubs, and restaurants. Fun, but kind of like real work — just trading hours for dollars — but I can’t complain.
But then the other day while going for a walk I realized that I can get back to my old life and pre-pandemic work. “What am I doing?” I asked myself. “I can go. Why am I still here?” I thought about it for a couple of blocks, put some pieces together, and then dove in to get back to where I was in March 2020.