Book Review: Rubies and Rucksacks: An Asian Odyssey by Mel Christie
Mel Christie’s Rubies and Rucksacks: An Asian Odyssey is a vivid, uninhibited collection of travel stories that captures the exhilaration, danger, absurdity, romance, and occasional loneliness of backpacking through Asia in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
The book consists of eighteen interconnected stories covering Christie’s travels through Hong Kong, Thailand, the Philippines, Singapore, Burma, Japan, and other parts of Asia. Although each story can stand on its own, together they form a larger narrative about a young traveler searching for what the subtitle calls “Life, Love, and Meaning.” The book’s three-part structure—“First Flight,” “Lost and Found,” and “Where the Heart Resides”—also gives the collection a sense of progression as the narrator’s experiences accumulate.
One of the book’s greatest strengths is Christie’s writing style. His prose is energetic, conversational, highly visual, and often deliberately outrageous. From the opening pages in Hong Kong, the reader is plunged into a world of neon signs, crowded streets, food stalls, noise, smells, strangers, cheap accommodations, and unpredictable encounters. His descriptions frequently feel less like conventional travel writing and more like being dragged through the experience alongside him.
The opening story, “Hong Kong, a Love Story,” is an excellent example. Christie transforms Nathan Road, Chungking Mansions, the Star Ferry, and Victoria Peak into almost living characters. His descriptions are particularly effective when he combines the physical environment with his emotional reaction to it. Hong Kong is simultaneously exciting, overwhelming, seductive, and alienating.
The humor is another defining characteristic. Christie has a willingness to make himself look foolish, naïve, lustful, frightened, or completely out of his depth. In “Rubies and Rucksacks,” for example, he is tempted into becoming an international gem courier despite knowing virtually nothing about rubies. Eventually, common sense wins out, and he backs away from the transaction. That episode captures one of the book’s recurring themes: travel means continually confronting situations in which the traveler has little idea what he is doing.
The book is also unusually candid about sex, drinking, drugs, prostitution, nightlife, and the sometimes reckless behavior of young travelers. Christie does not sanitize the world he encountered. That frankness will appeal to readers who enjoy memoirs that are raw and unvarnished, although some readers may find portions of the book excessive or uncomfortable.
Beneath the adventures, however, there is a more thoughtful book. Christie repeatedly returns to the question of belonging. His travelers move from country to country, form intense relationships with people they have just met, and then move on. The result is both exhilarating and melancholy. The narrator gradually recognizes that traveling can create a peculiar kind of homelessness: one can belong everywhere temporarily while belonging nowhere permanently.
That idea becomes particularly important in the later stories. “The Language Divides,” for example, moves the narrative out of Asia and into the United States, where the narrator again finds himself an outsider. The geographic displacement becomes a metaphor for the larger problem of identity.
The women in the narrator’s life are also important to the book’s emotional development. Jan, Karin, JoJo, Anyamanee, and others are not simply romantic episodes; their appearances help mark different stages of the narrator’s journey. JoJo in particular becomes increasingly important as the book progresses. The later sections show that relationships that seemed temporary during the travels can leave permanent impressions.
The story “One Night in Shibuya” is particularly effective in this respect. What begins in the atmosphere of Tokyo nightlife ultimately becomes a much more emotionally complicated encounter involving JoJo, attraction, jealousy, violence, vulnerability, and the possibility of genuine affection.
Christie also succeeds in making the historical setting important without turning the book into a history lesson. These stories take place during a remarkable period of change in Asia, including the final years before the 1997 Hong Kong handover and the political turmoil in Burma. The author's glossary and annotated bibliography reinforce the historical and cultural background behind the stories.
Another strength is the sense of authenticity. Christie openly acknowledges that the events have been reshaped by memory and narrative technique: experiences have been compressed, rearranged, and modified, while names and characteristics have sometimes been changed. That makes the book read as memoir rather than as a conventional travel guide.
The final section, “Where the Heart Resides,” gives the collection a satisfying emotional dimension. By this point, the reader understands that the journey has never really been only about destinations. The narrator has accumulated experiences, relationships, regrets, friendships, and memories. The epilogue brings JoJo back into the story and provides a fitting sense of closure to a relationship that has remained significant across the years.
The book is not without weaknesses. The prose is intentionally exuberant, but that exuberance can sometimes become exhausting. Christie frequently uses long, breathless sentences packed with slang, sexual references, jokes, observations, and sensory details. Some passages could have benefited from greater restraint. There are also moments when the narrator's youthful attitudes toward women, foreigners, sex workers, drugs, and different cultures may strike contemporary readers as insensitive or dated. In this case, however, those attitudes are part of the historical voice of the narrator rather than an attempt to present a sanitized contemporary travelogue.
Ultimately, Rubies and Rucksacks succeeds because it feels lived rather than manufactured. It is funny, crude, romantic, frightening, occasionally sad, and consistently curious about the world. Christie captures something that conventional travel books often miss: the disorientation of being young, far from home, and surrounded by people and cultures that you do not fully understand.
The book's deepest message is not really about Asia. It is about movement—the desire to leave the familiar behind, to test oneself, to take chances, to fall in love, to make mistakes, and eventually to discover that the search for meaning may have been occurring in the relationships and experiences along the way.
For readers who enjoy adventurous travel memoirs, particularly those interested in the backpacking culture of 1980s and 1990s Asia, Rubies and Rucksacks offers an entertaining and distinctive journey. It is a book filled with memorable characters, colorful locations, outrageous episodes, and moments of genuine reflection.
Overall, Rubies and Rucksacks is an engaging, highly personal travel memoir that combines adventure, humor, romance, and cultural observation with a surprisingly reflective examination of identity, belonging, and the meaning of home.
Goodreads Review
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/9014351608