CBR 15 Bingo – Asia/Oceania: Aimee was fascinated by the people and cultures of Asia from when she was young, and the majority of the adventures she recounts take place in various countries there.
Edwardian heiress Aimee Crocker, after the failure of her first marriage, sets off multiple years-long journeys around the world for the sheer joy of it, picking up along the way many lovers, children, pearls and snakes.
I had never heard of Aimee Crocker until I read 19th Century Female Explorers and had my imagination completely captured by her. Born in 1864, she was a Sacramento heiress who led a fabulously strange and adventurous life, taking full advantage of her privilege to visit as many distant countries as she could in a time when travel was a tough and time-consuming undertaking.
This is Crocker’s autobiography, though in truth it is compromised more of a series of anecdotes and episodes than a cohesive insight into her personal life – but who cares when all those adventures are so thrilling, the recounting so amusing? The writing is vivid and unusually direct, as though Crocker is telling us the stories as we sit across from her in a cocktail bar. I enjoyed having a boots-on-the-ground insight on so many places that are so different today.
However, there were points while reading that I did feel a bit awkward. Crocker is definitely admiring of Asian cultures in a way many people of her era were not, but this book was still written by an Edwardian woman and published in 1936. Crocker often writes about people of color in a patronizing manner, and the fact that she somewhat fetishizes ‘the Orient’ is blatantly obvious. I also wished she’d included more stories from the second half of her life, as we race forward through time after her travels in India in a very disjointed fashion.