“When in conflicts, or dangerous places, or exotic places, there’s always this interest in ‘What’s it like trying to do journalism in such-and-such a place?’ That hasn’t changed, and I don’t think it ever will.”
Veteran CBC foreign correspondent Patrick Brown is sitting in a downtown Starbucks, describing the varied viewer response he has received to his three-decade career reporting abroad. He’s in the midst of a quick tour of Canadian cities to promote his book Butterfly Mind: Revolution, Recovery, and One Reporter’s Road to Understanding China, which came out this summer as Brown covered the Olympics from Beijing, the city where he has been stationed for the better part of 20 years.
We are discussing the allure—the myth if you will—of the foreign correspondent. As Brown recounts in his book, there is a certain minor-celebrity status that comes with reporting from abroad. When a 33-year-old Brown set out in 1980 to become a “fireman,” a correspondent zipping about from hotspot to hotspot where there is no resident reporter, he was excited to join the ranks.
“I was thirty-three years old,” he writes. “This move was a promotion to the major leagues of journalism, an opportunity to witness extraordinary happenings.”
So far, so good. But Butterfly Mind is not your typical memoir. Among the broad biographical details I ask him to fill in: Brown is 61 years old. He was born in Birmingham, England. He is married, but separated—his wife lives in Bangkok, he lives in Beijing. He has two sons, one of whom is in the British military and is currently serving in Afghanistan.
The question at the heart of Butterfly Mind concerns how one can write responsibly about being a foreign correspondent, given as Brown once said at the 2006 CBC Foreign Correspondents’ Forum, there is something abusive about a reporter registering their emotions before the viewer in the face of a tragedy.
“There is a style of reporting which is emotional and emotive, and belongs in my mind properly on The Grief Channel, if there were such a thing. I see it as being somewhat pornographic,” he said in 2006. “Violence and emotion is very compelling on television. I don’t see it as my job to tell you how I feel or how you think I ought to feel in the face of some disaster. My job is to present to you what is happening where I am, and it’s up to you to feel as you will.”
“I didn’t particularly want to do a China Rising Olympic Book, and I didn’t have time to do deep new research on a new China subject that would satisfy me as being original and compelling,” he says over coffee. “I thought combining a memoir with some insights into why China is the way it is and the way that it is the great exception to other countries, which it likes to present itself as, and the ways in which it is exactly the same as other countries.”
Alongside accounts of world events he witnessed in the 1980s—the fall of the Berlin Wall, the rise of the Solidarity party in Poland—is the story of his own descent into alcoholism. Brown delves into what he has learned about China by way of contrast.
When Brown first started reporting from China, he thought the Tiananmen Square Massacre was just another example of a communist party falling apart, similar to what he witnessed in Eastern Europe. China is the great exception. While the majority of Chinese may not be clamouring for western democracy, the people, says Brown, are outraged by injustice. Milk powder tainted with melamine is only the latest example.
“It was considered a national priority cover up the deaths of children in order to preserve the public relations for the Olympics. It’s outrageous, and it is the biggest threat to the Communist Party that they continue to do this because it puts them ever the more in disrepute with ordinary Chinese people who otherwise would think, ‘Hey, things aren’t that bad, things are improving.’”
“It’s still not a place where human rights is widely respected. Many people I know are in jail for what they said and what they’ve written, but nevertheless, it’s a much more open society than it was. Still, ‘Let’s cover it up, let’s pretend it didn’t happen,’ is a very powerful impulse.”
The book’s structure can make for complex reading that some have found difficult to appreciate. Jay Smith in Vue Weekly claims the book contains too little of Brown’s alcoholism to be a memoir, and concludes that the author’s failure to go into greater specifics about his experiences during the collapse of the Soviet bloc was the result of drunkenness, not, say, the “butterfly mind” of the title, an epithet Brown was given as a child. He’s since grown into the nickname, which implies the attention span of an insect and the ability to flit from subject to subject.
“A butterfly mind turned out to be an asset for a foreign correspondent who is expected to be on the air speaking in an apparently knowledgeable and sensible way hours after descending into a chaotic and violent situation in a country he’s never visited before,” he writes.
Smith critiques, “Why is Brown bothering to write about his battles with alcohol against a washed-out backdrop of world history if he doesn’t really want to talk about the former and can’t talk about the latter?” Smith infers that Brown is trying to be a Canadian Robert Fisk, the Middle East correspondent for The Independent and of Pity the Nation fame.
More apt comparisons might be to John Scully’s Am I Dead Yet? 71 Countries, 36 War Zones, One Man’s Opinion, published last year, and from 2003, Anthony Feintein’s Dangerous Minds: War and the Men and Women Who Report It. Scully’s work garnered attention for the long-time CBC and CTV producer’s personal story of suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, though the stories were in the typical vein of veteran correspondent memoir. Looking for the typical memoir might be Smith’s mistake.
Brown’s story runs contrary to the common tale of war correspondent turned alcoholic. Of his own substance abuse, Brown writes, “It is commonly supposed that some journalists drink heavily because of the dangerous and irregular lives they lead, but I am absolutely sure that, in my case at least, this is back-to-front. If I had been a bank manager or a bishop I would still have been a drunk. I was not drinking because of what war was doing to me. On the contrary, one of the reasons I liked going to wars was that it gave me license and an excuse to drink.”
Concurrent with his descent into alcoholism, he notes in the development of a persona inflated by the interest in war journalism, offering him the opportunity for self-indulgence he now finds shameful.
“It was on my second trip to Lebanon, during the Israeli invasion of 1982 and the ensuing siege of West Beirut, that I really found the voice of the person I wanted to pretend to be. That voice had the weary swagger of someone pushing beyond normal limits, living life on the edge, saddened by the violence around him, but somehow rising above it all to send dispatches from the belly of the beast,” writes Brown.
“The most important words were the sign-off, ‘Patrick Brown, Beirut.’”
When asked about the development of this swagger and whether it’s part of being a correspondent, Brown is unequivocal.
“Well, I was a drunk.”
But is being a drunk the cause of that former persona?
“It’s hard to separate what it is. Still, to this day, there is a certain amount of satisfaction to be gotten from being able to do a difficult thing well in dangerous circumstances. Part of being an alcoholic, as the illness progresses, is a kind of self-aggrandizement, a bravado, and that plays so readily into the myth of the foreign correspondent with a battered old suitcase and a typewriter and a bottle of scotch and a press card in his hand.”
Especially when that stereotype includes the bottle of scotch. Brown is now a recovered alcoholic. CBC top brass had an intervention with him in the late ’80s when he missed an assignment after blacking out.
“People invite you to play that stereotype and it becomes quite—I don’t know, it’s a whole set of circumstances that leads to what I describe in the book, and some people thought I was rather too frank about it, and others think it’s great that you’re willing to say, ‘Hey, here’s something I got wrong.’ Because a lot of journalists’ memoirs are ‘I went to so-and-so when such-and-such was happening, and I was great, and I got it right every time.’”
It’s the need to be true to the work that runs through Butterfly Mind—the belief that quite aside from the need to be honest as a journalist, Brown’s personal chaos found a release in the larger political landscape, a destructive, dictatorial force that dishonesty imposed in both.
“One reason that I wrote about alcoholism more than I might have done otherwise is that I see a very interesting parallel between personal recovery from that kind of distortion of your life and recovery of these countries that went through huge amounts of turmoil and misrule and are trying to get themselves back together. The key to both is honestly taking a look at your situation and resolving to do things differently.”
