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River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze (Paperback)
by Peter Hessler
| Category:
Memoir, Chinese Culture |
| Market price: ¥ 168.00
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¥ 138.00
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| MSL Pointer Review:
An unforgettable portrait of a city that is seeking to understand both what it was and what it someday will be. |
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Author: Peter Hessler
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Pub. in: April, 2006
ISBN: 0060855029
Pages: 432
Measurements: 7.8 x 5.4 x 1.2 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00982
Other information: ISBN-13: 978-0060855024
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- Awards & Credential -
The New York Times bestseller
Winner of the Kiriyama Book Prize
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- MSL Picks -
In China, the year 1997 was marked by two momentous events: the death of Deng Xiaoping, the country's leader for two decades, and the return of Hong Kong after a century and a half of British rule. In 1996, 26-year-old Peter Hessler arrived in Fuling, a town on China's Yangtze River, to begin a two-year Peace Corps stint as a teacher at the local college. Along with fellow teacher Adam Meier, the two are the first foreigners to be in this part of the Sichuan province for 50 years. Expecting a calm couple of years, Hessler at first does not realize the social, cultural, and personal implications of being thrust into a such radically different society. In River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze, Hessler tells of his experience with the citizens of Fuling, the political and historical climate, and the feel of the city itself.
1) Cultural shock: Wherever Peter goes in town, he often gathers a crowd looking dagger at him, saying 'hello', calling name and following him. To his surprises later on, he realizes the town has never had a foreign visitor for at least 50 years. It is a mixed bag of xenophobia and curiosity for foreigners. No soon than Peter arrived in town than he realized that foreigners are usually treated differently in daily necessities and accommodation. Certain inns were forbidden to accommodate foreigners due to the untidiness. Foreigners often had to pay a higher fare for the steamboats.
2) Teaching style: Learning Chinese was excruciatingly painful for Peter. The Mandarin comes with 4 intonations and the thousands of characters have complicated strokes and dots. Suffice it to say that the slightest mispronunciation or missing a stroke in writing will reap a harsh admonishment from Peter's native Chinese teacher. 'Budui' is the devil word meaning 'wrong'. As Peter has pointed out, the Chinese teaching style is significantly different from the western methods. If a student is wrong, she needed to be corrected immediately without any quibbling or softening. It is the very strict standard that motivates Peter to determinedly show his teacher he is 'dui' (right). His bitter encounter with the Chinese way enables him to finally relate to his Chinese-American peers, who go to school and become accustomed to the American system of gentle correction. But the Chinese parents expect more-unless you get straight A's, you haven't achieved anything yet!
3) Hong Kong handover: Peter's students have been drilled on the shamefulness of history, of how the Britain defeated the Chinese in Opium War, of how China was coerced to cease the fragrant city for 150 years. The magnitude of the colony's return to motherland simply overwhelmed Peter: the handover lapel pin, the handover umbrella, and the handover rubber flip-flops!
4) Chinese collectivism: The Chinese people are often nonchalant, indifferent, and apathetic to politics, crisis or crimes. So this is the usual Chinese mind-my-own-business attitude. This attitude is so implanted inveterately into the Chinese due to decades of isolation (from media and geography) and political control. The consequence is a strictly standardized education system, common beliefs among the people, common reactions toward political issues, and an unchallenging submission to authority.
This is a page-turner, the kind of book that you don't want to end.
- From quoting Matthew
Target readers:
Foreigners who are interested in Chinese culture & people
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- Better with -
Better with
A River Runs through It and Other Stories, Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition
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Peter Hessler is the Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker and a contributor to National Geographic. He is the author of River Town.
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From the publisher
In the heart of China's Sichuan province, amid the terraced hills of the Yangtze River valley, lies the remote town of Fuling. Like many other small cities in this ever-evolving country, Fuling is heading down a new path of change and growth, which came into remarkably sharp focus when Peter Hessler arrived as a Peace Corps volunteer, marking the first time in more than half a century that the city had an American resident. Hessler taught English and American literature at the local college, but it was his students who taught him about the complex processes of understanding that take place when one is immersed in a radically different society.
Poignant, thoughtful, funny, and enormously compelling, River Town is an unforgettable portrait of a city that is seeking to understand both what it was and what it someday will be.
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| View all 10 comments |
Elisabeth W (MSL quote), Shanghai China
<2007-05-11 00:00>
Modern China is a place ripe with ironies, and among the greatest of them is them is that the Chinese have no sense of irony. It takes an understanding outsider to appreciate these ironic idiosyncracies that Chinese themselves are so oblivious to, and a gifted and sensative writer to portray them without resorting to caricature or mockery.
River Town is the most honest and insightful portrayal I have read of China in the late 1990s. Although it takes a small town in Sichuan as its focus, most of Hessler's astute observations are applicable to the rest the country, from metropolis to village. The book is not so much a travelogue as a 'socialogue'.
Personally, having lived elsewhere in China during the same periods that the book describes in Fuling, I found myself nodding in agreement throughout the book, and laughing aloud in many a section. Hessler's characterizations, both of China and of how a Westerner changes after a few years in China, are dead on.
River Town is the best book available for getting a sense of what China is like, on the most basic level, and explains why we who live here simultaneously love and despise the place. If you are an old China Hand, you will love this book. If you are a total novice to the subject, you couldn't find a more accurate and enjoyable introduction. |
M. Scott Murphy (MSL quote), USA
<2007-05-11 00:00>
This book was an incredible eye-opener about Chinese culture. A sprinkling of wit binds together a string of vignettes which lay bare the society of this remote, interior, Chinese city. Hessler's personality rings through the pages as he draws you into his world and his experiences.This is a must read for anyone who wants to travel in Asia or who wishes to understand the role that China will have in the coming century.
Simply a fabulous book.
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Boris Bangemann (MSL quote), Singapore
<2007-05-11 00:00>
Peter Hessler's River Town ranks among my favorite three books about China, the other two being Mark Salzman's Iron and Silk and Simon Winchester's The River at the Center of the World.
More than the other two books, "River Town" is the story of a love-hate relationship with China. In my experience, this is the mode of existence that is predominant among expatriates in this country. What is quite unusual about Peter Hessler is the determination with which he tries to see China through Chinese eyes (quite unlike W. Somerset Maugham in "On a Chinese Screen"). He learns the language, he travels hard-seater, takes the slow-boats on the Yangtze, goes hiking among the rice fields, talks with the locals. He takes note of what he sees, and he takes notes. Lots of notes. They become the basis for the abundance of details about everyday life in the city and the college where he teaches.
The book is an impressive document of Hessler's love for the country, and at the same time, beneath the armor of his love, there is the anger and frustration he feels about not being accepted as the well-meaning, open-minded individual that he is (almost like a missionary whose good intentions are not valued). He works admirably hard at understanding the people, the culture, and the land, but the majority of Chinese do not change their idea of who he is, and very few change their behavior towards him. His frustration at being treated as a wai guo ren (the summary term for a person from a foreign country), as opposed to being treated as an individual, is palpable.
I am confident that this book will find readers years from now. For the time being it provides the most comprehensive picture of city life in the rural hinterland of a country in transition. Hessler has witnessed a very traditional China that is about to disappear in the process of the economic modernization, just like parts of the river town are about to be submerged in the lake created by the Three Gorges Dam. He is not sentimental about the old customs and traditions, but there is a whiff of nostalgia and a sense of loss in his book.
River Town is a memoir with an ambition to be more. It is not as original, crisp and witty as Salzman's memoir, and not as erudite as Winchester's travel book. Its ambition is to be poetic and realistic at the same time. Poetic in its depiction of the land, realistic when describing life in Fuling. This makes for a somewhat uneven mixture, and I think the book would have gained if Hessler had kept his talent for poetic evocation apart from his talent for reporting. He is very good at both, no doubt. My feeling was simply that the book would have been even better, albeit shorter, if he had concentrated on just one of his strengths.
River Town has the potential to become a classic China memoir. Peter Hessler is a gifted observer, and a person who has great empathy with the Chinese people. He is someone who tries to understand the country from the bottom up. Very admirable. |
David Johnson (MSL quote), USA
<2007-05-11 00:00>
Peter Hessler paints a wonderful portrait of the complex nature of modern Chinese society. In his classroom, in the remote town of Fuling, and on the Yangtze River he leads the reader on a journey through the lives and times of simple yet remarkable people who are rooted in the past while being firmly nudged to accept a future steeped in the four Modernizations of agriculture, industry, defense, and science. Hessler uses gentle humor and keen powers of observation to bring to life the vignettes of his students and the townspeople. This book is a joy to read. |
View all 10 comments |
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