River Town: Two Years On The Yangtze (2006) - Plot & Excerpts
For those who think this book is incredibly dull, I must say, I don't think it was intended to be a work of entertainment. It often reads like a personal journal, which can be both charming and a chore. If you're patient, I think you'll find it reasonably pleasant to settle in and listen to Peter Hessler tell his story. For those who say that Peter Hessler is a conceited jerk ... mmm, I don't buy that. He makes observations about how rude and petty many of the Chinese people are, and he also freely admits to losing his temper and he feels remorse for instances when he treated other people cruelly. While he clearly cares about being kind to others and being empathetic to the various sides, he doesn't try to pretend that he's Mr. Wonderful and Always Kind and Patient in Every Scenario. Nope, sometimes he is kind of a jerk, as most of us sometimes are, especially when we're stressed. The fact that Hessler is able to admit to these things honestly and humbly is to his credit, I think. Now that we got that out of the way ... I think this is an excellent memoir. After reading about all the struggles that Peter Hessler had, trying to adjust to life in the polluted, noisy, filthy, crowded town of Fuling, and how hard he worked to learn the language and make a difference for his students ... I had tears in my eyes and a lump in my throat, as I read the last couple of pages when Peter made his final departure from Fuling. I liked learning about different aspects of recent Chinese history, as the author brought up pieces here and there, prompted by people and places in the story. I also thought that the excerpts from the students' writing samples, sprinkled throughout the narrative, greatly added to the story. Peter Hessler is from Missouri, like me, the Show-Me-State ... and I appreciated how he told it as he saw it ... often times being quite critical of the Chinese people he met. Alas, sometimes Hessler even seemed to be ridiculing the Chinese people, which is a reason why, I think, some of the reviewers think he is an arrogant jerk. Here is one example, from pages 234-235 of my paperback (499 pages)."Perhaps the strangest part of the Chinese fascination with Hitler was that simultaneously they had a deep respect for the Jewish people. Jews were the next best thing to Chinese--they were an extremely intelligent race, as one could tell from examples of Einstein and Marx. ... "Ideas of this sort were standard and completely predictable ... There were buttons you could push--Hitler, Jews, the Japanese, the Opium Wars, Tibetans, Taiwan--and 90 percent of the time you could predict the precise reaction, including specific phrases people would use. It was natural enough, given China's conditions; virtually everybody was the same race, the country had been isolated for centuries, and the current education system was strictly standardized and politically controlled."And it was also natural that these conditions resulted in some particularly bizarre notions, like the admiration of Hitler or the fascination with Thai transvestites ...""It was interesting to figure out these common beliefs, and occasionally you could work them to your advantage. During the summer, my sister Angela and Todd, her Stanford colleague, had been bored by eating meals with their Chinese interpreter, so I gave them a list of subjects that would surely make things more entertaining ..."It seems Hessler is ridiculing the Chinese people for holding stupidly to stereotypes and not thinking for themselves. I'm sure many people would be offended by this, but you know what ... this is his memoir, and the scorn that he felt was real. I hope there's nothing wrong with him documenting that. It just shows that he's not a saint, and honestly did we expect him to be one?There were also parts of the book that made me laugh out loud. For example, at the beginning of the book, Peter Hessler kept seeing Communist propaganda messages (together with the names of sponsors such as Magnificent Sound Cigarettes, a private company, so it's a bit ironic), and one of the common phrases was "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics." Because of pressure from the Communist Party over what he could teach, he had to modify his literature class to be what he jokingly called "Shakespeare with Chinese Characteristics." etc. Eventually there is a faculty basketball tournament, and the referee is biased against Peter and Adam (the two Peace Corps volunteers), not wanting the foreigners to win. So Peter and Adam drop out of the tournament because of all the bad referee calls. Afterward, Peter was talking to his Mandarin tutor, a very prim and proper Chinese lady. Peter called the referee a bad egg, and the tutor told Peter he was wrong to say that; he was dribbling wrong and was not playing basketball the Chinese way. Peter was already exasperated with his tutor who had been very stern, constantly correcting his Mandarin without ever giving him any positive feedback. On page 74 he wrote:"She said it in hopes of ending the argument tactfully, because she saw that I was annoyed. But I had already heard too many explanations about 'the Chinese way,' and I did not want to lectured about Basketball with Chinese Characteristics." ... and so he exploded in an indignant rant to the teacher about how basketball is an American game that he knew quite well and he wasn't about to be lectured about playing it the Chinese way ...OK, Basketball with Chinese Characteristics ... yes, that's it, that's what made me laugh out loud when it appeared on the page. Hmm, not funny now? OK, maybe you had to be there. :)One thing I found very poignant in the book was how Peter and Adam found ways to teach the students by having them perform skits and other creative activities, despite resistance from the Communist officials. For example, Peter had his students put on Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" as a play, but the Communist leaders of the school would not allow him to teach the students Christmas carols, even if they were secular ones (p 336). "No," said Dean Fu, still smiling tightly. "I'm afraid that we can have no songs about Christmas. I'm sorry, but you know it is not my decision." I could have pointed out that even in the spring the campus propaganda speakers, as part of the noon entertainment program, often played a Muzak version of "What Child is This?" But I knew the argument was hopeless; there was no logic to any of it. And in the same spirit I instructed my classes to replace the Christmas carols with patriotic Communist songs, which is anything improved Dickens. My favorite scene was when a furious Scrooge swung his cane at a band of merry carolers who were belting out "The East is Red," singing the praises of Mao Zedong while the old man shouted, "Humbug!"Toward the end of the book, they have a school play where Cervantez' Don Quixote is adapted for Chinese audiences. In the students' version, Don Quixote is instead Lei Feng (a famous Communist worker-martyr), and he offers Sancho Panza the island of Taiwan, if he will join in on the adventure. In another assignment, Peter Hessler studies Shakespeare's Sonnet Eighteen (Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? etc) with his students. In this section Peter notes that his Chinese students were more advanced at understanding the rhythm of poetry than their American counterparts (p. 42). Peter has the students write essays to describe the woman in Shakespeare's poem. Many of the students' responses are very similar, writing in English but using classical Chinese cliches to describe a woman's beauty, such as comparing her fingers to scallions or to the roots of an onion, comparing her hair to a waterfall, and comparing her eyebrows to the leaves of a willow.Another excellent assignment was when Peter assigned the class to study Washington Irving's Rip Van Winkle (pp. 170-171). The students performed skits; one group acted out a Chinese Rip Van Winkle who had fallen asleep in 1930 and woken up in 1950, another group did a Rip who had fallen asleep in 1948 and woken up in 1968, and so on. He had seven groups, each highlighting a different piece of recent Chinese history. Given all the changes that have happened in China over the past 100 years, I thought this was brilliant.Another thing I found interesting was the reaction of the locals to the building of the Three Gorges Dam (back then, the dam was under construction). Although the people were living in these centuries-old villages, for the most part they didn't seem concerned about losing the old towns. The old towns were dirty and crowded, and the people wanted to move somewhere new. Peter says that there was strong opposition to the project from academics and intellectuals ... (p.105) ... "But there were always voices of dissent. Even in the 1980s, as Deng Xiaoping and Premier Li Peng moved closer to beginning actual work on the dam, it was one of the few major issues in China that could be debated publicly. Criticism was accepted, and there was no shortage of it; many experts believed that constructing a series of smaller dams on the Yangtze and its tributaries would have many of the same benefits without the risks. The debates continued until finally in 1987 the government tired of this version of democracy and silenced it. If China's leaders wanted the largest dam in the world, it would be built, regardless of the risks. None of the difficulties mattered--the silt, the earthquakes, the lost relics, the extinct species, the displaced peasants. The experts could be ignored, just as they had been ignored so many times in the past; when Mao encouraged high birth rates in the 1950s and 1960s; when the Great Leap Forward was launched; when the Cultural Revolution began. Sometimes you need decision rather than debate. There's no sense in giving up eating for fear of choking."Now, this last sentence ties in to an earlier theme in the chapter. Mr. Hessler had used an essay on the Three Gorges Dam, provided by the Chinese textbook, as a model of a "persuasive essay." The essay gave a standard essay format, beginning with points in opposition to the dam. Then, as a transition, before proceeding to the points in favor of the dam, the essay used the phrase "But we should not give up eating for fear of choking." After that time, to Mr. Hessler's great dismay, the students used that exact same phrase as a transition point any time they wrote an argumentative essay, whether the subject was the pro's and cons of morning exercises or an analysis of Shakespeare's Hamlet (p. 100). I believe this phrase was an example of how much Mr. Hessler hated the lack of independent thinking / original ideas and "follow the pack" mentality that many of the students displayed.A nice literary device I wanted to mention was how Peter Hessler spent a few pages (pp. 94-98) writing about the White Crane Ridge, which was a rock or a small island (about 240 feet long) in the Yangtze river, with thousands of years of inscriptions on it. Mostly the inscriptions noted the date and the level of the water, and some of them had predictions about next year's harvest, etc. There was also a famous carving of twin carp from the Tang Dynasty. The next chapter is a more detailed story about the Three Gorges Dam ... you continuing reading on this new topic, and then, just when you've nearly forgotten about the White Crane Ridge, he mentions how the Three Gorges Dam will affect the town of Fuling (p. 101) ... and among other things, he says "the new reservoir will be more than 130 feet above the Tang Dynasty twin carp."I thought that was a very nice literary touch, as he got us all excited about the White Crane Ridge and how nice it must be to visit it, and a few pages later we learn that it would soon be lost forever. On page 106, Hessler mentions that archeologists were proposing ways to preserve these cultural relics. In response, Hessler writes (p. 106):All of these plans and complaints greatly annoyed the forces that were pushing the dam forward. Wei Tingcheng, the seventy-year-old chief engineer who spent virtually his entire professional life developing the project, scoffed at the "palaces" that archeologists were proposing. "To tell you the truth," he said, in a 1996 interview with the New York Times, "the common people of China have such a low education level that they will not be able to enjoy these cultural relics, and only some of these experts will go to these museums." It wasn't a particularly tactful remark, but in some ways it addressed an important issue: a country like China is accustomed to making difficult choices that Americans might not dream of considering. I thought of this every time I visited the White Crane Ridge, where I was always amazed to see the conjunction of the ancient carvings and the timeless river. Nowhere else had I felt so strongly that there are two types of history, nature's and man's, and that one is a creature of cycles while the other, with mixed results, aims always at straightness--progress, development, control. And on the Yangtze I sensed that it was a particularly dangerous violation to force these together, pressing the river's cycles into stagnancy behind the long line of the dam. But this was a poetic turn of thought, and most people in Fuling couldn't afford it. They didn't have the time or interest to visit the White Crane Ridge, and they didn't worry much about the relationship between man and nature. Often there were no other tourists on the ridge besides me, and the only time I ever saw a big crowd was the day I researched my story about the carvings, which was on on a weekend during the Spring Holiday Festival in 1998. ... Even educated people often weren't interested. If you wanted to see local history, it wasn't necessary to go to the hassle of taking a boat--you could wander into the countryside and stumble upon Qing dynasty tombs without even searching."There is a lot to this book, and for once, I don't think it was too long. I usually complain about how books should have been edited way down. But this time, I think all the pieces presented in this 400-page diary were important in describing Peter Hessler's two years in western China. I like the way some of the chapters are simply "memories" which stand on their own and don't lead to anything else, like in real life. Meanwhile other chapters do relate to the others and help to propel the narrator forward. I think I'd like to give this either 3 stars or 4 stars. I would give it 5 stars for technical mastery and completeness. If I were grading this for a class, certainly it would be an "A," maybe even an A+, depending on what the other students turned in. But as far as as my personal enjoyment of the book, I need to bring it down to 3 or 4 stars. This is partly because the book can be a bit dull at times, but mostly it's because it's rather depressing to read how close-minded many of the Chinese people are, and how poor the cities are, and how many people there are, living in those conditions. Most of the time the book doesn't evoke much sympathy (other than pity, possibly) for the people, and it certainly reinforces a lot of negative stereotypes about the Chinese. But ... I don't want to criticize the book for this; it was simply the narrator's experience, and that is valid, and I do appreciate Peter Hessler's honesty. Nonetheless, so many negative words about the Chinese people, and the narrators' constant battles with corruption and small-mindedness, tended to wear me down after awhile. All of this made me weary of this book, just as I'm sure the narrator became weary of life in Fuling. One saving grace was that Peter was able to understand people better once he was able to talk to people (and the students especially) in their own language. He found that much of the formality and lack of humor (sometimes perceived as rudeness) slipped away when the people were able to speak in their native tongue. The students spoke more candidly about their feelings about the government etc when able to converse in their native language; on top of that, Peter Hessler could see more of their playful / joking sides, which is so important for pleasant person-to-person interactions. This may speak to the importance of foreign language instruction here in the United States. Perhaps listening as someone discusses his or her country's problems in his or her own language can relieve tension and make people feel more at ease. If Peter Hessler's observations are transferable, it sounds like it might be a good idea to put more emphasis on learning foreign languages here in the U.S. I believe this may be a much better way of promoting peace and understanding in the world, as opposed to more advanced weaponry and nuclear arms races, etc.
A volunteer for the Peace Corps, Hessler lived in Fuling, a little town in Sichuan province, on the delta of the Yangtze and Wu rivers, for two years teaching English. As one of the few Westerners in the town since World War II, Hessler becomes the focus of not always kind attention in town, but as he learns more Chinese and more of the Chinese way of doing things, he sees his place more clearly and almost, at times, seems to fit into the daily life there. Of course, nearly everything in China is political: the literature he teaches is used by his students as a springboard to analyze their own lives, even as Hessler learns how hard it is to broach certain subjects in a culture where everyone is brought up to believe the same things.Written in calm, meditative prose, this is an excellent entry into the annals of the Westerner-in-China body of memoirs. Hessler is wise beyond his years, and his China (or rather, his Fuling) is never of the sadly typical “oh look how foreign everything is” variety. He recognizes full well how foreign he himself is, and even during his lowest points of cultural contact – when men try to pick fights with him simply because he’s a Westerner – he reports with a detached and reflective eye. He learns rather quickly how to deal with some of the illogical bureaucracy – I enjoyed his clever face-saving solution when confronted with the lie that he was required to get a chest X-ray to participate in a foot race, for example – but he is troubled and bemused by certain other aspects of Chinese culture. He cites the lack of empathy and collectivist thinking that he saw in Chinese crowds, and the disturbing lack of fixed individual values in a culture where “wrong” thinking can become “right” as easily as it takes for an authority to say it. In his own small circle of students and friends, he hears of two deaths, a suicide, and a kidnapping (of a woman to become a forced bride). Near the end of the book, he muses that he can only brush against “the slightest sense of the dizzying past” that informed the values and behaviors that he encounters. His Fuling is, as he says, “a human place,” and that puts his memoir in the top ranks of its kind.
What do You think about River Town: Two Years On The Yangtze (2006)?
I read this in the days after we settled into our apartment in Chongqing. It was a good timing, because Hessler describes some of the same landscapes and culture in his vivid description of Fuling, not far down the Yangtze river from Chongqing. Some things he described I have been discovering myself as I explore my new neighborhood, and some things have changed dramatically since he was in Fuling in 1995-97. This book serves as useful context and recent history to inform my stay, and it also puts into perspective just how rapidly things change around here. Some of his observations matched what I've heard from Nick, and I felt as if I were getting advice from an expat friend I'd met here.My only minor complaint is that almost every description of flowers and fields includes a mention rapeseed. Perhaps it is as ubiquitous here as the frequent mentions would suggest, but it became stale after a while. Otherwise, I enjoyed reading this book knowing that Hessler's two years in the Peace Corps inspired him to continue living in and writing about China, and I look forward to reading more of his books while I'm here.
—Sara M. Watson
China is bafflingly massive. And that is a bonafide geographical fact people. You can get one of those old fashioned things called a map and have a look. See, I am not wrong. Not only is it massive but the PRC is also the most populous country in the world with a population of over 1.3 billion. How do you even go about counting that many people? How do you get them all to stand still for long enough?Peter Hessler, author of River Town, Two Years on the Yangtze, went to China not to check population statistics, but to immerse himself in the culture and physical geography of a place which still seems mysterious to a large portion of the world beyond China's borders. The result is a book which carefully documents Hessler's time and experiences living in the river town of Fuling on the banks of the Yangtze. Hessler is an engaging writer but from the outset I found myself wondering why I should care about two years in the life of an American Peace Corps volunteer (probably in much the same way that people might wonder why they should care about my opinions of this or any other book). Why indeed?Hessler presents the day to day minutiae of life on the Yangtze in a way which retains its personal element but also references the wider historical and cultural aspects which have moulded the lives of the residents of River Town (Fuling). Part travelogue, part diary, part Cliff notes to China's long and varied history, this book is a strong introduction to a culture which some may regard is largely impenetrable. After all so many books have been written on China it is difficult to know where to start. Most interesting of all is the way in which Hessler and his friends gradually infiltrated the local traditions and way of life. It took time and patience but a polite determination to learn the language and self depreciating humour allowed him a view point that few other short term visitors would get.Despite this book being a chance find, it is one that I'm glad to have read and I'm keen to learn more about China. Hessler has recently moved to the Middle East as a foreign correspondent and I look forward to seeing what his output from Cairo might be.
—Shovelmonkey1
What a fantastic book. This, for me, was one of those rare books that you can't put down but don't want to end. Having just finnished it this morning I am already at a loss. I have read many books on China and this ranks among the best for me. This is the story of Peter Hessler, an American student, who takes up an English teaching post in a remote town called Fuling where the River Wu meets the Yangtze. Fuling becomes his home for the next two years and here we are treated to a feast of Chinese life in a town where they are very unused to "waiguoren" (foreigners). We go through the many highs and lows with him and we meet a collection of fantastic characters along the way. To view this town and its people through waiguoren eyes is fascinating and a real eye opener. Having been to China only once on holiday (to satisfy my enthusiasm) I am left feeling that spending all my time in Beijing and Shanaghai is abit of a cop out and I am now left with a real urge to travel deeper into this wonderful country and expore some more. This book has certainly given me a taste for that. I highly recommend this book. I found it a real page turner. Enjoy.
—Boof
