Other Rivers by Peter Hessler

ISBN: 0593655338
Date read: 2024-11-10
How strongly I recommend it: 4/10
(See my list of 360+ books, for more.)

Go to the Amazon page for details and reviews.

American who taught in China in 1997, then lived in Beijing for 10 years, returns to China - Chengdu - to teach in 2019 and notes the differences. But also happened to be there when COVID hit, so he shares what it was like in 2020-2021 there.

my notes

Almost none of them had been born with any advantages in terms of family, finances, or geography. But their luck was historical - they couldn’t have had better timing. In 1978, when they were a few years old, Deng Xiaoping had initiated his Reform and Opening policy. They grew up alongside these economic and social changes, and they were part of what I came to think of as the Reform generation. Members of this cohort had participated in the largest internal migration in human history, with more than a quarter of a billion rural Chinese moving to the city. Since Reform, 800 million had been lifted out of poverty.

Fear had permeated the government, and cadres were even more cautious than they had been.

The bureaucracy often operated with its own logic and momentum. If a request was rejected, it was worth trying a different office, a different cadre. In a country of such size, there were always other rivers.

The experiences of the Reform generation had been shaped by economics rather than politics, and there was a high degree of agency.

Out of 200 countries, China had seen the largest increase in boys’ height, and the third largest in girls’, since 1985. The average Chinese 19-year-old male was now more than three and a half inches taller, because of improved nutrition.

“985 universities” and “211 universities,” classifications:
985 refer to a date: the fifth month of 1998, when Jiang Zemin’s campaign eventually became known as Project 985.
Project 211, during the twenty-first century, one hundred Chinese institutions would be granted extra support.
Anybody who tested into a 985 university paid much less than she would at a lower-tier institution, which was one of many motivations for high school kids to study hard. It was the opposite of the American system, in which elite universities are typically more expensive.

College entrance: 8.3% in 1996 to 51.6% in 2016.

Chengdu is closer to Hanoi than to Beijing.
Chengdu has a strong community of artists, poets, and novelists.
Christians and queers both represent fringe communities in China, and they are more likely to flourish in a place like Chengdu, far from the nation’s political center. Sometimes, people jokingly refer to the city as “Gaydu”.

«I Am Aware, I Participate, I Support, I Am Satisfied»
“Look at that old slogan. You don’t see that one anymore.”
Dating propaganda was a kind of political archaeology. The characters themselves could be excavated: sometimes, beneath the surface, a word indicated the opposite of its meaning.
The fact that many signs used the term hygienic suggested that the city had been dirty at the time.
Repeated references to Fuling as national indicated that leaders must have been self-conscious about their provincial status.
And whenever a slogan put words into the reader’s mouth - I Support, I Am Satisfied - it was a sure bet that some citizens had been neither supportive nor satisfied.

May 12, 2008 the date of the Great Sichuan Earthquake, whose epicenter had been less than one hundred miles northwest of Chengdu. The earthquake had had a magnitude of 8.0 and killed nearly 70,000 people.

Young Chinese had become far more international, with millennials constituting two thirds of the country’s passports.
More than 372,000 Chinese are at American institutions. The vast majority of these students paid full tuition.
More than 80 percent of Chinese students returned after completing their studies abroad!

Increased educational and economic opportunities on one hand, narrowing political space on the other - produced young people who were themselves a study in contradictions: the George Orwell fan who dreams of Chinese tech, the Gabriel García Márquez magical realist who hopes to work in automotive repair.

China had suffered so much instability that political lessons from any particular period quickly became obsolete.

He referred to the death penalty as a human right - in his opinion, if a murderer is not properly punished, such leniency violates the rights of other citizens to a safe society.

Young people often seemed willing to be guided by their parents to a degree that would be unusual in America.

90% of the students had no siblings. I learned that when asking this question I had to clarify what I meant by the word sibling, because otherwise students might include cousins in their responses. As families shrank, the term had broadened - for many young people, a cousin was a kind of substitute brother or sister.

Young people in today’s China were more narrowly patriotic than previous generations. There was a term for these youths: Xiao Fenhong, or “Little Pinks.” They were known for being rabidly pro-Party, making social media attacks on anybody deemed insufficiently patriotic.

Most of my students had never had a romantic relationship.
Stunted by the intensely competitive environment of high school, their instinct was to find a way to make dating seem like work - this seemed to be their comfort zone.
Approach romance with the same diligence that they applied to academic subjects.

Math is virtue. Math is a way to cultivate yourself.

School tests are designed for a hypercompetitive society in which citizens needed to be alert.
One guiding principle behind Chinese third-grade math could be summarized as: Don’t be a sucker.
American exam writers want children to get things right.
But Chinese exams are aiming for wrong answers.

In China, a family tragedy is not a story to be shared. To some degree, this is a matter of basic decency, because sadness is a burden best lifted alone.
I never learned other details about the death of Emily’s brother.
In conversations with Emily, I was careful not to mention her brother.

Marva Collins and her students were mostly Black. And at that time Black people were mostly belong to lower class. So education was the way to change their social status. They needed to work hard and go to college and then get a noble job.
Neill was white and so were most his students. Changing status was not the main goal. What they cherished was creativity and being themselves.
In China, most people take education seriously, because it’s the way of getting a better life.

Chinese education was long overdue for a change. For many citizens, the drive to escape poverty was over, but there was still something desperate about how hard people worked and the ways they pushed their children.

Parents were well aware of the potential risks to any child who became too creative and free-thinking.

Fear typically ran in two directions. Administrators were afraid of what students might do, and they also feared higher officials.

China’s divorce rate has more than tripled since 2000, and it’s now higher than in the U.S.

Virtually every city had an ill-advised development project, usually half-built and abandoned. It was part of the nationwide detox, or maybe a hangover.
Things had happened so fast that memories were blurred, as if everybody had been a little drunk for a couple of decades.

Official style at The New York Times: the word Black should be capitalized.

Parents are protective of children, worrying about accidents and disease, but they often lacked the same sensitivity to mental health.

When everybody is busy trying to catch the fast-moving train, no one cares if someone falls off.

sishitongtang, “four generations under a roof.”
Even the square-edged characters gave the impression of being cramped in a tiny room: 四世同堂.

Americans are famous for self-identifying in the middle. Roughly half of the U.S. population is middle class, but in some surveys, as many as 70 percent of respondents describe themselves as such.
In China, 75 percent defined themselves with terms that included “poor,” “low class,” “down class,” “poverty class,” “proletariat,” and “we belong to nothing.”
In Zhejiang, Willy had an excellent job that paid the equivalent of eighty thousand dollars a year, and he owned three apartments and a car without any debt. For a man raised by illiterate parents on a farm that consisted of a third of an acre, it was a remarkable achievement. But he responded on the survey, “We belong to lower class.”

Chinese didn’t seem particularly invested in these conspiracy theories, and they showed little true curiosity about the origins of the virus. Chinese citizens are accustomed to living with the unknowable, and they also understand that often it’s better not to look too closely.

In early July, the U.S. was recording more COVID cases every two days than China had reported during the entire pandemic.

Exotic animals are much more popular in Guangdong, in the far south.

China was an agricultural country with a large number of peasants, which explains why people have always been so tightly connected to their land.
But now China’s land is owned by the state, and in a sense the citizens are just renters living in the country.
They are fraught with unease.
And thousands of years of feudal monarchy, the traditional notion of an emperor’s reign, and the ideology of Confucianism have become deeply rooted.
All of this forges a natural obedience to authority.

We had been in the private room for more than two hours, and now, from the main part of the restaurant, came the sweet and sour strains of Kenny G’s sax playing “Going Home.”
“They’re trying to rid of us.”

Xi Jinping described the project of educating young people in core socialist values as similar to “fastening buttons on clothes.”
He said, “If the first button is fastened wrong, the remaining buttons will be fastened wrong.”

Daijiaren:
On DiDi, China’s most popular ride-share app, you could summon a man who showed up at your car on a folding bicycle.
He folded the bike, put it in your trunk, drove you home, parked your vehicle, charged a fee of a few bucks, and then pedaled off to the next drinker.
It was amazing how quickly these guys materialized - on any given Friday night in downtown Chengdu, there seemed to be at least two daijiaren per city block.

In America, every child is a winner, while in China, every child is a loser. The glass was one-tenth empty.

Deep inside they believed the same thing as their parents: that the world was made for strivers.

Future generations were also being trained to tolerate intense competition and work.
The intensely competitive environment seemed standard across all groups: from elite to lower class, from childhood to middle age.

Professor who studied grassroots politics, had analyzed a number of villages in southern China that tried to fight government land expropriations. He discovered that when villages relied on more formal structures, like traditional lineage associations, they were actually less likely to mount successful resistance. Established organizations created easy targets for the Party, which was experienced at intimidating and co-opting leaders.
In contrast, villages that lacked such groups actually did a better job of fighting land grabs.
This is the power of leaderless collective action in China: it is not that no one initiates it, it is that it appears that no one does.

“The Stranger.” an outsider who comes to a community:
His position in this group is determined, essentially, by the fact that he is not inside.
In the community, but not of the community.
Distance and nearness, indifference and involvement.
He is not radically committed to the unique ingredients and peculiar tendencies of the group, and therefore approaches them with the specific attitude of “objectivity.” But objectivity does not simply involve passivity.
He imports qualities into it, which do not and cannot stem from the group itself.
European Jew is a “classical example” of the stranger.
Traders who come from outside a neighborhood:
A man who delivers packages or picks up garbage can play the role of a stranger, and so can a migrant worker.
Sometimes, people tell things to the stranger that they wouldn’t tell their relatives, friends, or neighbors.

Some things about him impressed me most:
1. that his initial prediction about the pandemic’s economic effects turned out to be wrong.
2. that he had no hesitation in abandoning plans that were based on this prediction.

Trade war didn’t affect his business. In response to the tariffs, Li had simply raised his Amazon prices by 15 percent.
“The tariff is paid by the customer,” he said.

One word that never appeared in Amazonglish was China.
Two one-way streets: Chinese products went to America, and American money and information went to China.
Nearly half of the top sellers on Amazon are based in China, but they generally didn’t advertise their location.

My generation, born in the age of the Internet, is puzzled and somehow depressed by the conflict between Chinese beliefs and Western ones.
Propaganda about liberty and reason prevails on the Internet while propaganda about patriotism and Communism prevails in the textbooks.
Youngsters are mostly attracted by the former, but when passing exams and pursuing jobs, they should bear in mind the latter, and in practice in China, more often than not, the latter functions better.

Emily had great faith in education, but her belief was of a different sort:
Nowadays, education was another form of competition, a way for children to strive for class rank and gaokao scores.
Emily believed that an ideal school also teaches values, empathy, and self-awareness.
Part of her respect for education was an understanding that schooling can also damage a child.

She was worried for the sake of Tao Tao, and not for the sake of the rules.
This kind of protective attitude about politics was common in China.
Even people in positions of authority often did little things to help others navigate the system, and the level of decency could be surprising.
Sometimes, it was possible to forget that this was actually one way in which the system was sustained.
For most people, it was an article of faith that nothing important could be changed, and that the goal was simply to avoid problems at the individual level.

I was able to re-create a number of photos:
I placed the pictures side by side - 1996 on the left, 2021 on the right.
In the old pictures, the sky was gray and textured. Pollution was terrible, because of poorly regulated industry in the heart of the city.
In the 2000s, the government shut down or relocated the downtown heavy industry.
In the new pictures, the air is clear and blue, and it’s possible to see distant ranges of mountains that weren’t visible in the 1990s.

High income and higher education correlate with reduced national identification.

For most of my students, the greatest fear wasn’t surveillance cameras, or revised history, or any of the other instruments that are typically associated with state control.
The students feared one another - they worried about all the other talented young people who were also striving for grades and jobs.
Most young Chinese I knew were too numbed and too distracted by the struggle for success to think hard about the big picture.

Young people often seemed risk-averse, because they were only children who felt pressure to succeed.

There were far more elaborate graduation ceremonies at nursery schools in the United States.
But this was also the Chinese way: the point was the process, not the achievement, and people weren’t inclined to ceremony.

They had been aware of rumors that I was in trouble, but they didn’t respond with any particular curiosity.
This made sense: any student in China learns that there are moments when he asks no questions.
Certain circumstances, certain situations.