River Town - by Peter Hessler

ISBN: 0060855029
Date read: 2024-11-06
How strongly I recommend it: 7/10
(See my list of 360+ books, for more.)

Go to the Amazon page for details and reviews.

Memoir of an American 27-year-old spending two years teaching English in a small city in Western China from 1996-1998. Interesting to watch his progression of getting more comfortable there.

my notes

Much of the local industry had been moved here from Shanghai as a direct result of the American nuclear threat in the 1950s and 1960s, when Mao Zedong dispersed China’s military factories throughout the remote mountains of the southwest.
Moving Shanghai’s military industry to remote mountain areas in Sichuan and Guizhou provinces was something like that of picking up the whole of California’s high-tech industry and moving it bodily to the wilds of Montana as it was in 1880.
The Third Line had always been a huge drain on the economy; in some years as much as 50 percent of China’s capital budget was spent on the project.
According to some estimates, the Third Line did more damage to China’s economy than the Cultural Revolution.

On literary criticism:
Literature was read as social commentary rather than art, and the way that books were forced to serve political theories of one stripe or another.
Very rarely did a critic seem to react to a text; rather the text was twisted so that it reacted neatly to whatever ideas the critic held sacred.
There were Marxist critics, Feminist critics, and Post-Colonial critics; and almost invariably they wielded their theories like molds, forcing books inside and squeezing out a neatly-shaped product.
Marxists turned out Marxism; Feminists turned out Feminism; Post-Colonialists turned out Post-Colonialism.

English departments constantly tinkered with the canon, hoping to create a book list as multicultural as the fake photographs they put on the covers of their undergraduate brochures.

All of my students knew Marx; none of them knew Confucius.

Even as late as the early 1800s it had been illegal for a Chinese to teach the language to foreigners, and a number of Chinese were imprisoned and even executed for tutoring.

Sichuanese slurs the Mandarin reflexive sounds:
sh becomes s, zh becomes z
and certain consonants are reversed, so that the average person in Sichuan confuses n and l, and h and f.
A word like “Hunan” becomes “Fulan.”
The Sichuanese tonal range is also shorter, and most significant, two of the four Mandarin tones are reversed in Sichuan.
If Mandarin is your starting point, it seems that the entire language has been flattened and turned upside down.

The Chengdu dialect is distinct from that of Chongqing, which is also different from that of Leshan, and so on.

In China, success is expected and failure criticized and promptly corrected. You are right or you are budui; there is no middle.

Three Gorges Dam’s twenty-six massive turbines will produce 18,100 megawatts of electricity - the equivalent of ten nuclear reactors, enough energy to boost China’s national output by 10 percent.
The Yangtze’s summer floods, which in the past six decades have killed more than 330,000 people, will be better controlled by the dam.
In effect, it will turn Chongqing into a seaport, as ten-thousand-ton ships - three times the size of the current limit - will be able to navigate the upper river.

The disruption of the dam, which seems massive to an outsider, is really nothing out of the ordinary when one considers recent history in the local context.
Within the last fifty years, China has experienced Liberation, the radical (and disastrous) collectivization of the 1958–1961 Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and Reform and Opening.

The past fifty years had taught the people not to meddle in public affairs, but to some degree Communism merely built on the foundations of traditional Chinese collectivism, which had shaped social patterns.
Collectivism was limited to small groups, to families and close friends and danwei, or work units, and these tight social circles also acted as boundaries: they were exclusive as well as inclusive, and the average Fuling resident appeared to feel little identification with people outside of his well-known groups.

Mobs gathered around accident victims, staring passively but doing nothing to help.
Thinking: That is not my brother, or my friend, or anybody I know, and it is interesting to watch.
Lu Xun, probably the greatest Chinese literary figure of the twentieth century, wrote with intense feeling and frustration about the pre-Communist tendency of the Chinese to ignore their fellow men in times of need.

There seemed to be no value in the natural world unless it was linked to man - some shape that a mountain recalled, or a poem that had been written about it, or an ancient legend that brought the rocks to life.

How it was possible that China could be a democratic country when it was led by only one party?
“Democratic China is different from America. The education level in America is higher. Most of the Chinese are peasants, and if they chose our leaders directly it would be dangerous, because anybody could lie to them, or trick them.”

But this worked both ways: the Chinese system could also be seen as the natural creation of people who had little faith in their own power.
The silent consent of people who had chosen not to exercise other options.

Chinese use personal pronouns when they speak of national affairs - it’s “our China” and “your America”.
So every political discussion quickly became polarized and personal.

“Qing Dynasty,” the people always say knowingly, to almost any question about old tombs, ancient houses, or other relics whose origins have been lost in the rush of the last century.
They realize it’s a safe guess - the Qing ruled for nearly three centuries, from 1644 to 1911.
Often what they seem to mean is: It’s very old, but not as old as many other things.

A “Welcome Back Hong Kong” sign decorated the entrance to the library, and every day they changed the numbers to show how many days it was until the colony returned to the Motherland.
Two students who wrote that it would be the happiest day of their lives:
“July 1st, 1997 is my happiest day. On that day all of us Chinese will be cheerful and happy. Because the day of July 1st 1997 is very especial day for us. Hong Kong will be restored to China on that day, this shows accomplishment of the great cause of reunification in China.”
All of the political classes and special events had made the return of Hong Kong a personal event in the lives of my students.

Laobaixing, Old Hundred Names:
He was completely uneducated but he had interesting ideas - views I never heard on campus.
“They have those political classes every week - they have to believe whatever the Communist Party says.
We Old Hundred Names can have our own ideas.
I don’t have to study that stuff they study in the college.”
I realized that as a thinking person his advantage lay precisely in his lack of formal education.
Nobody told him what to think, and thus he was free to think.

Students’ opinions were exactly the same.
You had to think of something foreign, because in those cases they couldn’t turn to what they had been told to think.
The point was, more or less, to trick them into coming up with their own opinions.
There was no way you could ever debate openly about China’s planned-birth policy - nobody would dare to oppose it - but you could speak freely about America.
So that was the topic: Should America also have a law that limits most couples to one child?

He asked me what Americans thought about the Revolution, and I said that most people didn’t understand it, which was the safest response.
It always made the Chinese happy when waiguoren said they didn’t understand China.
The mechanic and I talked for a while and then, as a polite way to show that the conversation was ending, he said solemnly, “Our two countries have taken different roads. But now we are friends.”
“Yes,” I said.
“We can forget about the problems of the past.”
Many of my random discussions in small places like Fuling and Yan’an ended like that; the people seemed to feel a need to summarize the relations between China and America.
Spending time in remote parts of China - every casual conversation was a major diplomatic event.

The Great Wall:
Ming rulers had built the fortification against outsiders who would have been better handled through diplomacy.
And the size of the thing - both its pathetic smallness and its amazing bigness; the fact that I could step across it easily and the fact that it stretched for fifteen hundred miles - all of that showed how far one could go with a bad idea.
Symbol of national pride, and nobody connected it with negative qualities like isolationism and stubbornness.

In Missouri, where the children celebrated Thanksgiving with traditional stories about the wonderful friendship between the Pilgrims and the Indians.
I realized that these myths were a sort of link between America and China - both countries were arrogant enough to twist some of their greatest failures into sources of pride.
And now that I thought about it, I remembered seeing Indians dance more than a few times on American television.
But just like Thanksgiving, the Great Wall had outgrown its original significance and now it simply meant greatness.

I found it easy to speak openly, because soon I would leave this place.
That was the best part of traveling - I wasn’t really accountable for things I did and said.
I could wander off with anybody and talk about anything I wanted.
It wasn’t like living in Fuling, where people kept track of me.

Qingdao, the former German concession on the east coast:
He spoke lovingly of Qingdao, of the beautiful red roofs and the clean streets, the friendly people and the calm sea.

When I asked about the problems, everybody was evasive.
A woman in her forties told me that she didn’t understand the issue, because she was simply Old Hundred Names.
That was the best part of being Old Hundred Names - they were never responsible for anything.
Virtually everybody you met described himself as such, and none of them claimed to have anything to do with the way things worked.

The people had such a strong sense of their unique cultural identity.
Despite the self-destruction of the Cultural Revolution and the subsequent rush to open to the outside world, there was still a definite sense of what was Chinese, and I believed that this would help them survive modernization.

In the five thousand years of their history it was striking how little interest the Chinese had had in exploration.

He traces the ten characters on the surface of the low table in front of him, stroke by stroke, dipping a finger into his tea.
This is a common Chinese habit when speaking with foreigners - because many characters have the same sound, a conversation will sometimes pause as the speaker writes a word in order to clarify the meaning for the waiguoren listener.
They write them in the air, on the palm of their hand, in tea water on a table; and to watch a Chinese person do this is to realize how unique the written language is, and how its words are truly shapes - not just sounds, or collections of letters, but tangible things that are handled and touched.

My Chinese identity became distinct from my American self.
Eventually, I came to think of myself as two people, Ho Wei and Peter Hessler.
Ho Wei was becoming most of my identity.
Everybody knew me strictly as Ho Wei, and they knew me strictly in Chinese.
Ho Wei was completely different from my American self: he was friendlier, he was eager to talk with anybody, and he took great pleasure in even the most inane conversations.
Also Ho Wei was stupid, which was what I liked the most about him.
He spoke with an accent; he had lousy grammar; and he laughed at the simple mistakes that he made.
People were comfortable with somebody that stupid, and they found it easy to talk with Ho Wei, even though they often had to say things twice or write new words in his notebook.
I had two desks in my apartment. One was for studying Chinese, and the other was for writing; one desk was Ho Wei’s and the other belonged to Peter Hessler.
I kept the desks in separate rooms.

More than half of the female suicides in the world take place in China, where the suicide rate for women is nearly five times the world average.
China is the only country on earth in which more women kill themselves than men.

The sense of self seemed largely external; you were identified by the way that others viewed you.
That had always been the goal of Confucianism: the individual’s place strictly in relation to the people around.
Your self-identity came from the group, and thus your sense of self could fall apart instantly.
There wasn’t a tradition of anchoring one’s identity to a fixed set of values regardless of what others thought.

I woke up early in the mornings and wrote for three or four hours.
That was the English part of my day; usually it was over by ten or eleven in the morning.
To clear the language from my head, I studied Chinese in my apartment for another hour, reading a newspaper or listening to tapes, and after that I went to lunch.

We switched to speaking Chinese at key points, when we talked about politics, or sex, or our guanxi with the college.
Even the best students often made that shift, despite their English being better than my Chinese.
The fear wasn’t of somebody else hearing. The true fear was of themselves. Virtually all of the limits had been established in their own minds.
English had been learned at school, and thus it was indistinguishable from the educational system and its political regulations.
When they spoke the language, warning bells automatically went off in their heads - it was a school language, as well as a waiguoren language, and in both of those contexts they had been trained to think and speak carefully.

Looking at a student’s photo album was always a strange experience, because the Chinese saw no purpose in pictures that did not feature themselves.

After seeing her photo, I said, “Very beautiful!”
“No, not very beautiful,” she said, and then she smiled. “But beautiful enough.”
I realized that she was precisely correct - she was a pretty girl, but not so pretty that it became a distraction or eclipsed her other talents.
That was another example of the sort of pragmatism that I often saw where people seemed much more capable of viewing themselves with cold judgment than Americans.

It’s never a good sign when a nation turned to twenty-one-year-olds as its moral voice.

The woman invited me to dinner, just as the teacher-peasant had done at my first stop, and I explained that I had to continue hiking.
In the countryside it was a common invitation - virtually every time I went for a long walk in the fields somebody offered me a meal.
It seemed that you could travel indefinitely in rural Sichuan without any money at all, because the people were so generous that they considered it rude not to offer a meal or a place to stay.

Before he went into town to practice Chinese: “Well, now it’s time to be a buffoon for the next two hours.”

We sat there at the dock for thirty minutes.
Outside it was raining, but still the students waited.
To show respect for a good friend you would see him off until he was completely and undeniably gone, regardless of the weather.