Review of RIVER TOWN: Three Years on the Yangtze
A candid and illuminating memoir from a young American in the heart of China.
Increasingly I have adapted a three-pronged approach to my reading. First thing in the morning armed with a cup of coffee and a relatively clear mind, I read the most challenging book of the several I am reading at any one time. For weeks last year it was War and Peace. Recently it was A Portrait of a Lady. It can include non-fiction as well, particularly a long and involved biography. Later in the day I read the other book. It may be fiction but is usually a non-fiction book I suspect I might not finish but think it might contribute to The Wall. This book usually has to weather naps and digital distractions. It is, by far, the least secure time slot. The third reading moment is bedtime and this book has shifted from a fiction bias to a non-fiction one - in fact, a very specific type of non-fiction. I am on my third version of an adventure or travel memoir. One was written 92 years ago, another that I just started even farther back in time than that. Each of these memoirs, beautifully written and classics in their niche, involve a man in an as yet unexplored, unexploited and utterly non-European world. More on those later …
The memoir rooted in a space far away from my life in South Pasadena seems to be the tonic these days when it comes to the “bedtime” book. The most recent was River Town, written by Peter Hessler in 1998. A son-in-law told me it deeply affected him when he read it in his younger days and suggested that it might be an overlooked classic. Given what a serious reader he is, I snapped it up. It lay in its worn hardback version next to my bed for a couple months. I was loath to finish it. It is a beautiful book that will change how you think about what might be the most important country in the 21st century – China.
Hessler’s story takes place in an interior province of China, in a city that abuts the Yangtze River, in a time where China was just beginning to fully embrace her commercial future as the factory of the world. The province was Sichuan when Hessler wrote the book but today is Chongqing. It is in the heart of China and is defined by the great Yangtze much as the Midwest is by the Mississippi. It is remote enough that in the mid Nineties when Hessler taught adults for two years, the sight of a “foreigner” was enough to part the waters of a crowded city street. The city is Fuling and much of Hessler’s version of this bustling, utterly unromantic but still vital river town is now under water thanks to the massive Three Gorges Dam. The dam was already beginning its gradual watery immersion of cities, towns and ecosystems as Hessler was finishing his book. It may be the reason for the province name change … who knows. In fact, what people actually know is at the heart of this book. These people include you, the reader.
This is a book that grows on you. It is beautifully written with an honest, youthful and very candid voice. The people he interacts with are as alive and available as they feel safe being given that the communist China of the Cultural Revolution echoes throughout the book in the behavior, language and prejudices of his students and the not always pleasant people of Fuling. I came to the book armed with prejudice against the China of today, the China of Mao and a deep suspicion of the Han Chinese culture. I finished it two months later with an entirely different outlook on China. This has little to do with the present China that I admire, distrust and fear in equal measure. Rather, its magic has to do with how honestly and sharply Hessler depicts the Chinese people, their culture and the ways history and geography has shaped both. It should be required reading in the State Department and for any journalist on the Asia desk. Just a few of the insights I gleaned from this lovely book:
We see very little of “country” China in our media … this book begins with an American teaching the adult children of Chinese peasants in a town filled with a citizenry that is utterly alien to the modern, sky scraper world of the China we glimpse each day on our smartphones.
Today’s China is a product of deep trauma. It began with the West and then turned into a self-inflicted nightmare. Hessler is often yelled at and disrespected because he is a foreigner. He pays the price for the humiliations heaped on the Chinese by the Western powers beginning with the British and the Opium Wars of the 19th century – events brought up by his students and colleagues. The violent turning away from the world into the totalitarian madness of Mao is regarded as a deliverance of sorts despite the horrors that came with it. The Chinese character of today is defined by historical memory no matter how distorted the facts.
Throughout the book, the people of Fuling are obsessed with the impending return of Hong Kong. This event takes place during Hessler’s stay and if the nationalistic ardor that came with it is a foreshadowing of what the people will say if mainland China decides to bring Taiwan into historical “realignment”, watch out.
The Chinese are obsessed with money throughout this story. Every conversation seems to begin and end with it. Clearly, Mao was about returning China to the Chinese not about an embrace of collectivist thinking. Clearly, the capitalist model now so successfully employed by the Communist Party is an honest reflection of what matters most to a hardworking Chinese citizen – at least all of those that Hessler met in his river town.
Finally, the Chinese of this book are comfortable with discomfort, obey a party that they may not particularly respect and love to drink and make fun of each other. Chinese humor is an acquired taste for Hessler. In fact, most everything Chinese is for him and, by the end, he is deeply grateful for it. So was I.
River Town: Three Years on the Yangtze
By Peter Hessler (2006)
432 pages