Reading recommendation:
River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze
Author: Peter Hessler
Harper Collins (2001)
An
American’s Observations in China
At
first, artful prose, flowing like a river, draws readers in, and then it grips
them with a sense of urgency. In River
Town: Two Years on the Yangtze, Peter Hessler’s audience must experience
the author’s unique take on Fuling’s local color--what he has seen and what he
has felt. It’s almost as if Hessler’s words promise a firsthand account of the
demise of the last specimen of an endangered species.
In fact, geographically, Fuling,
in China’s Sichuan province, at the fork of the Yangtze and Wu Rivers, was an
ill-fated city. Soon part of it, along with centuries of history, would
suffocate under a lake created by the Three Gorges Dam. Hessler was one of a
dozen or so foreigners allowed into the area in more than fifty years. As such,
he would be among the few Westerners to gain a glimpse of it before the great
rush of water would push the entire region into a new era.
“I had never any idealistic
illusions about my Peace Corps ‘service’ in China,” said Hessler. “I wasn’t
there to save anybody or leave an indelible mark on the town. If anything, I
was glad that during my two years in Fuling I haven’t built anything, or
organized anything, or made any great changes to the place. I had been a
teacher, and in my spare time I tried to learn as much as possible about the
city and its people. That was the extent of my work, and I was comfortable with
those roles, and I recognized their limitations.”
Fortunately Hessler also
recognized the importance of first preserving, and then sharing his impressions
of the region. Perhaps he left no permanent marks on them, but they leave an
indelible mark on those who vicariously join the author in his quest to
understand the Chinese people, and especially residents near the fork of the Wu
and Yangtze rivers.
Despite Fuling’s 200,000
population, it is a small city by Chinese standards, and the area considered
rural. That is the least of the contradictions Hessler encountered.
Hessler’s students represented
the region’s best, yet were not affected with self-pride. They spoke of admiration
for rural culture, hard work, and the peasant’s life; yet they looked forward
to a future different from their parents. “They were never suspicious of
impossible tasks” writes Mr. Hessler. “The students would work at anything
without complaint, probably because they knew that even the most difficult
literature assignment was preferable to wading knee-deep in muck behind a water
buffalo.”
A cultural plurality shows up in
the writing of Hessler’s students. Aware of the suffering endured under Mao Zedong’s
rule, students generally spoke well of him. One wrote, “One flaw cannot obscure
the splendor of the jade.” Another defended him: “No gold is pure; no man is
perfect.”
But that mindset also precluded
honest teacher/student discussions if Hessler, their foreign teacher, moved to
the slightest criticism of anything Chinese. As a group, his class, the
region’s scholastic stars, would turn stoic. “Whenever that happened,” Hessler
laments, “I realized that I was not teaching forty-five individual students with
forty-five individual ideas. I was teaching a group, and these were moments
when the group thought as one, and a group like that was a mob, even if it was
silent and passive.”
During Hessler’s two years in
Fuling, the British lease on Hong Kong expired, The Chinese government loosened
its grip on the economy, encouraging a form of capitalism, and the Three Gorges
Dam neared completion. Communities prepared for modernization to be made
possible by reliable electric power and better control over the Yantze’s flood
cycles.
But in China modernization does
not mean Westernization, culturally or politically. “In the end,” said Hessler,
“Fuling struck me as a sort of democracy—perhaps a Democracy with Chinese
Characteristics—because the vast majority of the citizens quietly tolerated the
government. And the longer I lived there, the more I was inclined to see this
as the silent consent of people who had chosen not to exercise other options.”
Isn’t that an interesting
perspective on what Americans call a Communist dictatorship? Read River Town to gain your own perspective
of the book Kirkus Reviews described as “a vivid and touching tribute to a
place and its people.”
