River Town

Peter Hessler · 2001

Thesis

The China of the late 1990s was neither the regime of official propaganda nor the caricature seen from abroad, but a place where ordinary people lived with a heavy inheritance of history and politics while adapting pragmatically to rapid change, and an outsider could begin to understand it only by learning the language, staying long enough and accepting the role the town gave him.

The main ideas

Learning the language changes an outsider from a spectacle into a participant, with a local identity of his own.
Official ideology shaped how people read everything, even Shakespeare, but did not erase their individuality.
National history, especially humiliation by foreign powers, was felt personally and could surface in any conversation.
Hostility to foreigners was real but gave way, slowly, to acceptance.
Ordinary lives carried the scars of the revolution even as the country moved toward markets.
The Three Gorges Dam stood for a state willing to remake landscapes and move millions of people in the name of development.

Ho Wei

Peter Hessler arrived in Fuling, a city of about 200,000 people on the Yangtze River in Sichuan province, in 1996, as a Peace Corps volunteer. For two years he and a fellow volunteer, Adam Meier, taught English and American literature at the local teachers college, and for most of that time they were the only foreigners in town.

The book follows his gradual change of position. At first he is an object of curiosity and suspicion who cannot speak to anyone outside the college. He studies Chinese with two tutors, Teacher Liao and Teacher Kong, and as his Mandarin improves the town opens to him. He takes a Chinese name, Ho Wei, and finds that the name comes with a persona: friendly, a little unsophisticated, someone people can talk to.

The mechanism is that language is not only a means of communication but a means of belonging. Speaking Chinese let him enter conversations, friendships and arguments that were closed to him as a foreigner who needed an interpreter.

Implication: to understand a place, learn its language well enough to be wrong in it, and stay long enough for people to stop performing for you.

Shakespeare with Chinese characteristics

Hessler's students were training to become English teachers. Teaching them Western literature showed him how thoroughly official ideology shaped interpretation. Students read Hamlet and the Robin Hood stories through the categories of Party doctrine.

Yet the students' responses were also inventive and personal. Asked to write about Shakespeare's eighteenth sonnet, they described the beloved in the conventions of classical Chinese poetry, with fingers like scallions. When they staged a version of Don Quixote, the hero became Lei Feng, the model soldier of Communist propaganda, and offered his squire the island of Taiwan.

The mechanism is that people absorb the frameworks they are taught and then use them creatively, combining official language with their own humor and culture.

Implication: do not mistake the official vocabulary people use for the whole of what they think. Watch what they do with it.

History in the classroom

1997 brought two national events into Hessler's classroom. In February Deng Xiaoping, the leader who had begun China's economic reforms, died; students and staff watched his televised memorial together in a lecture hall. In July Britain returned Hong Kong to China.

The handover set off what amounted to Hessler's personal Opium War. One of his tutors, a committed nationalist, held him to account for Britain's and the West's role in the nineteenth-century wars that had forced China to cede Hong Kong, and they argued about history as if it were a current grievance.

The mechanism is that national humiliation, taught as the core of modern Chinese history, was felt as a personal injury, and a Westerner became its representative whether he wished to or not.

Implication: in another country, expect history to be present and personal, and expect to be held responsible for the record of the country you come from.

Being watched

Life in Fuling, for a foreigner, meant constant attention. People called out waiguoren, foreigner, as Hessler passed, shouted a mocking hello and gathered to stare. Some men tried to provoke fights.

The book records how this changed. As Hessler spoke more Chinese, became known in the town and returned day after day to the same streets, shops and restaurants, the hostility and spectacle gave way to familiarity and, with some people, friendship.

The mechanism is that much of the hostility was a response to strangeness rather than to the person. Familiarity, repeated contact and the ability to answer back in the local language reduced it.

Implication: when you are the outsider, treat initial hostility as a reaction to your strangeness, and expect patience and presence to change it.

The marks of the revolution

Fuling's people carried their history with them. Across from the college gate, the Huang family ran a noodle restaurant where Hessler ate often; Huang's grandfather, a landlord, had been executed in the land reform after the Communist victory. The town's Catholic church, founded in the nineteenth century, had a priest, Father Li. When Hessler's father, who spoke no Chinese, visited, he and Father Li, who spoke no English, found that they could share parts of the Latin Mass.

These lives show a country in transition: families that had survived political campaigns now running small businesses, and religious institutions surviving as the state relaxed its control.

The mechanism is that the revolution's violence did not disappear when the policies changed; it remained in family memories, but people adapted and moved on with remarkable pragmatism.

Implication: in a country that has lived through upheaval, expect ordinary people to carry its history privately while getting on with practical life.

The river and the dam

The Yangtze dominates the book. Downstream, the Three Gorges Dam was under construction, and its reservoir would flood part of Fuling and force more than a million people along the river to move. Among the sites to be submerged was White Crane Ridge, a rock in the river whose carved inscriptions recorded low water levels going back more than a thousand years.

For Hessler, the dam stood for the scale and confidence of a state that could remake geography and move entire towns in the name of development, and for the indifference with which local history and individual lives were treated in the process.

The mechanism is that a state focused on growth and national strength treats the losses of particular places as acceptable costs.

Implication: when judging a great development project, look for what it will erase as well as what it will build.

Limits

It is one outsider's view of one town. Hessler was a young American teacher in a provincial city, and his access to people's private views was limited by language, his position and the political caution of those around him.
Its picture has dated. It describes 1996 to 1998, before China's rapid economic boom transformed towns like Fuling, which Hessler himself traced in later books such as Oracle Bones and Country Driving.
Its students spoke under constraint. Party control of the college meant that classroom statements were not necessarily candid, and the book can show only what students chose to say to a foreign teacher.

Born Red — the Cultural Revolution, a generation earlier, seen by a Chinese teenager.
Mao: The Unknown Story — the leader whose campaigns shaped the lives Hessler encountered.