River Town: Yangtze nuances

Genuinely, one of my favourite books. Peter Hessler, when he was 27, spent two years (1996-1998) as a Peace Corps volunteer teaching English in a rural but rapidly developing part on the banks of the Yangtze River, in a town called Fuling, in the Sichuan province. He documented and journaled his experiences in English, but he learned about China through immersing himself and talking to the people.

When you look at China during these decades, some common themes of modernization vs. loss (the Three Gorges Dam project, an absolutely massive dam that was constructed, and coined a scientific celebration in textbooks), politics and history and its integration with propaganda and education, and childhoods and social customs (the drinking culture, hosting culture, how we treat our parents, our friends, and what quesitons are socially ok to ask strangers) and more of these tidbits emerge.

What made this book incredible is that Hessler really came to understand the connotations, the culture, the social customs, the language, and the people, all of the nuances of Chinese culture with uncanny accuracy perfectly overlapping with how I recall, know, and see it. It opens memory boxes for me because the way he sees China is directly in line with how I see my things myself, which is a crazy statement since our positionalities, and time point, and encounters with China could not be more different. After all, he’s an American writer and journalist born in Missouri. And the vessel in which he delivers — his writing is amusing, sincere, authentic, bonafide; it uncovers unique pockets of memories.