Book Review - River Town (China)

I read a lot, and am especially facinated with China. I have been to Taiwan, but never China proper but would like to visit someday. I am currently reading the third and final book in Peter Hessler's series on China.   It is a great series that will give you a much better and more complete view of this huge, strange country and more importantly, its people.  Here is my review on Goodreads of the first book in the series.

River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze by Peter Hessler
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Peter Hessler writes with just the right mixture of objective description and sensitivity to the people and culture around him as he spends two years in the small (by China standards) city of Fuling as a Peace Corps teacher of English. The emphasis of the book is less on the exotic travel aspects, and more on the struggles of adapting to an environment that is completely alien, and in which you are the intruder. His experiences are at once real and surreal, facing choices that we seldom encounter in everyday life or even think about. In one memorable passage he talks about the choice of whether to patronize a ten-year old shoeshine girl who is an elementary school dropout to help her family out, or to recoil in natural revulsion at perpetuating such a cruel and empty existence. In the end, Hessler admits that this was like a lot of daily Chinese life choices, and that he never figured out exactly the right thing to do.

Written in the years before the Three Gorges dam was complete, the surprising stoicism or bland acceptance of the people whose towns and cities were going to be changed forever (sometimes completely obliterated) is surprising at first, but as the book goes on, you realize this is a key part of survival in China, accepting the inevitable or unchangeable and learning to make the most of whatever freedoms and choice a faraway and insensitive government leaves.

I have had the good fortune to do some international travel, although always for "business purposes" which means that you get the pleasure of dipping into a fascinating country/culture for a few days at worst or a few weeks at best, sandwiched in around "business meetings" which unfortunately have a bland, drab gray sameness about them no matter where they occur. But Hessler gets to go much deeper, and he communicates very well the entire experience. He is obviously intelligent, well-educated, and thoughtful, and his writing style is very readable yet it doesn't get in the way of stopping and thinking along the way. There is wry humor as well, as he points out some of the more absurd points of Chinese life, and some of the more obnoxious aspects begin to grow wearisome as his time in Fuling draws to a close.

I eagerly look forward to reading the rest of Hessler's work.