River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze

Military Review, July-August, 2003 by Lewis Bernstein

Peter Hessler, HarperCollins Publishers, NY, 2001, 402 pages, $26.00.

After obtaining literature degrees at Princeton and Oxford, Peter Hessler joined the Peace Corps and for 2 years taught English literature at Fuling Teachers College in Sichuan, China. His book, River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze, is a candid, compassionate, insightful picture of a part of contemporary China little known to Westerners.

Hessler traded the academic dictatorship of deconstructionists and multiculturalists for the major and minor tyrannies of the college's communist bureaucrats, going against their wishes to learn Chinese from private tutors. As Hessler gained fluency in Chinese, he began to speak and listen sympathetically to his students and the local people. He found they spoke more openly about sensitive subjects when speaking in Chinese than when speaking in English.

As a foreigner, Hessler confronted the strangeness of the Chinese to him, his own strangeness to the Chinese, and the rigor of the Chinese educational philosophy, an experience common to all who have studied Chinese in the Chinese world. Hessler's students were examples of the Chinese educational system. They were first-generation college students--the sons and daughters of peasants--who became schoolteachers after they returned to their villages.

For the students Fuling, small by Chinese standards, was cosmopolitan. The city soon underwent radical change. After existing on the river for more than 1,200 years, parts of the city were to be submerged by a lake created by Three Gorges Dam. The dam is an unseen presence in the book, and in dealing with it obliquely, Hessler shows us the way the Chinese people cope with the dictates of a far away, arbitrary government. The ways the people cope are not new, but they were more frenetic in the years of Mao Tse-tung's mass campaigns and mass politics.

Hessler presents many pictures of provincial city life that engage readers' sympathetic attention as he narrates some of his students' and townspeoples' lives. In fact, when leaving Fuling after his 2-year stay, Hessler wonders whether he will ever see the place again, and the reader is mildly shocked to realize that be is not just being sentimental.

Hessler has drawn a picture of a city and a society poised between stasis and change and has given readers insight into the ways Chinese society works outside large national and provincial centers. I recommend River Town for all who are interested in how the Chinese interact with foreigners on a day-to-day basis.

Lewis Bernstein, Ph.D., Huntsville, Alabama