As my initial contribution to the Recommended Books series I present not one, but three volumes, all of them written by American author Peter Hessler and all of them focused on China. Collectively they represent a fascinating look at modern China as viewed through his own eyes and through the prism of the Chinese people with whom he has come in contact over a decade and a half.
As you will learn below, my reading of these books fueled my interest so much that I wound up taking a personal trip to China in June. For those who are interested, the following YouTube video features photos taken during a week-long visit to interior south China in the region of Guilin and Yangshuo.
Locations visited included the Li and Yulong Rivers, Fuli, Xing Ping, Li Gong, Juang Yao, and the incredible terraced rice paddies at Ping An in the mountains of Long Shen north of Guilin.
My review of Hessler’s three books continues below the fold.
Hessler’s first book, River Town – Two Years on the Yangtze (Harper/NY-2001) was based on his experience as a Peace Corps volunteer from 1996-1998 when he taught English and American literature at a college in the river town of Fuling in southwestern China. During that period, Hessler not only absorbed Mandarin Chinese through his time and contacts in country, but also engaged a tutor to help him learn the nuances of the language. His role as a teacher of young Chinese students, many of them the first in their families to attend a college or university and often from small rural villages, enabled him to engage his charges in dialogues on their country, culture, beliefs and hopes. He also gained insights into their own views of their lives, their futures, and their views of America and the western world (often distorted through the lens of movies, TV and pop culture) via assigned essays.
Book two was Oracle Bones, a Journey Between China’s Past and Present (John Murray/London 2006) in which Hessler provides follow-up details on the lives of some of his students after graduation as they began working and teaching – often in assignments further from their home villages. He also skillfully blends these narratives with the story of a Chinese archeologist studying the early roots of Chinese culture and civilization, who committed suicide after being swept up in the Chinese cultural revolution and subjected to ridicule and accusations of incorrect political thought by his scholastic colleagues. A second lengthy profile within the book follows the fortunes of a member of China’s ethnic Uighur minority who operates on the fringes of China’s black market before managing to defect to the United States and start a new life in a second “alien” society.
The final part of the trilogy is Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory (Harper/NY 2010). Armed with his journalist visa, gained through work as a China-based free-lancer for numerous Asian, European and Ameircan publications including the Boston Globe, New York Times, and National Geographic, and a Chinese driver’s license, Hessler takes long journeys in rented cars – from the steppes of Tibet to the factory towns of southern China. In so doing, he provides a fascinating window into the lives of average Chinese as they try to navigate and understand the incredible and rapid changes taking place in their country.
One major section of the book focuses on young people working in an industrial plant with a single product…..the wire hooks used to connect the backs of brassieres. Hessler’s story of this single factory is in many ways a microcosm of the industrial “revolution” which has swept the country and made China such an economic powerhouse internationally over the past two decades.
China’s growing dominance in this tiny niche market begins with Europeans holding the majority of market share, based largely on moden machines which can churn out the small wire-molded parts in high volume. But then Chinese entrepreneurs get involved. A start-up company begins its own production, using one of the European machines. Before long, an enterprising engineer working for the Chinese firm manages to reverse engineer the machine for his boss. He then gets an offer from another entrepreneur to repeat the process with a lure of a significantly larger salary, and he agrees. Before long, there are a half dozen such companies, most of them “spawned” from this initial start-up. The competition is intense and profit margins are razor thin.
As this one industry begins to grow, it draws workers, most of them young, from rural villages, migrating to industrialized southern China in search of a better life. The hours are long…often six days a week, and when orders need to be filled often 12 or more hours a day. While they work for very low pay and few benefits, what they do make is much more than they could earn back home. Most of them live in dormitory “residences” near their own factory and thus are able to save money they can send back home to parents and grandparents…or in some cases to support children they have had to leave behind. And good workers often have mobility in a growing job market to seek new positions with better pay and benefits.
Hessler explains that in many cases, industrial production centers seem to spring out of nowhere, starting with basic factory structures in a new industrial park in an otherwise undeveloped area. These are often rapidly filled by new entreprenurial start-up companies eager to fill a niche. In many cases, one town will become the center for production of a single item, whether it be plumbing fixtures, or auto electronics or kitchenware. Competition is fierce and piracy of ideas and workers is constant.
Yet for young Chinese, the overall sense is one of pride and growth….of having access to resources their parents could only have dreamed of…..televisions and tape players, motor bikes, movies and household appliances.
By any measure, China is massive -- with a population nearing 1.4 billion. And it is growing at an astonishing rate, in some cases almost faster than it can absorb. I know this because having read all three of the Hessler books in succession, my interest in China moved from just that….interest…to absolute fascination.
This winter, I reached retirement age and having a lifelong record of wanderlust that has taken me from northern Alaska and Baffin Island to Europe, South America and Oceania, I, was looking for a place to take a first post-retirement vacation trip. I had been thinking about Europe again, but having read Hessler’s books, knew that I had to go see for myself.
So the last two weeks in June, I traveled to southeastern China….to the Yangshuo area south of Guilin which is itself about a one-hour flight westward from Hong Kong. During a week in that area I used Yangshuo as a base to visit area towns and villages and to see the region and its people. Yangshuo’s physical beauty is itself often the image people see and think of when they think of China beyond the image of The Great Wall. (t was the setting for the movie The Painted Veil) It’s famous limestone spires (called karsts) jut up from land and water to create vistas of haunting, timeless and almost unbelievable visual impact.
The region is heavily agricultural, so a visit there provides insights into the transition from farm to factory taking place throughout China. The region still abounds in rich rice fields, lotus farms and orchards of fruit and nuts and fields of vegetables. But in many cases, young people have left the land to go to factories….or in the case of Yangshuo to serve a growing tourist industry as newly mobile Chinese and adventursome foreigners come to the area.
On my flight from Hong Kong to Guilin, I could see the march of new superhighways across the landscape from an altitude of over 20,000 feet. The construction was moving so rapidly that I could see sections of paved roadway, interspersed with unpaved. Cloverleaf interchanges were often nothing more than scratches in the earth, waiting for the paving machine.
As I rode through the region in rented cars and vans, exploring the countryside, we had occasion to travel on some of the newest roadways which provided their own illustration of the “Build it and they will come,” approach China commonly follows. Highways, complete with modern toll stations, roadway signs in Chinese and English and other signage and safety barriers, also featured service stations. However, most of them were stil unoccupied. Buildings were in place along with areas for rest rooms, service and food delivery and pumps and overhead shelters, but no gas or people or food. The roads were so new that the volume of driving had not yet reached a critical mass large enough to attract vendors.
In Driving China, Hessler describes much the same situation as he chronicles a long-weekend trip by a group of Chinese “auto club” members. With little support structure for auto travel such as AAA organizations, hotel and motel chains and restaurant/fast food networks, drivers setting out on the growing network of China’s new superhighways and improved secondary roads often must proceed without detailed maps. As a result, newly mobile Chinese drivers commonly band together through affinity “clubs” with one or more members planning the trip details. Still club “caravans” can often find themselves in search of restroom facilities or fast food as they begin a wider exploration of their country for the first time.
In my time in Yangshuo it was also apparent that the nation’s economic growth and the resources that come with it were driving the installation of a new network of paved roads. These secondary roads are reaching back into villages that had long been isolated from larger towns by deeply rutted dirt roads usually, traversed by foot or small motor vehicles moving at very slow speeds.
Now however, crews of workmen are rapidly pushing new roads into these villages with little attention to the kinds of details an American would expect. One afternoon we were driving a rutted dirt road when we found our path blocked by a road crew. Their installation methods were primitive….one dump truck filled with wet cement, a bucket loader, and a row of pinned 2x4 timbers on each edge of the roadway. Cement was poured out of the truck onto the dirt road and spread by hand, filling up the space between the wooden barriers…..no supporting re-bar or much prepration of the surface underneath…just a new concrete road opening traffic to small trucks, motor bikes and busses, opening it new opportunities for commerce and marketing.
Driving on China’s roadways is an exercise in anarchy that can leave you both laughing and wide-eyed with terror at the same time. Once drivers get a license, any rules are largely treated much like the “Pirates’ Code,” as Geoffy Rush described it in Pirates of the Caribbean…..”It’s more a set of guidelines.”
People suddenly cutting in front of you on a motorbike without signalling, passing on the right, driving at walking speed, dealing with cattle or other livestock in the middle of a busy roadway….part of daily life. Roads are generally two lanes or sometimes two-and-half lanes wide and attempts to pass are constant. If someone ahead of you sets out to pass, you treat them as a blocker and duck in behind, assuming that as long as they are barging ahead, you can run behind them. Oncoming busses or trucks? Depends on who blinks first.
Virtually everything that moves on the roads is often grossly overloaded. Auto trailers carrying as many as 24 small utility vans in one load with vans side by side and hanging off both ends. Trucks packed so full of bricks that tops of loads fall off into the roadway, threatening the safety of oncoming traffic. And best of all are the inventive arrangements for moving people and goods on small bikes and scooters with families of three and four often balancing on a moped along with bundles and bags headed to or from a village market.
It is way too easy for us as humans to try and group things into categories. But as big as China is, Hessler provides an excellent look at the country in ways which help you understand the many and diverse elements which make up this huge, important and growing nation. It is a nation with a sense of pride in its accomplishments, and one which can often take its own xenophobic view of other nations and nationalities….some of that fueled by its own history and long decades of subjugation to foreign powers. Chinese youth study intensely. They want to learn about other languages and cultures, but they are also intent on the growth of their own nation and proud of that growth.
It is a nation with many ethnic minorities. It is a nation which is trying to balance a long-standing fear of political chaos with the new dynamics of global economics.
It is all too easy for us to be lured into the fear scenarios of some who believe that the only way to view China is as a threat which we must prepare for militarily. But as Hessler notes, China’s greatest threat is its other strengths……a populace with an intense work ethic, driven by powerful economic forces, forging new international alliances based far more on economics and resources than on military adventurism. In fact Hessler emphasizes, an examination of Chinese history details a country which, unlike many of its neighbors has had little enthusiasm for expansionism through military might.
Hessler does not delve heavily into the impact of the Mao years on the lives of Chinese – particularly the Cultural Revolution which sent millions “back to the countryside” for re-education and disrupted the nation’s economy and the lives of so many, except in his narrative of the archeologist in Oracle Bones. But he does talk about the continued control the Communist party exerts over the lives of its people and of foreigners.
I highly recommend these books if you are interested in gaining a better understanding of modern China. Hessler, who took courses on writing from Princeton educator and author John McPhee, has a real skill for analyzing people, cultures and policies in ways that deepen your understanding.
I urge you to read all three books and to take them in chronological order. (I happened to read them out of order and it was not a problem, but the flow of references and events makes it easiest if they are taken in order.) I can pretty much guarantee you that if you get pulled into the first volume, you will quickly be seeking out the other two.
Peter Hessler today is a contributing author to The New Yorker and continues to write extensively about China and its people. His wife, Chinese-American journalist Leslie Chang, is herself the author of Factory Girls: From Village to Factory in a Changing China (Spiegel & Grau – 2008) and that book is next on my Kindle’s “to read” list.