River Town

I just did the 12 hour flight to the US and finished Peter Hessler's River Town. The author was a Peace Corp Volunteer in Sichaun Province in the late 1990s, and it talks about his two years there.

I loved the book  - to put it another way, it's the book I would love to have written. Certainly Beijing is not Fuling, the small (200,000 person) town that Hessler found himself in, but the experience is similar.  It's about the experience of living in a foreign country. When I first arrived, my first memory is the taxi driving into Beijing too quickly, driving in the breakdown lane, swerving into the left lane and then the right. The next day I had to cross six lanes of this traffic to get to the office and I wasn't sure I would make it. I followed a Chinese person, and made it.

After days and weeks, the noise and chaos fades, and that becomes background, and you see depth of life. You see the complexity of how China's social network is interconnected, in some ways very caring, in some ways following fixed patterns. Hessler experiences the duality of being a foreigner: on one hand, I will always be waiguoren (literally translated, outsider, but the common way to translate foreigner), but on the other hand people trust you and are friendly because you're not Chinese.  How do you talk authentically about Chinese or American politics while respecting others' views? Hessler beautifully captures all the surprises of life, in a new country, in a new place.

I'd recommend it to my American expat friends in China, people who just want a good read, and even my Chinese colleagues who are curious about how a foreigner's life can be in China.