Boston's Alternative Source!
Feedback

[Book reviews]

Deep river
Peter Hessler’s Chinese journal

BY ELIZABETH MANUS

RIVER TOWN: TWO YEARS ON THE YANGTZE
By Peter Hessler. HarperCollins, 402 pages, $26.

Author’s note: “This isn’t a book about China.”

Reviewer’s note: this is a book about China. But it’s not one of those tomes anemic on flair but brimming with facts drawing on 2000 years of history. For one, this book has a voice — you know, the thing that seems to be going out of print these days.

Consider Peter Hessler’s treatment of the Three Gorges Dam project. Yes, there are facts aplenty. He notes that the hydroelectric dam will relegate 13 cities, 140 towns, 1352 villages, 650 factories, and 139 power stations to underwater status. It will displace nearly two million people. Also, it will bring progress: electricity will likely have a positive impact on the number of deaths from lung disease in a coal-choked country; possibly Fuling will become a major port.

Then again, the dam is being constructed on an earthquake fault. Hessler wonders whether the river will still be in control after all. In any case, he doesn’t feel much for the diminishment of the man-made world. What gets him is “all that stagnant water,” how the “essential nature” of the rivers will be stifled. “There was power and life and exuberance in those rivers, and in a decade all of that would be lost.”

Hessler compounds the anticipation by reaching back into history, and here’s where he works his alchemy on all those facts. It comes on a trip down the Yangtze when his boat passes the Xiangxi River. There, he recalls Wang Zhaojun, one of the Four Great Beauties during the Han dynasty — fittingly the period (206 BC to AD 220) when the Chinese invented paper:

As a girl she had washed her handkerchiefs in the river; or perhaps she had washed the river in her handkerchiefs, because finally the water ran fragrant, sweetened by the beauty on its banks, which was how it came to be called the Xiangxi — the Fragrant River. Every rock looked like something; every tributary carried its legends; every hill was heavy with the past. With all of this history, it was impossible to say that the new dam was an entirely new sort of violation: Wang Zhaojun had turned her river into perfume, and [then prime minister] Li Peng and the engineers would turn theirs into electricity.

In stretches like this, Hessler gathers you close to see what he sees, and you can’t helping meet him to be gathered. Neither travelogue nor memoir, the book comprises a series of tableaux that fix a place and a cultural moment located somewhere between an unfathomable history and an uncertain future.

In 1996, Hessler arrives in the remote city of Fuling to teach English as a Peace Corps volunteer. For the next two years, he teaches, travels, and takes lots of notes. The result: striking reportage. Note-taking becomes more interesting in light of the obstacles. The 200,000 residents of Fuling are unaccustomed to outsiders. When Hessler arrives, they have not seen an American for some 50 years. People ogle him, shout at him, monitor his movements. To some he is an exotic animal; to others, a threat to the Communist Party. To detach himself from his circumstances and stick to his knitting — Mandarin studies, teaching, writing — he develops some key survival skills. For one, he learns not to take himself too seriously, to be the first to call himself a “foreign devil.” More important, he liberates himself by slipping into a persona that goes by his Chinese name, Ho Wei.

“Ho Wei was completely different from my American self: he was friendlier, he was eager to talk with anybody. . . . Also Ho Wei was stupid, which was what I liked most about him. . . . People were comfortable with somebody that stupid, and they found it easy to talk to Ho Wei, even though they often had to say things twice or write new words in his notebook. Ho Wei always carried his notebook . . . and when Ho Wei returned home he left the notebook on the desk of Peter Hessler, who typed everything into his computer.

Hessler stands by his method, seemingly putting above all else his contract with his readers-to-be. “Sometimes this relationship unnerved me,” he writes. “It seemed wrong that behind Ho Wei’s stupidity there was another person watching everything intently and taking notes. But I could think of no easy resolution to this divide. . . . Ho Wei and Peter Hessler never met each other. The notebook was the only thing they shared.” A less sympathetic reader might brand him fraudulent or casually schizo. But how does a crooked path fare in the light of honest writing?

Hessler has no trouble leaving Fuling. But he hopes that his students will remember something from the classes, a “sliver from a Shakespeare sonnet . . . that they would find something steady and true in its simple beauty. This was the faith I had in literature; its truth was constant, unaffected by the struggles of daily life.” Even if, as he acknowledges, it’s no antidote for those harsh struggles. River Town brims with the steady and true. I’ll remember it.

Issue Date: March 8-15, 2001