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A New York Times Notable Book
Winner of the Kiriyama Book Prize
In the heart of China's Sichuan province, amid the terraced hills of the Yangtze River valley, lies the remote town of Fuling. Like many other small cities in this ever-evolving country, Fuling is heading down a new path of change and growth, which came into remarkably sharp focus when Peter Hessler arrived as a Peace Corps volunteer, marking the first time in more than half a century that the city had an American resident. Hessler taught English and American literature at the local college, but it was his students who taught him about the complex processes of understanding that take place when one is immersed in a radically different society.
Poignant, thoughtful, funny, and enormously compelling, River Town is an unforgettable portrait of a city that is seeking to understand both what it was and what it someday will be.
Third-place winner of Barnes & Noble's 2001 Discover Great New Writers Award for Nonfiction
River Town recounts Hessler's difficulties in learning Chinese and how his students viewed Americans as both materialistic and soulless. But what he unexpectedly found in Fuling was a town "mid-river both geographically and historically," as it awaits a partial submergence by the construction of the Three Gorges Dam. Teaching students as a waiguoren, or foreigner, "was a matter of trying to negotiate [one's] way through a political landscape." And though Hessler brings plenty to his students, his students bring so much more to him. Surprisingly, at the end of his two years on the banks of the Yangtze, Peter Hessler finds he's been given a new perspective on both America and himself. And in reflecting on those lessons, he's written a memoir that enlightens, transports, and entertains. (Winter 2001 Selection)
"Tender, intelligent, and insightful..." --Simon Winchester, author of The Professor and the Madman
Hessler attended Princeton University, where he majored in English and Creative Writing. The summer before graduation, he worked as a researcher for the Kellogg Foundation in southeastern Missouri, where he wrote a long ethnography about a small town called Sikeston. This became his first significant publication, appearing in the Journal for Applied Anthropology.
In 1992, Hessler entered Oxford University, where he studied English Language and Literature at Mansfield College. After graduating in 1994, he traveled for six month in Europe and Asia. One of the highlights of that trip was taking the trans-Siberian train from Moscow to Beijing. That journey resulted in his first published travel story, an essay that appeared in The New York Times in 1995. And that journey was his first introduction to China.
He spent the following year freelancing and attempting to write a book about his travels. Although the book didn't work out, he was able to publish travel stories in a range of newspapers, including The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Washington Post, and The Newark Star-Ledger, among others. In 1995, he received the Stratton Fellowship, a grant from the Friends of Switzerland and spent two months hiking 650 miles across the Alps. Afterwards he continued to freelance, writing travel stories for American newspapers while teaching freshman composition at the University of Missouri. He also organized volunteer projects for students on campus.
In 1996 he joined the Peace Corps and was sent to China. For two years, he taught English at a small college in Fuling, a city on the Yangtze River. While living in Fuling, he studied Mandarin Chinese and became proficient in the language.
After completing his Peace Corps service in 1998, he traveled to Tibet, where he researched a long article, "Tibet Through Chinese Eyes," which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in February of 1999. Following that trip, he returned to Missouri and wrote River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze. While working on the book, he continued to write travel stories for The New York Times and other newspapers. In March of 1999, Hessler decided to return to China independently and try to establish himself as a freelance writer.
Over the following years, he traveled widely in China and freelanced for a variety of publications. For a brief spell, he was accredited as the Boston Globe stringer in Beijing. In 2000, The New Yorker began publishing some of his stories; the following year, he became the first New Yorker correspondent to be accredited as a full-time resident correspondent in the People's Republic.
In 2000, Hessler also started researching stories for National Geographic Magazine. The first assignment was a story about Xi'an archaeology, which sparked his interest in researching antiquities. Subsequently he accepted an assignment for a story about China's bronze-age cultures, which led to his interest of the oracle bones of the Anyang excavations.
River Town was published in 2001. It won the Kiriyama Prize for outstanding nonfiction book about the Pacific Rim and South Asia. It was also a finalist for the Barnes & Noble Discover award, and in the United Kingdom it was shortlisted for the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award. The book has been translated into Korean, Thai, and Hungarian. The Hungarian translation won the Elle Literary Prize for nonfiction in 2004.
Peter Hessler's magazine stories have been selected for the Best American Travel Writing anthologies of 2001, 2004 and 2005, and also for the Best American Sports Writing anthology of 2004. "Chasing the Wall," a National Geographic story published in 2003, was nominated for a National Magazine Award.
Hessler first conceived of Oracle Bones at the end of 2001 and spent the next four years researching and writing the book.
He currently lives in Beijing.
Author biography courtesy of HarperCollins.
I came to Fuling on the slow boat downstream from Chongqing. It was a warm, clear night at the end of August in 1996-stars flickering above the Yangtze River, their light too faint to reflect off the black water. A car from the college drove us along the narrow streets that twisted up from the docks. The city rushed past, dim and strange under the stars.
There were two of us. We had been sent to work as teachers, and both of us were young: I was twenty-seven and Adam Meier was twenty-two. We had heard almost nothing about Fuling. I knew that part of the city would be flooded by the new Three Gorges Dam, and I knew that for many years Fuling had been closed to outsiders. Other than that I had been told very little.
No Americans had lived there for half a century. Later, I would meet older people in town who remembered some American residents in the 1940s, before the 1949 Communist Liberation, but such memories were always vague. When we arrived, there was one other foreigner, a German who was spending a semester teaching at a local high school. But we met him only once, and he left not long after we settled in. After that we were the only foreigners in town. The population was about 200,000, which made it a small city by Chinese standards.
There was no railroad in Fuling. It had always been a poor part of Sichuan province and the roads were bad. To go anywhere you took the boat, but mostly you didn't go anywhere. For the next two years the city was my home.
A week after we arrived, everybody in the college gathered at the front gate. A group of students and teachers hadspent the summer walking from Fuling to Yan'an, the former revolutionary base in northern Shaanxi province, and now they were returning to school.
It was the sixtieth anniversary of the Long March, the six-thousand-mile trek that the Red Army had made during the most critical part of the civil war, when the Kuomintang was on the verge of destroying Mao Zedong's forces. Against all odds the Communists had marched to safety, over the mountains and deserts of western China, and from Yan'an they had steadily built their strength until at last their revolution carried the nation, driving the Kuomintang to Taiwan.
All semester there were special events in the college to commemorate the anniversary of the march. The students took classes on the history of the Long March, they wrote essays about the Long March, and in December there was a Long March Singing Contest. For the Long March Singing Contest, all of the departments practiced their songs for weeks and then performed in the auditorium. Many of the songs were the same, because the musical potential of the Long March is limited, which made the judging difficult. It was also confusing because costumes were in short supply and so they were shared, like the songs. The history department would perform, resplendent in clean white shirts and red ties, and then they would go offstage and quickly give their shirts and ties to the politics department, who would get dressed, rush onstage, and sing the same song that had just been sung. By the end of the evening the shirts were stained with sweat and everybody in the audience knew all the songs. The music department won, as they always did, and English was near the back. The English department never won any of the college's contests. There aren't any English songs about the Long March.
But the summer walk to Yan'an was not a contest, and the return of the Fuling group was by far the biggest event of the Long March season. They had walked more than a thousand miles, all of it in the brutal heat of the Chinese summer, and in the end only sixteen had made it. Thirteen were students, and two were teachers: the Chinese department's Communist Party Secretary and the math department's Assistant Political Adviser. There was also a lower-level administrator, who had burst into tears in the middle of the walk and gained a measure of local fame for his perseverance. All of the participants were men. Some of the women students had wanted to come along, but the college had decided that the Long March was not for girls.
A week before the assembly, President Li, the head of the college, had traveled to Xi'an to meet the marching students, because at the finish of the trek they had run into trouble.
"The students have some kind of problem," said Dean Fu Muyou, the head of the English department, when I asked him what had happened. I think they probably have no money left." And it was true-they had run out of cash, despite their sponsorship by Magnificent Sound cigarettes, the Fuling tobacco company. It struck me as a particularly appropriate way to honor the history of Chinese Communism, to march a thousand miles and end up bankrupt in Yan'an.
But President Li had been able to bail them out, and now the entire student body of the college met in the plaza near the front gate. It was a small teachers college with an enrollment of two thousand students, and it had been opened in 1977, one of many that were founded after the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution had destroyed much of China's education system. On the spectrum of Chinese higher education, this type of teachers college was near the bottom. Courses took three years and the degree was considered lower than a bachelor's, and nearly all of the students came from peasant homes in the countryside of Sichuan province. After graduation they returned to their hometowns, where they became teachers in rural middle schools.
I had a lot of time on my hands in Fuling. My teaching job took about 30 hours a week; I had no access to the Internet; and during my first year there was only one other foreigner in town. There wasn't much on TV. Anybody who called from the outside had to speak Chinese to get the operator to dial my extension. Nobody called from outside. I didn't have many books. I didn't bring a CD player. I traveled light when I came to Sichuan, and my salary of $120 a month made sure that I stayed that way.
All I had was time, which is both the blessing and the curse of the Peace Corps -- all the empty hours and the long days, the slow weeks that stretch to slow months until eventually you find yourself removed from time as you knew it before. Occasionally letters arrived, jarring me with echoes of the world I used to know: wedding invitations, birth announcements, new jobs. My sister had a baby, and I found out three weeks later. My mother wrote every week, but other than that I had few regular correspondents. One of the most faithful letter-writers was my alma mater, which sent regular solicitations looking for a chunk of that 120-dollar salary. I never sent them anything, but it was nice to get the letters anyway. Somebody knew where I was.
At the beginning I spent most of my time studying Chinese, and as I became comfortable with the language I wandered through town, looking for conversations. I was fascinated by daily life -- I got to know the porters who worked down by the Yangtze; I chatted with the shopkeepers; I became friends with the family who owned the noodle shop by the college. In the spring I spent hours in the countryside, watching the peasants plant and transplant the rice. I watched them weed the crop in summer and harvest it in the autumn. The peasants followed a life of cycles, and I sensed that my own routines were slipping into a similar pattern -- not so much aiming toward any particular goal, but rather doing things at a steady pace until it was time to do them again. A semester ended, another began; Chinese language lessons gave way to more advanced lessons. In the evenings I wrote in my diary, knowing that the next day I'd go out and find something else to write about.
Then with six months left in my service, time started to straighten out again. Fuling got access to the Internet, and suddenly I remembered that there was another world out there waiting for me. There were jobs and grad schools and other opportunities. A friend sent me a letter encouraging me to write something about Sichuan. Soon I was thinking seriously about it, and then I started writing, and almost without realizing what had happened I found myself working on a book.
I had always taken extensive notes throughout my time in China, but now the shape of the thing began to form in my mind. I wanted to write it for myself -- I didn't really have any faith in publishing a book, but I figured that someday I'd want it as a souvenir of those wonderful slow months. I started writing sketches -- short third-person descriptions of places and people I knew. Sometimes I'd spend a day in a certain part of town, or with a certain person, and then I'd write five or six pages about it. But I found that I couldn't yet write about my own life in Fuling; I was still too close to that experience. I didn't write anything in the first person until I left China.
I returned to my parents' home in Columbia, Missouri, and wrote the rest of it. The first draft went quickly -- four months, basically. I took the short sketches and put them between the chapters, and I gave the manuscript to one reader -- a writing professor at the University of Missouri named Doug Hunt. He gave me good editing advice, and finally I sent the whole thing to some literary agents whose names I had found on a list.
After that things happened quickly. Most of the agents didn't respond, but two were interested. I went to a shop in downtown Columbia and bought my first suit. I flew to New York and chose an agent, William Clark. He sold the book in a week. I went back to Beijing, to edit and work on freelancing. And since then things really haven't slowed down -- and I sometimes wonder what happened to all those days in Fuling, where I had so much time on my hands.
--Peter Hessler
Anonymous
Posted September 25, 2002
The book is excellent. Hessler's very eloquent, descriptive, humorous and poetic at times. I've highlighted almost every passage because his observations are impecable, very poignant, honest, and very funny. Hessler's quite a character. I'm actually going to give my family a copy of it because we travel so much and we spend our time trying to understand and fit in with other cultures. And this one time I wanted to know how others try to understand ours. I feel very lucky to have stumbled upon Hessler's River Town. Can't praise it enough.
2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
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Posted October 6, 2002
I picked up this book 3 days ago and was soon completely absorbed in reading it. It was fascinating to see China through Hessler's observations. His wrote his experience as an American teacher in Fuling with great humor and prose, backed by sharp oberservations and intellectual vigor. This is a must read for anyone with an interest in China!
2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
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Posted January 6, 2005
Peter Hesslers book, RIVER TOWN, gives the reader an outstanding look at contemporary China. As he does so, he teaches the reader a few Chinese words here and there. This kind of person, Hessler, is exactly who John F. Kennedy had in mind when he created the Peace Corps.
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Posted January 3, 2005
My son who lives as a foreigner in China directed me to read the book, and I found it wonderful. . Not only does it provide a dynamic insight into the country's present thinking (through Hessler's students' essays), but it allows us to watch his efforts to move gently and gracefully through his local society, with varying success. . Not only is the book enlightening, but it's wonderfully entertaining, as we share the bittersweet adventure of joining a culture that's so hard to decode. I read the book before a trip to Beijing, and thought about it every day.
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Posted August 15, 2003
While this book is excellent for people unfamiliar with China, it is also highly recommended for those with a more in depth knowledge. I myself have spent time in Taiwan and China and was often struck by how accurate Hessler's observations were. The section on Chinese photo albums and the rather bizarre photo culture there was hilarious, as was the section on the English names Chinese people take. I also identified with Hessler's alternate personality, his self in Chinese, Ho Wei. Anyone who studies Chinese has this other personality...kind of dumb, illiterate, and not at all erudite or funny. This book will make you laugh out loud, but it also has a serious side, discussing issues such as the sky-high rates of suicide among women in China, the educational atmosphere in a system tightly controlled by the CCP, and the death of Deng Xiaoping.
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Posted March 5, 2002
It's a great book for people who want to understand the Chinese culture. I feel enlightened reading the book. I know my own culture better through a foreigner's eyes. Peter Hessler caught those moments a native Chinese will never pay attention to. I truly enjoy his sense of humor and good writing. I hope he can find more interesting things to write about during his stay in China.
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Posted September 20, 2001
Very accessible in his writing, he brings the true experience of a young American in modern China. Hessler deftly brings up important points in China's history so as to help us understand what helps to shape the modern Chinese attitude towards foreigners of different nationalities, relations among fellow man, and their own relationships with themselves and their country.
Through this narrative based in part on his journal writings, we get a voyeuristic view as the book develops, riding along with Hessler's metamorphosis in character as he develops Ho Wei, his Chinese self. Hessler keeps the reader on thier toes through contrasting American and British attitudes and behaviors with those of the Chinese. He has evidently learned both yin and yang and lays both out fairly for the reader to decide on each subject he treats this way.
A great read that brings a wealth of knowledge of modern China and more than a couple of laughs along the way.
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Posted February 25, 2001
This book was an incredible eye-opener about Chinese culture. A sprinkling of wit binds together a string of vignettes which lay bare the society of this remote, interior, Chinese city. Hessler's personality rings through the pages as he draws you into his world and his experiences. This is a must read for anyone who wants to travel in Asia or who wishes to understand the role that China will have in the coming century. Simply a fabulous book.
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.River Town provides an enlightening account of what it is like to live & work in rural China. I wish the individual who lived in Chongqing & wrote a previous review had been more specific in their criticism, as it appears to me that Hessler tried his best to meet & honestly assess the lives & feelings of the people in this remote area.
I also found it interesting to hear what cautionary training the Peace Corp provided for someone to work in a Communist country & how the volunteers were able to cope with multiple issues & problems.
Hessler writes with clarity & a touch of humor which makes the history lesson included more fun. I look forward to reading his two sequels, Oracle Bones & Country Driving.
Anonymous
Posted September 18, 2009
I found this book to be interesting and enlightening. It is well written and goes fast
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Posted September 11, 2003
Hessler appears to have set foot in Fulin with a preconceived notion of superiority that never left him. What remains clear throughout his book is that he constantly treated the Chinese as subjects of his anectodes. It's as if he was composing his book as he experienced it. I think it left Hessler feeling removed from the Chinese. River Town never gets around this feeling. There are much better books on China out there. I recommend Da Chen's memoirs.
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Posted January 27, 2001
I rushed to the bookstore as soon as I found out about this book. But I am sorry to say I feel disappointed.
There is no doubt about the writing skill of the author. He vividly portrayed a rural Chinese city, Fuling.
But having been living in Chongqing, a city not far from Fuling, for over four years, I found this book misleading and in lack of in depth understanding of the local culture and local people. I hope the author of this book will spend longer time to get a better knowledge before he rush to publish his next book.
Anonymous
Posted July 17, 2011
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Posted December 24, 2010
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Posted December 1, 2008
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Overview
A New York Times Notable Book
Winner of the Kiriyama Book Prize
In the heart of China's Sichuan province, amid the terraced hills of the Yangtze River valley, lies the remote town of Fuling. Like many other small cities in this ever-evolving country, Fuling is heading down a new path of change and growth, which came into remarkably sharp focus when Peter Hessler arrived as a Peace Corps volunteer, marking the first time in more than half a...