River Town (59 page)
Authors: Peter Hessler
THIS BOOK WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN POSSIBLE
without my family. I owe a great deal to all the Hesslers and Gundys who kept in touch during my two years in Sichuan, and thanks for your encouragement and support while I was writing. I promise that someday I'll find subjects closer to home.
From the first trip downriver to the final revision of the manuscript, Adam Meier has been everything I could ask of a friend. In particular, thanks for being such a steadying influence in Fuling, and thanks for all your help with the editingâat times, a difficult and delicate process. We've tilted at our share of windmills together and not for a moment would I have rather been there with anybody else.
I was also fortunate to share the joys and challenges of Fuling life with Sunni Fass and Noreen Finnegan, who were great sitemates. I couldn't have started my time in Sichuan with a better group than Peace Corps China 3: Tamy Chapman, Sean Coady, Mike Goettig, Rose Karkoski, Karen Lauck, Lisa McCallum, Rob Schmitz, Craig Simons, Sarah Telford, Rebecca Steinle Wallihan, Andrew and Molly Watkins, and Adam Weiss. I also want to thank Travis Klingberg, Christopher Marquardt, Mike Meyer, and the Wolken family for their friendship, both in Sichuan and afterwards.
The Peace Corps China staff provided me with a perfect combination of support and freedom while I was in Fuling, especially Dr. William Speidel, Kandice Christian, Don McKay, and Zhan Yimei.
A number of editors helped me with revisions. In particular, I was fortunate to work with Doug Hunt of the University of Missouri, who was always generous with his time and good advice. I appreciated the
comments and recommendations of Scott Kramer, Matt Metzger, Angela Hessler, Terzah Ewing of the
Wall Street Journal
, and Ian Johnson of the
Wall Street Journal's
Beijing bureau. I benefited from the recommendations of a former Fuling student who read the manuscript and gave me a local's reactionâI won't name you here, but I very much appreciate your help. And I want to thank John McPhee of Princeton University for both guidance and friendship; your encouragement while I was living in Fuling helped get this book started.
Thanks to Tim Duggan, my editor at HarperCollins, and William Clark, my agent, for your enthusiasm and support for this project.
My largest debt of gratitude is to my friends in Fuling. I hope that my stories reflect your generosity, patience, and understanding. In particular I want to thank my former students, who are now working all across China, from the highlands of Tibet to southern boom towns like Shenzhen. Most of you are now teachers, and many of you are living in your own Sichuanese river towns, along the Yangtze, the Wu, the Longxi, the Changtou, the Meixi, the Yancang, the Quxi, the Daxiâall of the small and remote rivers that run through eastern Sichuan, where the schools are simple and the classes crowded but the teachers do the best they can. I hope that you are blessed with students as wonderful as mine.
Map Design by Annie Lee
for
RIVER TOWN
by P
ETER
H
ESSLER
“A perceptive and engrossing account of an outsider in fast-changing Chinaâ¦. Elegant.”
âBusiness Week
“Fascinatingâ¦. Vividâ¦. Penetratingâ¦. A valuable book for anyone interested in assessing the progress and future of China.”
âWashington Post Book World
“A work of grace and profundity.”
âEsquire
“Tender, intelligent, and insightful, [this] is the work of a writer of rare talent; it deserves to become a classic.”
âSimon Winchester, author of
The Professor and the Madman
“Charming and insightfulâ¦. Poignant [and] hilariousâ¦. Lively, intelligentâ¦. You will learn a great deal about real life in contemporary China in
River Town
, and about how that vast country appears in the eyes of a sensitive, aware, rugged young American who keeps both his eyes and his mind open.”
âNew York Times
“A vivid and touching tribute to a place and its people.”
âKirkus Reviews
“If you should read only one book about China, let it be thisâ¦. Hessler is a marvellous writerâ¦. I am not the only China-watcher who will wish he had written this book.”
âJonathan Mirsky,
The Literary Review
(London)
“An intimate, humorous, true-to-life portrait of modern China.”
âVanity Fair
“
River Town
is at once profoundly insightful, sharply critical, deeply admiring, thoroughly unsentimental, precisely written, and often very, very funny.”
âTim Cahill, author of
Pass the Butterworms
and
Road Fever
“A lyrical accountâ¦larded with the tender tales and sweet insights of a personal journeyâ¦. A triumph of grace over artifice.”
âSan Francisco Chronicle
“Richly nuancedâ¦. Hessler tells his story in a prose that is both forceful and precise.”
âLos Angeles Times
“With patience and trust, Hessler sees that it is possible to participate in and understand local lifeâ¦.
River Town
is a poignant and beautifully written account of a backwater about to face the onslaught of socialist modernity.”
âThe Times Literary Supplement
(London)
“Exquisitely reportedâ¦. Hessler describes the politics and the history of China in ways that I've never seen matchedâ¦. [He] writes beautifully and with balance.”
âGay Talese,
Brill's Content
“Never is Hessler's complex China, or his book, anything less than magnificent.”
âOutside
magazine
“Moving, mesmerizingâ¦. Transcends the boundaries of the travel genre and will appeal to anyone wanting to learn more about the heart and soul of the Chinese people.”
âBooklist
“One of the most enchanting books I've read in a very long timeâ¦. The quality of the view is exhilarating.”
âAnne Stephenson,
USA Today
“Hessler writes beautifully.
River Town
is memoir, travelogue, and astute anthropological writing woven into a book that is difficult to put down.”
âAbraham Verghese, author of
The Tennis Partner
and
My Own Country
“Powerfulâ¦. Hessler makes poignant observations about the Chinese and the ways Communism and increasing openness affects them.”
âSalon.com
“Suffused with candor, compassion, insights, and intimate knowledge,
River Town
is a wonderful read.”
âHa Jin, author of
Waiting
, winner of the National Book Award
Poem in Chapter Twelve from
The Poetry of Robert Frost
, edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright 1923, © 1969 by Henry Holt and Company, copyright 1951 by Robert Frost. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company, LLC.
RIVER TOWN
. Copyright © 2001 by Peter Hessler. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
First Perennial edition published 2002.
First Harper Perennial edition published 2006.
Chinese Calligraphy by Dai Xiaohong
The Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover edition as follows:
Hessler, Peter.
River town: two years on the Yangtze / Peter Hessler.â1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-06-019544-4
1. Fuling (Sichuan Sheng, China)âDescription and travel. 2. Hessler, Peter, 1969â âJourneysâChinaâFuling (Sichuan Sheng). I. Title.
DS796.F855 H47 2001
915.1'38âdc21 Â Â Â Â Â Â 00-049872
EPub Edition © June 2010 ISBN: 978-0-06-202898-3
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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