River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze

I found this book by American author Peter Hessler excellent.

He is finding his feet in China, where he is teaching English in the town of Fuling, at the confluence of the Yangtze and Wu Rivers, in the Chongqing Municipality. Employed by the Peace Corps, Hessler is paid a relatively low wage, which, amongst other things, makes his conversation with the Chinese interesting, as their expectation is that he would be earning much more. Hessler spent two years in Fuling.

Hessler approached his writing in an interesting way, arranging his chapters largely in chronological order, but also theming each chapter around a major event or topic, which allowed his to speak about the past and events in the future of his time in China. He explained well in his writing, and came across as honest and forthright about the mistakes he made.

His most interesting writing was about some of the people he met and the students, often quoting their work to make a point. Of course there was a lot of politics involved - from the politics of his being in China, to the politics of what he was allowed to teach (or not teach) and how he interacted with all people from his students to the senior management of the school.

Equally interesting to his life for two years was the looming Three Gorges Dam, which was under construction at the time Hessler was living in Fuling. The TGD is a phenomenon, causing so much damage to ecosystems, to heritage (such as tombs which were below the new water level), and so much displacement of people, and yet overwhelmingly the general public support the construction of dam (largely because they are told it will be beneficial, and because they generally don't speak out against the wishes of the Communist leaders).

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I sensed that this was a small part of what contributed to the passivity with regard to the Three Gorges Project in Fuling. The vast majority of the people would not be directly affected by the coming changes, and so they weren't concerned. Despite having large sections of the city scheduled to be flooded within the next decade, it wasn't really a community issue, because there wasn't a community as one would generally define it. There were lots of small groups, and there was a great deal of patriotism, but like most patriotism anywhere in the world, this was spurred as much by fear and ignorance as by any true sense of a connection to the Motherland. And you could manipulate this fear and ignorance by telling people that the dam, even though it might destroy the river and the town, was of great importance to China.

4 stars.