“This isn’t a book about China,” claims author Peter Hessler about the first of his three books set far from his American upbringing. “It’s about a certain small part of China at a certain brief period in time.” And Rivertown: Two Years on the Yangtze is certainly that, though his disclaimer is among the first evidences of the clear-minded humility that is one of the book’s greatest recommendations. It is a first-person account of a young man’s two-year immersion in the life of western China, and it is many things: a wide-open window into a place and a time, a travelogue, a coming-of-age tale, and a teacher’s diary.
BLURT 21: Fear and self-loathing in Hong Kong, Guangdong, Yunnan, over an insignificant promise that terrifies me so that I’m writing THIS instead of THAT.
I’m looking out the 9th floor window of the Salisbury Street (downtown) YMCA in Hong Kong. Actually, I’m in Kowloon, all part of the territory so proudly reclaimed by mainland China in 1997 from the British, but Kowloon is the part attached to the mainland. The black and silver, soaring, hugely titled buildings — Panasonic, Olympus, Epson — across the harbour are on Hong Kong Island, along with Kowloon the densely populated, high-rising part of the “New Territories” of HK. (By the way, in Mandarin the newly returned “Special Administrative Region (SAR)” is known as Qiang Kang, “Fragrant Harbour”. It looks reasonably fragrant on this bright afternoon.)
It’s a city that works, that is remarkably clean, one that genuinely enacts the concept of “mass transit”, moving incredible numbers of people efficiently and, at least in the district where we are, making walking a useful and do-able way of getting around. They’ve maintained, through the decades, a lovely downtown park with massive old trees and lots of water.
Amid the pampered comings and leavings in the lobby of a Chiang Mai hotel, and here on a sunny balcony overlooking the baking tourists by the pool in Krabi, I try to pretend I am not one of them. When I can’t simply enjoy warmth and leisure and good food, I am guiltily soured by this tourist business, and am too (self) conscious of the real “tourist trap”: the detachment from the serving class, the presumption that the too-visible disparity between their fortune and mine is at it should be. At its worst, it becomes a bland but bitter-edged condescension at the quaintness/ignorance/pathos/inconvenience of “these people”. These people. What a simple and toxic phrase – surely better than “these brutes”, “these savages”, but not so much different. These thoughts gain traction in a slippery tourist mind that is still digesting a jet-set reading of The Help.
Now, gentlemen! Don’t turn away, I’m talking to you,
Here’s the Educated, Middle-Aged Concerned Citizen, seeing another country and its troubled, yet pleasant people. What is he thinking as he walks along the crowded streets? How does he correlate what he sees with his experience of the so-called “developed world”, and the perspective gained through his study of education, human psychology, literature and yet more sacred texts? What’s on his mind? Let’s listen in!
Early in the mornin’, come along!
Listen to the Kellogg’s Corn Flakes song!
Catch a bowl of sunshine, here’s how you do it,
Whistle up an appetite and hop right to it!
BLURT 20: First night in Chiangmai, ancient capital of Siam: warm breezes, friendly smiles, mango fruitshakes, drivers using brakes not horns. Thailand 4, China 0.
There is a university in my city that offers what I’m coming to think of as a classically “new China” approach to education – at least for the rich.
As you may have heard, China is racing. Athletically, especially as the 2008 Olympics loomed, the sporting cadres sprinted to pressure-treat their selected young warriors to shine, precious-metallically, before the world. Economically, China charges headlong toward international influence and prestige as the world’s largest producer of wealth. (Some say it’s only a matter of time.) Educationally, it seems that the notoriously manic, mobile concentration camp endured by China’s aspiring youth – with their profoundly anxious parents sounding the drumbeats of this single-minded march toward something or other – shows little sign of slowing down to see where it’s going. (To be fair, there is always the mantra: we must work hard so we can have a comfortable life. Even the most English-impaired students know this line, and the majority seem to find it satisfactory.)
A certain school here in Dalian, I’ve come to know, has among its main attractions a series of programs that allow students to travel for study in different disciplines
BLURT 19: The Writing Coach confronts the writing classroom, exemplifying the Sacred Art while the awed students enter. Look, he’s doing it even though he doesn’t have to! Look, he’s wearing a tweedy-looking jacket! Teachers can, mm-hmm.
BLURT 18: That sort of day: re-reading Shea-bon on the blue bed, wrestling with DFW on the white, sundry forays into half-hearted purpose mainly avoided, semi-conscious caloric binges mostly not. Redeem the day? Or wait for the next?
(BTW, long and narrow-interest piece published below right in On Second Thought, plus a piece of Pittsburgh cited below that. I knew you’d want to know.)
BLURT 17: David Foster Wallace mentions, offhand, the “delusion that cynicism and naïveté are mutually exclusive”. Wondrous. Wearing the casual armour of cynicism is actually a naïve choice: where does it lead? what can it make, besides bitterness?