River Town; Book Review

I first came to China in 1995 and spent a year in Chongqing (then in Sichuan Province) teaching English. It was probably the most interesting and difficult year in my life. I taught at a little college of about 3000 students. I’ve since been in China (and Taiwan) for most all of the last 12 years and have managed to keep in touch with only 3 students from 900 that were in my classes that year. I also read this book while traveling through Zhejiang and Jiangsu province visiting factories this past week.With that background you can see that I was a sucker for Peter Hessler’s book “River Town.” Set in a small college just down the river from Chongqing in 1997, Peter describes exactly what I had felt, seen and recorded in my journal and on film while I was in Chongqing. The sights, the struggles, the successes, the friends, the misunderstandings, the smells, the food, the politics, the weather—he nailed it. I laughed, I cried, I remembered. I loved it. Perter Hessler not only knows about China, he knows how to write.Now this isn’t a book about China today or a book about how great China will become in the future. It’s about living in a glass box—that’s what China was for foreigners as recently as 10 years ago. If you are doing business in the coastal cities this book will bear little resemblance to the China that you know today. But if you want to know what it was like “back in the day” this is the book for you.This is a very romantic look at 1997 China and my experience of talking with people about China is that they typically can’t relate to the past while looking at the current development. I think that most people who read this book will probably think one of two things: either that China is still like this (people that have never been here) or that he’s off his rocker (people that only visit Shenzhen and Shanghai in the last few years). In that light, my only issue with Peter’s book is that he doesn’t balance what he experienced then with what he knows now—but maybe that wasn’t his point.Read this book if you want to know what it was really like to experience China before it was used to the West. Great job, Peter. Thanks.