River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze
Where to buy River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze books online?
- ISBN13: 9780060855024
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
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 additional tiny 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, amusing, and enormously compelling, River Town is an unforgettable portrait of a city that is seeking to know both what it was and what it someday will be.
Amazon.com Review
In 1996, 26-year-ancient Peter Hessler arrived in Fuling, a town on China’s Yangtze River, to start a two-year Peace Corps stint as a teacher at the local college. Along with fellow teacher Adam Meier, the two are the first foreigners to be in this part of the Sichuan province for 50 years. Expecting a cool couple of years, Hessler at first does not realize the social, cultural, and personal implications of being thrust into a such radically different society. In River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze, Hessler tells of his experience with the citizens of Fuling, the political and past climate, and the feel of the city itself.
“Few passengers disembark at Fuling … and so Fuling appears like a break in a dream–the silent river, the cabins full of travelers drifting off to sleep, the lights of the city rising from the blackness of the Yangtze,” says Hessler. A poor city by Chinese standards, the students at the college are mainly from tiny villages and are considered very lucky to be continuing their education. As an English teacher, Hessler is delighted with his students’ fresh reactions to classic literature. One student says of Hamlet, “I don’t admire him and I dislike him. I reflect he is too sensitive and conservative and selfish.” Hessler marvels,
You couldn’t have said something like that at Oxford. You couldn’t simply say: I don’t like Hamlet because I reflect he’s a lousy person. Everything had to be more clever than that … you had to dismantle it … not just the play itself but everything that had ever been written about it.
Over the course of two years, Hessler and Meier learn more they ever guessed about the lives, dreams, and expectations of the Fuling people.
Hessler’s writing is lovely. His observations are evocative, insightful, and regularly poignant–and just as regularly, amusing. It’s a pleasure to read of his (mis)adventures. Hessler returned to the U.S. with a new perspective on modern China and its people. After reading River Town, you’ll have one, too. –Dana Van Nest
Buy Cheap River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze Online
Related posts:
A wonderful book that is unlike additional books I’ve read about Chinese culture. This book is based on factual experiences that Peter went through during his 2 years in Fuling. There is a lot to gain by experiencing, through Peter’s chapters, about the Chinese people, their past, and their future. This is not a fictional tale, but a right life experience of what it is like for an American to go to China, overcome the language barriers, the culture barries, and learn to live with, work with, and and know the Chinese.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
Brilliant writers praise this book as extravagantly as I would have after having read the first half. The descriptions of the countryside in particular are superb. Then questions started to arise, and I concluded that this is written by a pious man, for precocious children. If in persons two years the leader of this highly autobiographical account ever succumbed to or struggled with sexual impulses, he omitted mention. Certainly any normal young man would have had them, and recognizable their importance in evaluating his response to the sights and sounds he encountered and recounted. His few allusions to even hints of Chinese women’s sexual interest are, nearly lacking exception, contemptuous dismissal of prostitutes. Not, perhaps, too remote from the above: I judge that the word “stink” was used a few times, and nightsoil was mentioned, but not the toilet on a long train ride. The relation of the linked stink was never drawn , and was never absent in any experience or discussion of life in China in which I participated. The “outhouses”–even for tourists at many sites, were unforgettably spicy. A more arresting omission, for me, was Hessler’s failure to tell–perhaps to experience–full appreciation of the awe to which the Fantastic River gives rise in its majesty, its power, and especially its history. The subtitle of his book focusses our attention on it, but in contrast to his account of village life, what he writes about the Yangtze is shallow and superficial. Hessler is, obviously, a scholar. He should read Bodard’s “The Consul,” about life on the YangTze a century ago. In ten pages of this ancient book, I establish more emotional power and more graphic description than in all of “River Town.”
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
This was a excellent book which could have been better agreed the compelling theme matter and the leader’s front-row seat. He could have used a better editor. The unabridged audio book was read by Scott Brick who helped me get through the leader’s meanderings.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
River Town is a wonderful book for anyone who wants to learn more about China, or are preparation on living abroad for an extended period of time. I thought that the book was very appealing and was fascinated with the way the Chinese of Fuling treated Peter Hessler during his stay. It would be very helpful to know a small about China’s past, as Peter Hessler mentions many different movements and leaders lacking going into detail, which can lead to many readers feeling lost. The reader also has to remember that this book is the opinion of just one person who lived in a remote part of China and should not consider his experiences to be the norm for a forgeiner living in China.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
Peter Hessler writes about his experience teaching English in rural China for the Peace Corps. Like any travel book, it covers the geography, history, culture and people of the region.
Overall, the book is very readable. It is well written and paints a plain picture of everyday life in rural China. From this foreigner’s experience, the reader comes away with a better understanding of the Chinese character and lifestyle, both positive and negative.
While the leader does make generalizations about the Chinese, the reader is agreed the sense that his assumptions are largely right. Yes, China is an ancient, diverse country with a intricate mixture of jingoism, communist indoctrination, and constant change.
While thousands of people come to Asia to teach English each year, very few of them have the insight (or the curiosity) to delve into the real clockwork of the country around them. Most people come as tourists, and place as tourists.
Ten points:
1. The communist party is everywhere. 10% of the population are party members. It pervades all aspects of life,
especially education.
2. Life is rural China is tough. China is developing into a two tier economy, much like the rest of the world.
The standard of living in the countryside, where most of his experiences take place, is only a fraction
of the lifestyle that Chinese city people delight in.
3. Really amusing tales about his English lessons and their adaptation to the Chinese classroom. Essays on “What if Robin Hood lived in modern day China.” Chinese adaptation of Hamlet with Hong Kong
fighting scenes.
4. Three Gorges Dam. It will be the largest in the world and produce the same electricity as 10 nuclear power plants.
Strangely, the majority of the residents are long-suffering (nearly complacent) of the huge change this will have on their
environment and lives. All throughout the city there are markers that read 177 (the height above sea level that dam
will raise the water).
5. You can learn Chinese within 2 years if you try. Rumor has it that, the leader did.
6. Many of the peculiarities to the Chinese mindset are not entirely Chinese, but Asian. I marvel how much culture shock a Korean, or Japanese born person would have felt in his teaching position.
7. In Xian there is a law which states that all people get a day off if the temperature goes above 35 degrees. The government regulates the official temperature, and during the peak of the summer it is a consistent. . . .
35 degrees.
8. He took a 50 hour train ride through China lacking a seat.
9. Right to the communist roots, people are not ashamed of being effective class. When he questions his students what their parents’ occupation, the majority of them say “peasants” lacking the least indecision.
10. Quote. He wonders about the future of his students.
“He would turn out fine, too. Most of them were that way. They were tough, and sweet and amusing, and sad, and people like that would permanently survive. It wasn’t automatically gold, but perhaps because of that it would stay.”
Page 377.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5