|
River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze by
Peter
Hessler
(John Murray Paperbacks, 402pp. ISBN 0-7195-6480-8)
by Mark
Mordue
Travel literature today is the drained province of ‘rad’
snowboarders, contemplative chefs in Tuscany, gimmick artists with a story to grind, and a
horde of d-grade wits who bring us snapshots of the world with plenty of yuks per page,
conquistadors of irony devouring cultures in the name of their one true god, the lifestyle
magazine.
Its authors are usually all men whose final report is there’s
nothing new under the sun but themselves. It sells by the truckload, and given the oddly
talented exception - outstanding figures who are so imitated they begin to imitate
themselves as badly as their copyists (P.J. O’Rourke and Bill Bryson spring woefully
to mind) - it is all niche marketing crap.
And yet there’s another side to the genre re-emerging: a melding
of classical discipline and poetic natural observation in the grand line of Peter
Matthiessen and Barry Lopez, along with evolving literary voices that hybridize memoir,
history, reportage and a serious reflective ambition for what travel writing can do. This
more committed groundswell – and there’s no other word for it but
‘committed’ - puts the best travel writing at the forefront of a renaissance in
non-fiction storytelling just when it felt like the world was being horribly plundered all
over again for the so-called Information Age.
Peter Hessler is certainly one of those writers who restore your
faith in the travel genre’s revelatory potential, even its nobility. His book River
Town documents the two years he spent as a Peace Corps volunteer teaching literature
at a teachers’ college in Fuling, a small “by Chinese standards” town of
some two hundred thousand people in the Sichuan province.
When he arrives in late 1996, “No Americans had lived there for
half a century.” By story’s end he has won a local marathon race, mastered
Mandarin, had a student commit suicide, been assaulted by a mob, struggled through classes
on everybody from Shakespeare to Helen Keller and a Marxist version of Robin Hood, dealt
with the bureaucratic absurdities of censorship and learnt a few things about “the
Chinese smile” and the life that underlines it under Communist rule.
Subtitled ‘Two Years on the Yangtze’, Hessler’s book
does this all quietly, assuming a detailed authority and flow that finally sweeps you
away, whether he is dealing with local characters, Chinese history or the natural
landscape and the many ways they intersect and impress their identity upon him.
There’s something reasonable and true about Hessler’s subdued tone that grows on
you page after page as he does this, an unhurried and precise quality to his prose, with
subtly poetic turns that surprise you when they emerge.
In noting that Fuling is located at a junction between the Wu and the
Yangtze Rivers, one blue and clear, the other a dirty brown, Hessler describes them as
meeting “like two slivers of painted glass”. In discussing their pace and
character he goes on to say, “The Yangtze in its size and majesty seems to be going
somewhere important, while the Wu in its narrow swiftness seems to have come from some
place wild and mysterious; and the faint forms of its distant hills suggest that the river
will keep its secrets. You can fish all day long and the Wu will give you nothing.”
Hessler grieves for the damming of the Yangtze and the coming changes
to Fuling life, let alone the drowned cities and landscapes that are all upriver from the
monumental Three Gorges Project. But he also recognizes the strength of local needs
(“Cold was like hunger; it had a way of simplifying everything”) and a stoicism
– both impressive and frustrating - born out of “the ashes of the Cultural
Revolution” and a century of constant, savage change in China. As Teacher Kong tells him when Hessler asks what
people in Fuling think of the Three Gorges Project, “Well… the boats will all
float, so they will be fine.”
In resisting a waiguoren (“people from outside the
country”) tendency to see things in black and white, Hessler colours his book with a
self-critical voice that opens up issues of how we engage with other cultures. Even so,
the damming of the river finally lurks as a metaphysical crime in his imagination:
“to turn the river into a lake – for some reason that bothered me more than
anything else… I couldn’t explain it other than that they [rivers] were meant to
rush forward; that was their essential nature.”
This feeling imbues River Town with a vaguely elegiac character. It
is, of course, a diary of his time, and as such it also has the flavor of remembrance, of
the past as another country. And yet its freshness and intimacy signal China’s unique
vitality, the human torrent that can inspire or overwhelm. With this book Hessler gives
the torrent a face, the history a meaning and a heart one could almost call
‘home’.
~~~
Mark Mordue is the author of
‘Dastgah: Diary of a Headtrip’ (Allen & Unwin Book Publishers; Sydney 2001).
He has been published in The Nation, Interview, Salon and Planet.
|
