In scouting around for my next bookgroup's read, I took up a book that's been on my night-table for over a year. The night-table is stacked with recommendations from friends and family, so I feel they're safe investments of time. And time was of the essence for this choice, because I had already assigned Tony Hendron's "Father Joe" to the bookgroup for next month, but it's not yet out in paperback. That's our one rule: that we only read affordable books, so they have to have come out in paper.
In scurrying to make up for my error, I've whipped through about half of Peter Hessler's "River Town," and it's enough to know I have a winner. I assigned it to my book group last night, saying it's one of the few books, besides Mark Twain's "Life on the Mississippi," that makes me really want to travel. And being a person who's neutral about travel, who rather tries to cultivate and sustain interest in my own backyard, this new inspiration makes the book special.
And that's because the narrator isn't just a traveler; he's a teacher, assigned by the Peace Corps to a rural river town at the junction of the Yangtze and Wu rivers in China. He teaches English in a small teacher's college to sons and daughters of rural peasants and workers in the town's several factories.
So he stays in one place long enough to get asthma from the polluted air, as well as a sense of his students' and fellow-citizens' minds. This insight into how the Chinese learn and what they value, shaped by the intense collectivism of the Cultural Revolution, clashes with the narrator's regard for the individual, shaped by Democracy. His biggest challenge is getting his students to think for themselves, and the freshest ideas he encounters are on his long hikes into the countryside. The fishermen and farmers he encounters there, because they are not being groomed - as his students are - to shape the minds of coming generations along party-lines, can let their ideas flow freely.
So nature has a redeeming effect in this book, and yet nature has a much bigger meaning than the usual travelogue's descriptions of wild and beautiful landscapes. This book's focus is on the human mind, and there is a constant interplay between what we Americans would see as a more natural, free-flowing mind, and minds that are paralyzed or dammed-up by political repression. The fact that Hessler is there in the late nineties, when construction has just begun on an enormous dam that will alter the rivers and their surrounding countryside forever, drowning hundreds of acres under an enormous, state-sponsored lake that will collect and intensify the area's pollution, makes a perfect metaphor.
Hessler shows whole minds, so he includes many positives in the Chinese mind that I haven't touched on here, such as the fact that Chinese students are more sensitive to poetry than American students. He is admiring and compassionate enough about what he observes to show us the true suffering political repression can cause.
Having grown up in a family with an elitist bias towards travel, judging those who didn't travel as "provincial," I've overcompensated by regarding travel as neutral: simply getting one's body from one place to the other. A little-known guy I found in my Word Lover's Boook of Unfamiliar Quotations, Thomas Fuller, got it right in 1732 when he wrote: "If an ass goes traveling, he will not come home a horse."
But this book, "River Town," shows that travel can illuminate how culture shapes the mind. Yes, we can achieve the same effect by staying home and reading, but doing it through travel is more vivid, compelling, and - especially if accompanied by pictures - indelible.
I just finished reading "Folly" by Laurie King. Enjoyable fast reading and delicious scenery. When I bought the book, I was looking for her latest Mary Russell book, "The Game". Half-priced books did not have that title so I settled for "Folly".
Posted by: Cowtown Pattie | April 12, 2005 at 08:07 PM
Actually travel can force you to 'fit' youself into a different mold and if you stay somewhere long enough (not travel as a tourist) you can begin to broaden, change, question your values and ideas. So the ass may not come home as a horse but he may come home able to do some new tricks and with better eyesight.
Posted by: Tabor | April 14, 2005 at 05:33 AM
Yes, thank goodness for travel books. We can visit places in some way which we would never be able to go to by ourselves. I am in a book group and we have just read The Human Stain by Philip Roth - a challenging book but by a master
Posted by: Tom Cunliffe | April 17, 2005 at 01:04 AM
I am late finding your post about Peter Hessler's book. I just want to say that I also found his book wonderfully insightful. I struck a chord with me - reading it after two visits to China and not long after I had made a trip down the Yangtze stopping off at many towns, including the one he writes of.
Posted by: Jude | May 15, 2005 at 01:52 AM