Books
Monday, 08 February 2010 06:02
Written by Aelred Doyle

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Take a ride with Peter Hessler's Country Driving

Peter Hessler has built a deserved reputation as perhaps the best writer about contemporary China, and this fascinating read is the fruit of his long experience here and ability to glean insight from the smallest of interactions. Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory, his third book after River Town and Oracle Bones, has three distinct sections. In the first he embarks alone on a series of drives, following the path of the Great Wall – or rather, as he is at pains to point out, the many different walls that make it up. The second section covers six years in which he spends time in Sancha, a village once remote but now gradually being encroached upon by Beijing. And in the most traditionally journalistic section, he follows developments over two years in Lishui, one of the many sudden boomtowns of Zhejiang Province, focusing on one factory in particular.

The Sancha section is the best, but the driving section is the most stirring. Hessler’s aim is simply to understand the country he then lived in (he now resides in the US) a little better by striking out, and to experience the open road alongside millions of Chinese buying their first cars (his first trip is in 2001). Descriptions of driving techniques and the different forms of horn-honking won’t surprise anyone, though the wrongheadedness of much of driving school training is eye-opening. But the core of the section is the people he talks to on the way, from truckers to laborers, hitchhikers and officious local cops. Stirring in history (Hessler wears his research lightly, but he’s done plenty) as he goes, it’s a masterclass in structure and observation.

In Sancha, where he and a friend lease a village house as a writing retreat, there’s a sense of a writer realizing he’s stumbled onto a goldmine. Over time he becomes as integrated as a foreigner can. He becomes particularly close to one family, and through the changes in their life – making money catering to Beijing visitors looking for a rural haven, their son falling dangerously ill and starting school, a local power struggle – we can see the challenges facing millions of people.

Lishui, in contrast, is a new town rather than an old one, and change happens incredibly fast. Hessler admires the flexibility and intelligence of the people he follows closely, and takes heart in the sense of adventure among many of the young. It’s a hard life which, despite the barriers to success – tricky bosses, an infuriatingly inefficient guanxi-centered system – carries opportunity for the smart and quick. One wonders what the people could do if the system would just get out of their way.

This fine writer’s great skill has always been to think big by thinking small, using his curiousity and eye for detail to tell small stories, piecing together modern China by implication. Hessler’s publisher call this the last of a trilogy. In terms of his China writing, let’s hope this doesn’t mean the end of the road.

You can read a full interview with Peter Hessler on the reasons why he writes and his inspirations right here.

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