MCLC: Peter Hessler and his Chinese fans

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: anne henochowicz <annemh2 at gmail.com>
Subject: Peter Hessler and his Chinese fans
***********************************************************

Source: Global China Center (11/18/11):
http://www.globalchinacenter.org/analysis/chinese-history-culture/peter-hes
sler-and-his-chinese-fans-a-new-generation-of-sinoamerican-relations-as-see
n-through-chinese-cyberspace-discussions-of-hesslers-china-trilogy.php

Chinese History & Culture
Peter Hessler and His Chinese Fans: A New Generation of Sino-American
Relations as Seen through Chinese Cyberspace Discussions of Hessler’s
China Trilogy
By Dr. Gloria Tseng

Peter Hessler, the author of River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze
(2001), Oracle Bones: A Journey through Time in China (2006), and Country
Driving: A Journey through China from Farm to Factory (2010), has gained a
reputation as an American writer about contemporary China in the last
decade. All three books were reviewed in The New York Times upon their
publication. River Town was reviewed under its “Books of the Times,” and
Oracle Bones and Country Driving were listed among its “100 Notable Books
of the Year” for 2006 and 2010, respectively.[1] The three books fall
under the category of memoirs or travel narratives, all of them based on
the author’s experiences while living in China from 1996 to 2007.Hessler’s
first experience of living in China was as a Peace Corps volunteer. He
taught English for two years at a teacher training college in the small
town of Fuling, in Sichuan province, which led to the writing of his first
book upon his return to the U.S. in 1998. In 1999 he went back to China as
a freelance writer and soon became a staff writer for The New Yorker,
serving as its Beijing correspondent from 2000 to 2007. Rivertown won the
Kiriyama Prize, and Oracle Bones was a finalist for the 2006 National Book
Award. Evan Osnos is the current Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker.

Hessler’s books came at a time of increasing American interest in China
and doubtlessly contributed to such interest. As he likes to recount in
his interviews, he submitted the manuscript of Rivertown to several
publishers who expressed skepticism that American readers would be
interested in his story, well told as it was.[2] Of course, the reception
of the book as soon as it was published proved these cautious publishers
wrong. There are a handful of popular American authors who write about
contemporary China in our day besides Hessler—Leslie Chang (Hessler’s
wife, former Wall Street Journal correspondent, and author of Factory
Girls), Richard Bernstein (Time magazine’s first Beijing bureau chief and
author of From the Center of the Earth and The Coming Conflict with
China), 
Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn (New York Times reporters, the first
married couple to win a Pulitzer Prize for journalism, and coauthors of
China Wakes), James and Ann Tyson (correspondents for the Christian
Science Monitor and coauthors of Chinese Awakenings), and Mark Salzman
(author of Iron and Silk). All except Salzman, whose only experience in
China consisted of teaching English for two years at Hunan Medical
College, came from a journalistic background. The reestablishment of
diplomatic relations between China and the U.S. in 1979 gave rise to the
careers of these writers of the post-Mao “reform and opening” era.

So far, of the post-Mao generation only Hessler’s books have been
translated into Chinese. All three books in his “China trilogy” have been
translated into traditional Chinese and published in Taiwan, and Country
Driving has been translated into simplified Chinese and published in
mainland China.[3] Judging from posts on popular Chinese websites, Hessler
has gathered an enthusiastic following among (presumably young) Chinese
readers. In fact, a search for Peter Hessler (or his Chinese name 何伟) or
one of his books on the Chinese search engine Baidu (百度) yields many more
hits than a search for the same on Google.[4] Since the first two volumes
were first translated and published in Taiwan, acquaintance of Hessler
among Chinese readers appears to have begun in Taiwan and then spread to
the mainland. Except for Taiwanese readers’ responses to Rivertown, which
appeared on the Taiwanese website www.books.com.tw
<http://www.books.com.tw/> (博客來) as soon as the traditional Chinese
translation appeared in 2006, five years after the publication of the book
in the U.S., the earliest cyberspace discussions I was able to find were
of Oracle Bones, dating from 2008. From this point on, discussions
appeared on various popular Chinese websites, such as www.douban.com
<http://www.douban.com/> (豆瓣), www.readfree.net <http://www.readfree.net/>
(网上读书园地, and www.sina.com.cn <http://www.sina.com.cn/> (新浪网).
Thanks to 
the possibilities afforded by the internet and Chinese disregard for
intellectual property rights, one can easily find electronic versions of
any of Hessler’s three books in English or Chinese to download for free.

Hessler’s fame spread from cyberspace to China’s elite cultural space with
the publication of the simplified Chinese translation of Country Driving
by the respectable Shanghai Translation Publishing House, China’s largest
comprehensive publisher of translated works and bilingual dictionaries. He
was one of the featured authors of the Bookworm International Literary
Festival in Beijing this year, which took place in March.[5] Tickets to
hear him read from Country Driving were sold out well in advance. Then
interviews with Chinese media and book signings followed.[6] Articles in
the Chinese media introduced Hessler to Chinese readers by giving a
chronology of his years in China and the publication dates of his three
books.

They gave synopses of each work. Rivertown recounts his experience of
teaching English in the provincial town of Fuling as one of the first
foreigners to live in it; he attracted curiosity wherever he went and used
it to his advantage. Oracle Bones is about the intersections of the past
and the present in contemporary China; in it he weaves together
archaeology, muted echoes from the Cultural Revolution, as well as stories
of former students, an old man whose ancestral home was demolished in
China’s rush to modernize old Beijing, and a Uighur friend who eventually
found asylum in the U.S. Country Driving recounts a long road trip across
north China along the Great Wall as well as his extended stays in a
village in north China and a factory city in south China; the main
characters are the Wei family of Sancha Village, whom he got to know and
with whom he weathered their son’s medical crisis, and several factory
workers in the city of Lishui in Zhejiang province. The articles also
spoke of Hessler’s wife, their twin daughters, and their plan to move to
the Middle East in the near future, and in other ways tried to offer
glimpses into the author’s personality. One mentioned his humorous comment
following a shot taken by a photojournalist: “Like a monkey in a zoo,
aren’t I?” Another spoke of the laughter he elicited from his audience by
interjecting a sentence in the Sichuan dialect when a young woman in the
audience said that she was from Sichuan. One described him as a “simple
American” who made sense of “complex China” better than the Chinese do.
All remarked on the signature trait of his writing, namely, his focus on
ordinary people whose lives he followed over a period of years.

To Hessler’s credit, he is a keen and thoughtful observer of people, and
the tone of his writing is sympathetic and humorous. There has been a
flurry of Chinese readers’ blogs from 2008 to the early part of this year,
quite a few of which were thoughtful book reviews that would have
delighted a teacher. A review taken from www.douban.com and reposted on
www.readfree.net on April 6, 2009 spoke of the effects reading Oracle
Bones had on the reviewer: “From being unable to let go to being skeptical
and then critical, to reaching an understanding and then accepting, I have
rarely encountered a reading experience like this, which has been
intensely thought provoking.” This reader was especially challenged by
seeing China from a Uighur’s perspective: “Why does a Uighur have so much
anger and prejudice against China; is this anger directed at the Han
people, the Communist Party, or China?”

Another blogger, who calls himself Edwin, in a post on www.douban.com
dated April 30, 2011, commented on the “sincerity” that flows through the
narrative of Rivertown. In response to Hessler’s observation that the
Chinese seem to take in stride major changes as if these changes do not
impact them, Edwin mused, “In fact, it’s not that we are indifferent; it’s
that even if we care, there’s nothing we can do—this sense of
powerlessness is perhaps incomprehensible to the author at the time.” The
blogger was especially impressed by Hessler’s observation regarding the
politicization of the entire schooling experience for Chinese students:
“He’s an outside observer. Therefore, he can see many things much more
clearly than we can. He can see that political consciousness permeates
campus life—those things that we do as a matter of course every day.”
Hessler’s observations of ordinary life in an ordinary small town really
struck a chord with Edwin, who concluded, “The author just came, took part
in life here, peacefully and sincerely watching all that happened, and
wrote it down; that was enough.”

The “Hessler phenomenon,” however long it lasts, marks a juncture in the
history of American perceptions of China. Historically, American
missionaries in China were the purveyors of information about China to the
American public. The best known is the early twentieth-century American
novelist, Pearl Buck (author of The Good Earth), a child of missionaries
to China. Kenneth Scott Latourette, the great Yale church historian and
former missionary to China, produced a substantial volume,The Chinese:
Their History and Culture, in 1934. Whereas American Christians continue
to write about China in our day—G. Wright Doyle, co-author of China:
Ancient Culture, Modern Society (2008), for example—it is quite apparent
that they no longer shape American public opinion the way they did in the
early twentieth century. For good or for ill, today we have no equivalent
of the missionary backers of Chiang Kai-shek or a Pearl Buck.

Journalists, of course, were another important source of information, and
in this tradition we have Edgar Snow, who made his way into
Communist-controlled areas in China’s northwest in the late 1930s and
subsequently wrote Red Star over China, now a classic first-person account
of early Chinese Communism. Hessler both follows in this journalistic
tradition and departs from it. He follows in this tradition by starting
out as an adventurer of sorts and a freelance journalist, and he departs
from it by consciously rebelling against the style of journalistic
writing, regarding his work as narrative nonfiction, as opposed to
newspaper reporting. More importantly, Hessler is not a partisan as Snow
was. In fact, his avoidance of the “newsworthy” and the political is
intentional, and the outcome is a collection of portrayals with which his
Chinese readers can easily identify.

In addition, I would like to suggest that friendship is an important
factor in the resonance that Hessler is able to have with his Chinese
fans. In his interview with Modern Weekly, the reporter asked if he was
still in touch with the Wei family described in Country Driving. He
replied, “We talk often on the phone. Wei Jia [the son] sometimes calls me
at six in the morning U.S. time. He’s in the seventh grade now, already
grown up, very bright. He makes fairly good grades in his studies. He must
have changed much; his voice is already changed.” Such long-term
friendships fill Hessler’s narratives and are the material of his books in
the first place. While his books capture snapshots of a rapidly changing
Chinese society, as well as the alienation, loneliness, and bewilderment
these changes engender, they are the product of his intentional
cultivation of friendships that last through several years. As such, both
the research and the final product fill a deep longing in contemporary
Chinese society, which, even as it offers unprecedented possibilities to
many, is indifferent and lacking in trust between individuals.

Hessler is symbolic of a new phase in Sino-American relations. His initial
popularity among mainland Chinese readers owed much to internet discussion
forums. He is a cultural product of post-Mao political change. In the
process of venturing into a writing career and honing his skills, he has
forged a relationship with Chinese readers, which extends far beyond the
personal friendships that were the making of his stories. Perhaps for the
first time in modern Chinese history, a popular American writer is able to
write thoughtfully and at times critically about China without provoking
the instinctive nationalistic responses so typical of Chinese students and
intellectuals, and to do so without paternalism or exoticism or
revolutionary propaganda. By so doing, he has succeeded where many early
twentieth-century American writers—missionaries and journalists—failed.
This phase in his writing career could well be the harbinger of “normal”
relations between the two peoples on an equal footing.

Notes

1. Richard Bernstein, “Books of the Times: A Memoir of Teaching (and
Learning) in China,”The New York Times, April 9, 2001. Jonathan Spence,
“Letters from China,” The New York Times, April 30, 2006. Dwight Garner,
“Feeling at Sea on the Roads of New China,”The New York Times, February
24, 2010. Alida Becker, “Red Highways,” The New York Times, February 28,
2010.

2. Hessler mentioned this in at least two interviews with Chinese
reporters; one was carried in the April 3, 2011 issue of nodally, or 南方都市
报
, and another in Modern Weekly, or 周末画报, the issue of which I cannot
trace. These two interviews were in turn posted as blogs on April 26 and
June 19 of 2011, respectively, on the popular Chinese website
www.douban.com, or 豆瓣. The site specializes in reviews of movies, books,
and music, and has gained a large following of intellectuals since its
launch in 2005.

3. Rivertown was translated as 消失中的江城：一位西方作家在長江古城探索中國
by 吴美真 and published
by 九周出版 in Dec. 2006. Oracle Bones was translated as 甲骨文：一次占卜現代
中國的旅程 by 盧秋瑩
 and published by 九周出版 in May 2007 (and then republished by 八旗文化 in
June 
2011). In Taiwan, Country Driving was translated as 路尋中國 by 賴芳 and
published by 八旗文化 in Feb. 2011; in China, the work was translated as 路寻
中国：从
乡村到工厂的自驾之旅 by 李雪顺 and published by 上海译文出版社 in Jan. 2011
(a month before 
the Taiwanese translation).

4. Interestingly, the Google search still yields a March 9, 2009 blog by a
Princeton graduate (Hessler is also a Princeton alum) named Thomas
Talhelm, humorously titled “How Peter Hessler Ruined My China Life.”
Apparently Hessler read the blog and wrote a generous-spirited reply to
Talhelm. The original blog was subsequently carried in the March 17, 2010
issue of China Daily (Entertainment section, “Hot Pot Column”), and
Hessler’s reply was carried in the same column of the paper on March 18,
2010.

5. According to its website, http://bookwormfestival.com
<http://bookwormfestival.com/>, the festival is now in its fifth year. It
is hosted by the three cities of Beijing, Suzhou, and Chengdu. The event
brings together an international community authors, filmmakers, and
journalists and draws a distinguished audience of teachers, ambassadors,
artists, entrepreneurs, designers, NGO workers, and journalists. It enjoys
both domestic and foreign sponsorship for its events.

6. The following is a brief summary of three articles, all of which
contained interviews with Hessler: one was carried in the Apr. 3, 2011
issue of nodally (南方都市报); one in the Apr. 19, 2011 issue of 南方人物周
刊, a 
“people weekly” of nodally; and one in Modern Weekly (周末画报), the date of
which I am unable to trace (it was posted in a blog on www.douban.com.