River Town

I first learnt of Peter Hessler, when I read his wife Leslie Chang's Factory Girls, which I blogged about earlier. Hessler was a reporter for the Wall Street Journal and the New Yorker based in China for 10 years. He first lived in China when he went as a Peace Corps volunteer to a small river town along the Yangtze river to teach English and literature. River Town is a diary of his observations about the people, culture and life in Fuling, a town near the Three Gorges. I am not a heavy reader of travel-related literature but River Town is incredibly well-written, immensely thoughtful and often very funny. What got me hooked were Hessler's acute observations of things and people around him, his analytical turn of mind that produced sensitive portrayal of his experiences and how his role and identity shifted and adjusted to the vast differences he encountered daily. He also wrote Oracle Bones, a collection of stories about ordinary Chinese people, which is the next book in my reading stash. His newest book Country Driving was published in early March this year.