Country Driving

Country Driving, the latest and last of the three books by award-winning writer and researcher on contemporary China Peter Hessler, is a marvellously well-written account of his journey across China on the automobile, collecting thoughtful observations of how the burgeoning highway network is transforming China today. The first part of the book tracks Hessler's road trip along the Great Wall, from the coastal region all the way into the interior and the Qinghai plateau, crisscrossing the Wall's cultural and archaeological history and lives of rural peasants in far flung villages that are more than a world of difference from the developed Chinese cities. The second part is more focused geographically on a small village Sancha, outside Beijing where the writer was based as the correspondent for The New Yorker. Hessler acquired a holiday home-cum-writer's retreat there, where he spent weekends with the Wei family and noting down keen observations of how a young peasant who remained behind in the village - an unusual situation given the booming rural-urban migration that has swept across the nation - struggled to adapt to changes brought about by modernisation, making the best of what he can. The last part of the book deals with the bustling factory town of Lishui, in the Zhejiang province where every small town is being turned into a development zone by local officials who behave like seasoned entrepreneurs, raising funds in a way not unlike that of the Carlyles and Blackstones, to blast away mountains, pour on the asphalt and stack up the factories, churning out "Buttontown" and "Pleatherville"; an entire town produces buttons, supplying 70% of the buttons to clothes in China, and another spews out pleather, or plastic (PVC) leather products 24/7, together with toxic fumes of DMF, a chemical used in the manufacturing process. These trips are all made via the automobile and Hessler also has a thing or two to say about driving in China, most of which are refreshingly humourous. Most of all, Hessler writes with a lot of heart and the reader can really feel his affection towards the people and places he has spent time with, listening and learning with respect and an open mind, creating a vivid and moving landscape of a nation always in a hurry to get somewhere.