Book Review of Country Driving

 Country Driving: A Chinese Road Trip, is Peter Hessler's book published by Harper in 2010. The version I read is its Chinese version, published in 2011.

The book is composed of 3 stories: driving along the Great Wall from Beijing to northwest provinces; living in the Sancha (三岔), a small village in HuaiRou (怀柔) district of Beijing; factories, bosses, and workers in LiJiang (丽江), a city in Zhejiang (浙江) province. IMHO, these stories represent three worlds of modern China:

The first represents the forgotten and vanishing villages and towns; The second represents villagers' struggle to modernize; The last represents the development of eastern cities and the workers living in them.

It's not difficult for readers of this book to discover that Hessler is an acute and insightful reporter and observer, like a sophisticated surgeon, while his patient is a society and its cells, instead of a human being.

But the most significant impression after reading this book is the openness and devotion of the author's mind. To most Chinese, the social hierarchy is one of the key elements in their worldview. People hate superiors while discriminating against inferiors. You may argue that it's not only Chinese. Well, as a native, I have no experience living outside PRC. So I only talk about what I see.

In this hierarchy, peasants are at the bottom, like Dalits in India. So in the second story, Wei Ziqi struggled to change himself into a citizen. In the third story, the migrant workers tried to learn how to live like a citizen, too. However, this hierarchy is not part of Hessler's view. He devoted himself to live with villagers in Sancha, the migrant workers in LiJiang. His devotion and honesty can be felt by these people. So he won their reliance and built real friendships with them.

His devotion to a foreign culture makes me wonder if I can do what he'd done? Can I be the good friends of those villagers and workers?

By far I'm afraid I can't. Technically I have no the communication skills Hessler has. But more importantly, maybe it's the lack of desire (or even fear) that makes me walk away from them. This is a paradox every Chinese liberal faces.