Home > Work > River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze
1 " I realized that as a thinking person his advantage lay precisely in his lack of formal education. Nobody told him what to think, and thus he was free to think clearly. "
― Peter Hessler , River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze
2 " People with good memories are liable to be crushed by the weight of their suffering. Only those with bad memories, the fittest to survive, can live on. - Lu Xun "
3 " I looked at the terraced hills and noticed how the people had changed the earth, taming it into dizzying staircases of rice paddies; but the Chinese looked at the people and saw how they have been shaped by the land. "
4 " I sensed that this was a small part of what contributed to the passivity with regard to the Three Gorges Project in Fuling. The vast majority of the people would not be directly affected by the coming changes, and so they weren’t concerned. Despite having large sections of the city scheduled to be flooded within the next decade, it wasn’t really a community issue, because there wasn’t a community as one would generally define it. There were lots of small groups, and there was a great deal of patriotism, but like most patriotism anywhere in the world, this was spurred as much by fear and ignorance as by any true sense of a connection to the Motherland. And you could manipulate this fear and ignorance by telling people that the dam, even though it might destroy the river and the town, was of great importance to China. "
5 " When the cadres banned his students from singing any actual Christmas carols in a stage version of ''A Christmas Carol,'' he had them substitute patriotic Communist songs -- which actually improved Dickens: ''My favorite scene was when a furious Scrooge swung his cane at a band of merry carolers who were belting out 'The East Is Red,' singing the praises of Mao Zedong while the old man shouted, 'Humbug! "
6 " Like many Peace Corps volunteers all over the world, I found that the parent visit was a kind of revelation: suddenly I saw how much I had learned and how much I had forgotten. "
7 " A woman in her forties told me that she didn't understand the issue, because she was simply Old Hundred Names. That was the best part of being Old Hundred Names - they were never responsible for anything. It was the same way in any country where the citizens spoke of themselves as the "common people" but in China there was a much higher percentage of Old Hundred Names than in most places. Virtually everybody you met described himself as such, and none of them claimed to have anything to do with the way things worked. "
8 " ... the American press tended to portray a China that was overwhelmingly negative and Beijing-centered. And yet like any waiguoren in China, I knew that I had access to a great deal of information that was unavailable to the Chinese, and as a result I often felt as if I understood the political situation better than the locals. It was impossible to avoid this type of arrogance, even though I realized that it was misleading and condescending, and I was careful not to voice my opinions openly. "
9 " She and her family hadn't invited me in order to make a point about xenophobia, or anything like that. They knew that I was alone on the holiday, and i was their friend; nothing else mattered. They were simply big-hearted people and that was the best meal I ever had in China. "
10 " In Fuling I was always extremely conscious of my appearance, because every day I was confronted by the ways in which I looked different from the locals, but now in these desert towns I saw people with noses and hair and eyes like mine. For the first time I realized the full importance of race, not just in the way it divided people, but also in the sense of feeling a link to those who looked like you. "
11 " He would turn out fine, too. Most of them were that way. They were tough and sweet and funny and sad, and people like that would always survive. It wasn’t necessarily gold, but perhaps because of that it would stay. "
12 " I knew that Teacher Liao was only telling the truth: virtually everything I did with the language was budui. I was an adult, and as an adult I should be able to accept criticism where it was needed. But that wasn't the American way; I was accustomed to having my ego soothed; I wanted to be praised for my effort. I didn't mind criticism as long as it was candy-coated. I was caught in the same trap that I had heard about from some of my Chinese-American friends, who as children went to school and became accustomed to the American system of gentle correction, only to return home and hear the Chinese-minded parents say, simply, budui. That single B on the report card matters much more than the string of A's that surrounds it. Keep working; you haven't achieved anything yet "
13 " Mostly I longed to find something that I could do well. This was part of why the simple routines of the city fascinated me; I could watch a stick-stick soldier or a restaurant cook with incredible intensity, simply because these people were good at what they did. There was a touch of voyeurism in my attention, at least in the sense that I watched the people work with all of the voyeur's impotent envy. There were many days when I would have liked nothing more than to have had a simple skill that I could do over and over again, as long as I did it well "
14 " ... a country like China is accustomed to making difficult choices that Americans might not dream of considering "
15 " There were lots of small groups, and there was a great deal of patriotism, but like most patriotism anywhere in the world, this was spurred as much by fear and ignorance as by any true sense of a connection to the Motherland "
16 " Usually I said nothing at all; as a waiguoren I was often most comfortable when I was listening. "
17 " ... even though much of what America believed about itself was also fraudulent, at least the press and publishers could express unorthodox views. "
18 " One of the Characteristics of Chinese Socialism is that small enterprises can engage in virtually unrestricted capitalism, which works to the advantage of the Huang family. "
19 " The strange part of was that so many of these victims were racked by shame, clearly believing that they were somehow flawed. It was like a target of McCarthyism immediately breaking down and admitting that he was wrong, or a Holocaust victim hating herself because she was indeed a "dirty Jew." Often it seemed that in China there was no internal compass that was able to withstand these events. Group thought could be a vicious circle - your self-identity came from the group, which was respected even if it became deranged, and thus your sense of self could fall apart instantly. There wasn't a tradition of anchoring one's identity to a fixed set of values regardless of what others thought, and in certain periods this had contributed to the country's disasters. "
20 " I was fighting fire with fire, and I responded to propaganda with more of the same. "
