I’ve spent at least 6 months in China, Hong Kong and Macao … bewildered much of the time.

But after reading this book, I’m finally starting to understand the culture.

In 1996, 26-year-old Peter Hessler arrived in Fuling, a town on China’s Yangtze River, to begin a two-year Peace Corps stint as a teacher at the local teacher’s college. The first foreigner to live there in 50yrs.

… Hessler’s writing is lovely. His observations are evocative, insightful, and often poignant–and just as often, funny. It’s a pleasure to read of his (mis)adventures. …

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This was the era when Hong Kong was returned. When the Three Gorges Dam controversy was in the western media.

China itself, I visited Aug-Oct 1998. (travelogues)

Hessler debunks many of the stereotypes we have of modern China. He couldn’t find anyone on the Yangtze strongly opposed to the dams. Even those who were to be relocated.

Despite what we assume about “arranged marriages” being successful, most were not in Hessler’s small rural town.

If you’re planning a trip to China, these are MUST READING:

River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze (2001) is a Kiriyama Prize-winning book about his experiences in two years as a Peace Corps volunteer teaching English in China.

Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China’s Past and Present (2006) features a series of parallel episodes featuring his former students, a Uighur dissident who fled to the U.S., and the archaeologist Chen Mengjia who committed suicide during the Cultural Revolution.

His third book, Country Driving: A Journey from Farm to Factory (2010), is a record of Hessler’s journeys driving a rented car from rural northern Chinese counties to the factory towns of southern China, and the significant economic and industrial growth taking place there.

His wife, Leslie T. Chang, is an American journalist and the author of Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China (2008). A former China correspondent for the Wall Street Journal …

The couple has recently moved to Cairo. And are learning Arabic.