I had a business trip to Suzhou and Shanghai and was too ambitious about how much reading time I had, which is why I started River Town in China but finished it in Singapore.

River Town is a memoir of Hessler’s two years in Fuling, a small town on the Yangtze river. Hessler was there with a fellow colleagues as part of the Peace Corps volunteers, and he chronicles what he sees and experiences in the book.

The book and I got off to a very good start when, in the author’s note, he says that “This isn’t a book about China. It’s about a certain small part of China at a brief period of time, and my hope has been to capture the richness of both the moment and the place.” That set expectations beautifully and I think he has managed to do what he set out.

It’s pretty clear that while Hessler came with a set of expectations for China, he did his best to assimilate to the lifestyle in Fuling (and accepting that as a foreigner, he would be treated differently) and did his best to learn the language. Towards the end of his time, it seems like he and his colleague were comfortable speaking Chinese to one another and to the locals. I think that this willingness to learn the language and adapt helped him to portray China in a realistic and nuanced way. Yes, there is a lot of patriotism due to propaganda, and yes there are unpleasant people and moments, but Hessler also writes movingly and sincerely about the warmth and generosity that he has experienced. He disagrees with a lot of the monitoring and censorship (I would too) and it’s clear he feels the Three Gorges Dam would lead to the removal of a lot of history (he managed to see the Tang-dynasty fish carvings while they were at the Baiheliang, for example) and he portrays that honestly. I never felt like he was trying to bash or praise China, but he came across as just wanting to portray his life there with all its frustrations and joys.

Above all, I really enjoyed the stories of the various people that Hessler teaches and meets. He talks about his students and the people of Fuling with great affection (for the most part, there is one oily person that irks him) and I really enjoyed seeing how he taught them literature because it speaks to the transcendent nature of the written word to see how students in China derive enjoyment from Shakespeare and Cervantes and how they use these works to express their feelings about the world around them.

There are two parts of the book that stood out more than the rest. The first was when Hessler talks about the Roman Catholic priest in Fuling, Father Li and his experiences. Father Li had a hard life and I thought the way he and Hessler’s father conversed in Latin late in the book was moving (I also borrowed a book about religion in China so this part made me excited for that book). The other was in chapter nine, where Hessler talks about women in China. Having recently finished another memoir where women seemed to be rather ignored through the author’s experiences in that country, the fact that Hessler grounds his talk in the stories of the women he met was powerful. When he wrote about the contradictory state of affairs that Chinese women find themselves in – that they have made progress but are still constrained, and their better education makes them more aware of their plight – I thought of the essays I read in Once Iron Girls, which I think would be a good reading companion for this book.

Overall, I thought this was an excellent memoir. Hessler has captured life in a tiny part of China in a particular time, writing with clear-eyed affection for the people and the place. Though his stay in China was in the late 1990s, I think he managed to capture the tension that arose as China progressed and helped me to understand a bit more of where China has just been, which combined with what I saw on my trip, helps me understand where China is now.