In 2001, the New Yorker writer Peter Hessler got his Chinese driver’s license and embarked on a journey along China’s Great Wall. For the next seven years, Hessler drove through the countryside, exploring the dying villages and the exploding factory towns. In his masterful new book, “Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory” (Harper, 448 pp., $28), Hessler examines the earth-shattering social and economic changes in China, mixing beautiful travel writing, social analysis and history.
In his travels across China, Hessler picked up migrants and told their stories. He and a friend also rented a house in the countryside outside Beijing for $40 a month and became enmeshed in village life. In one dramatic section, Hessler finds himself frantically driving his country neighbor’s dying son to a Beijing hospital, battling with doctors to save the boy. In the last section, on the factory town of Lishui, Hessler chronicles the world of an upstart factory, where a gigantic pirated machine spits out bra parts.
Hessler, 40, went to China with the Peace Corps in 1996 and was the New Yorker’s China correspondent from 2000 to 2007. His two acclaimed earlier books are “River Town” and “Oracle Bones.” Hessler spoke with freelance writer Dylan Foley by telephone from his home in Ridgeway, Colo.
Q. You weave together journalism, memoir and history in your book. Why?
A. In all three of my books, I tried to do this. I see myself as working somewhere between journalism and academia. I admire the immediacy of journalism, but with academia, what I admire most is doing a longitudinal study, where you follow a place or a group of people for a period of years and see how they change.
Q. Why did you open the book with several epic drives following the Great Wall of China?
A. I wanted to start the book with a journey. You get a survey and, along the way, I touched on the issues that were interesting in China, like migration of workers and the dying rural villages. There was also this massive road building and construction going on.
Q. Could you tell us about the driving boom in China?
A. This was a country where nobody had cars 20 years ago. By the time I got my license, the car boom was starting. There were as many as 500,000 new drivers a year. It was pretty chaotic. I sat in on a driving course and realized that the teacher didn’t know much about driving. It was the blind leading the blind.
Q. What interested you in renting a house in a rural area outside Beijing?
A. I had moved to Beijing in 1999. I realized, after 18 months, that I didn’t have the connection to the place that I really wanted to have. I missed the rural China I knew in the Peace Corps. I missed the outdoors. It was for personal reasons, not as a writing strategy.
After Wei Jia (his neighbor’s son) became sick, I knew I was going to write about the village. (The medical emergency) was probably the most powerful experience I had in China. The time in the hospital was frightening and challenging. You find out you can’t control everything and you can’t fix everything.
By Dylan Foley In 2001, the New Yorker writer Peter Hessler got his Chinese driver’s license and embarked on a journey along China’s Great Wall. For the next seven years, Hessler drove through the countryside, exploring the dying villages and the exploding factory towns. In his masterful new book, “Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory” (Harper, 448 pp., $28), Hessler examines the earth-shattering social and economic changes in China, mixing beautiful travel writing, social analysis and history.
In his travels across China, Hessler picked up migrants and told their stories. He and a friend also rented a house in the countryside outside Beijing for $40 a month and became enmeshed in village life. In one dramatic section, Hessler finds himself frantically driving his country neighbor’s dying son to a Beijing hospital, battling with doctors to save the boy. In the last section, on the factory town of Lishui, Hessler chronicles the world of an upstart factory, where a gigantic pirated machine spits out bra parts.
Hessler, 40, went to China with the Peace Corps in 1996 and was the New Yorker’s China correspondent from 2000 to 2007. His two acclaimed earlier books are “River Town” and “Oracle Bones.” Hessler spoke with freelance writer Dylan Foley by telephone from his home in Ridgeway, Colo.
Q. You weave together journalism, memoir and history in your book. Why?
A. In all three of my books, I tried to do this. I see myself as working somewhere between journalism and academia. I admire the immediacy of journalism, but with academia, what I admire most is doing a longitudinal study, where you follow a place or a group of people for a period of years and see how they change.
Q. Why did you open the book with several epic drives following the Great Wall of China?
A. I wanted to start the book with a journey. You get a survey and, along the way, I touched on the issues that were interesting in China, like migration of workers and the dying rural villages. There was also this massive road building and construction going on.
Q. Could you tell us about the driving boom in China?
A. This was a country where nobody had cars 20 years ago. By the time I got my license, the car boom was starting. There were as many as 500,000 new drivers a year. It was pretty chaotic. I sat in on a driving course and realized that the teacher didn’t know much about driving. It was the blind leading the blind.
Q. What interested you in renting a house in a rural area outside Beijing?
A. I had moved to Beijing in 1999. I realized, after 18 months, that I didn’t have the connection to the place that I really wanted to have. I missed the rural China I knew in the Peace Corps. I missed the outdoors. It was for personal reasons, not as a writing strategy.
After Wei Jia (his neighbor’s son) became sick, I knew I was going to write about the village. (The medical emergency) was probably the most powerful experience I had in China. The time in the hospital was frightening and challenging. You find out you can’t control everything and you can’t fix everything.
Q. You spent two years writing about the bosses and workers at a bra component factory. What made you keep going back?
A. In China, people don’t tell you the important stories the first time they meet you. I had talked with the guys at the factory more than 10 times before Master Luo told me the story of how he pirated the machine from another company. Master Luo was great. You could tell by his face that he had incredible wisdom. He had little formal education and had worked all over China.
Q. After 11 years in China, why did you return to the United States?
A. I didn’t want to get pegged as a China writer. I wanted to learn new skills and how to write about new things.
(This interview was published in the Newark Star-Ledger on February 20, 2011)
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