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The Travel Page
I was looking for a good travelogue on Spain but I stumbled across this book first, and because I'm still in my China/Chinese phase, I will look at this book today.
River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze, Peter Hessler, c. 2001. DDS: 915.1 HES.
The author writes about his "life in Fuling." All of the sketches were written while he lived in Fuling. Arrived in Fuling, August, 1996 -- I had completed 20 years in the USAF; most of it overseas; I now had ten years of being "retired on active duty."
Part I
Chapter One: Downstream
Arrived Fuling, coming downstream from Chongqing, on
the Yangtze River.
From an earlier post:
Today's there's a headline article over at Yahoo!Finance about Nanking, China, a "second-tier" city in that country with a population of over 8 million, similar to that of NYC. The best thing I ever did with regard to geography on the blog was "fix" a picture in my mind of what China "looks like." Nanking? Where is it? If it were on the US map, it would be a suburb northwest of Charleston, SC, (Shanghai) up the Yangtze River. Maybe similar to Summerville, SC, where we lived for several years.
Back to the book.
Two traveling together; the author was 27 years old; his colleague, Adam Meier, was 22.
Fuling: part of the city would be flooded by the new Three Gorges Dam; for years Fuling had been closed to outsiders.
No American had lived there for half a century.
No railroad in Fuling; to go anywhere, one went by boat.
The author would live two years in Fuling.
The City
There are no bicycles in Fuling because the city is full of steps because it is squeezed close on the mountains that press against the junctton of the Wu and Yangtze Rivers.
Chapter Two: Shakespeare with Chinese Characteristics
Textbooks: started with
Beowulf and continued through twelve centuries and across the ocean to William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily."
Hamlet in October.
Raise the Flag Mountain
The mountain has two names: Peach Blossom Mountain and Raise the Flag Mountain; rises above the college and the junction of the rivers.
The Great Taiping Rebellion was started in the mid-1840's by Hong Xiuquan, a poor man from Guangxi province who, frustrated by failing the Chinese civil service examination four times (we've talked about the Chinese CSEs before), decided that he was the Son of God and the younger brother of Jesus Christ. By 1851, Hong Xiuquan was leading 20,000 followers, and he declared that he was the Heavenly King of a new dynasty; a sort of bastardized fundamentalist Protestantism; based loosely on foreign missionary tracts. In 1853, they captured the city of Nanking, and in time Hong Xiuquan ruled half of China; the Heavenly Kingdom; the Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace -- Taiping Tianguo -- opposed to opium, foot binding, prostitution, gambling, and tobacco ... and we stumbled into the Opium Wars!
Chapter Three: Running (think Forrest Gump)
Author arrived in China able to recognize about 40 characters, all of them simple: people, middle, country, above, below, long, man, woman.
Peace Corps had given them an intensive course during two months of training in Chengdu. The emphasis was on learning enough spoken Mandarin to function.
One of the author's reasons for going to China to teach: to learn Chinese.
Mandarin Chinese has a reputation as a difficult language
- in Sichuan, things are further complicated by the provincial dialect, which is distinct enough that a Chinese outsider has trouble understanding the locals in a place like Fuling
- the variations between Mandarin and Sichuanese are significant
- in addition to some differences in vocabulary, Sichuanese slurs the Mandarin reflexive sounds
- certain consonants are reversed, so that the average person in Sichuan confuses n and l, and h and f
- a word like "Hunan" becomes "Fulan"
- more differences described
- Sichuan is an enormous province
- bottom line for the author: for learning, Chinese, a hell of a mess
- author: there is no such thing as "Chinese"
- educated people usually speak Mandarin; but majority of Fuling's population spoke the dialect
- so, Mandarin and Sichuanese
- learning Chinese, at first, almost drove him insane; incredibly difficult for many reasons
- after about a month of classes, he read aloud a paragraph from his book, recognizing all of the characters smoothly except for one; highly satisfied;
- multiple tones
- Mandarin Chinese is a tonal language. In order to differentiate
meaning, the same syllable can be pronounced with different tones.
Mandarin's tones give it a very distinctive quality, but the tones can
also be a source of miscommunication if not given due attention. From chinesepod.com --
-
Mandarin is said to have four main tones and one neutral tone
(or, as some say, five tones). Each tone has a distinctive pitch
contour which can be graphed using the Chinese 5-level system.
- the Chinese way: success was expected; failure criticized, and promptly corrected
Running -- his form of stress relief; something those in Fuling had not seen before
The White Crane Ridge
The White Crane Ridge is an 80-yard long strip of sandstone that sits like a temporary island in Fuling's harbor; when it emerges in the heart of the dry season: 22 pictures and over 300,000 characters are engraved on its surface
- the "fish" pictures first used to help sailor navigate the river
- various dynasties left their own engravings on the ridge
Chapter Four: The Dam
- a nice history of the Three Gorges Dam
- there were always voices of dissent
- even in the 1980s, as Deng Xiaping and Premier Li Peng moved closer to beginning actual work on the dam; debates continued until 1987
- China's first environmental lobby group was formed in response to the dam, and careful criticism continued even as work began in 1993 (my first year in Turkey; I completely missed Asian news at that time)
Mao Zedong's Third Line Project:
- triggered by the American atomic bomb
- Mao sent Deng Xiaping to the southwest so he could research the feasibility of moving Shanghai's military industry to remote mountain areas in Sichuan and Guizhou provinces
- the Korean War accelerated the project, and eventually three-quarters of China's nuclear weapons plants were incorporated into the Third Line, as well as more than half of its aeronautics industry
- the project was "something like that of picking up the whole California's high-tech industry and moving it bodily to the wilds of Montana as they existed, say, in 1880." -- The New Emperors, Harrison Salisbury
- in comparison, it was a small matter to turn the river into a lake
- much of Fuling's economy had originally come via the Third Line Project, which accustomed the locals to change
- Deng Xiaoping started dismantling the Third Line Project in 1980
- China's foreign relations improving; American threat seemed less serious
- the Third Line Project had always been a huge drain on the economy
- in some years as much as 50% of China's capital budget was spent on the project (sounds like the US military budget)
- even Stalin's first Five-Year Plan couldn't compare -- according to some estimates, the Third Line Project did more damage to China's economy than the Cultural Revolution
The author describes his trip through the gorges - this is one of the most lasting, important reasons for this book, in my opinion -- begins about page 118
The Wu River
- everything seems slow next to the current of the Wu, as it enters the Yangtze -- which seems to stand still where the Wu enters
- the Wu is a mountain river
- not wide enough for big river cruisers; navigable channels narrow to 30 or 40 feet during the dry season
- the character for Wu is shaped vaguely like a bird; echoes part of the meaning of "crow." Also means black, or dark; nobody in Fuling seemed to know the origin of the river's name
Chapter Five: Opium Wars
- there had been no other Chinese leader quite like Deng Ziaoping
- appearance was unassuming; he was short; had not been handsome as a young man like Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong
- he had grown up in the countryside northeast of Chongqing; acquired the habits of a peasant
- his spitting was famous, at least overseas
- but he had a practical, hard-headed intelligence; why he was able to turn China away from the disaster of a state-run economy
- blunt; one reason why the pro-democracy demonstrations in 1989 has been suppressed with such violence; much of what was good and bad about Sichuanese could be seen in the character of Deng Ziaoping
I will stop at page 133
