Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory Kindle Edition

I read River Town when I was in China and liked it so much I immediately purchased Hessler's other two books, Oracle Bones and Country Driving. When I was travelling through China I actually started reading Country Driving but I never got round finishing it. More recently I bought a few audio books and have been listening to the two books in recent weeks.I was quite disappointed by Oracle Bones, which I found to be too drawn out, often boring and had Hessler writing to much as a know-it-all. In cCuntry Driving he regained some of his balance and I'm happy to say it's more like River Town than Oracle Bones. The book consists of three parts. The first part deals with Hessler getting his driving license (including samples of the hilarious test questions) and driving along the Great Wall. I consider this the best part of the book with many funny stories and good humour and some information about Chinese regions you don't often come across.I had expected the whole book to be like a travelogue, not unlike Rob Gifford's more serious China Road, but this (unfortunately) did not prove to be the case. The second and third part of the book find Hessler grounded in the small village of Sancha, north of Beijing, and a facotry for bra rings in Zhejiang. As such, the title of the book is a bit misleading.The second part of the book, about the village on Sancha is my least favourite. The story mostly deals with one family and thereby the book shifts from the wide perspective of a roadtrip in the first part to the microcosm of a Chinese rural family. That's all fine but it does so in too much detail and I found myself getting impatient with the continuous story about a handful of people. I also found Hessler's writing to be walking a thin line between humorous admirating and derision at times.The third part, about the Zhejiang factory, is more interesting again. Besides the workings of a factory in all it's facets - including having to deal with workers, government officials and competition - it also gives a glimpse of what China's economic development was like after the turn of the century. This makes for more interesting reading than the life of one rural family as far as I'm concerned.All in all this is a step back in the right direction for Hessler after the disappointing Oracle Bones.A note on the audio book: like Oracle Bones this audio book is narrated by Peter Berkrot, who I didn't like much in Oracle Bones because of his dreadful pronounciation of Chinese and silly voices whenever he read out dialogue by a Chinese person. Berkrot has improved is pronounciation somewhat for this book and his silly voices are a bit less exreme, though not fully absent in his rendition of Country Driving.

My relationship with China is not straightforward. There’s great pride latent in my parents’ attitude towards their home country - their zuguo - and some of it has trickled down. While I recognize the validity, I tend take criticism of the Chinese - government policies, human rights violations, behavior of tourist groups - somewhat personally. Rather, I would prefer to assume a deaf ear.Country Driving by Peter Hessler does not lack these criticisms. It’s an account of Hessler's experiences driving a rental car through the country, first following the Great Wall to the desolate Gansu province, then to a rural village north of Beijing, and finally, to the Zhejiang in south, the land of emerging factories. At each leg of his journey, Hessler integrates into some facet of the local community, putting him in a position to explore the effects of rapid development at a very personal level. The criticisms that Hessler includes stem from an American accustomed to different conditions, and to be fair, they aren’t really presented as criticisms. Hessler describes insane driving conditions or guanxi, the Chinese form of networking, where business men and political officials lavish gifts in exchange for leniency, and his subtle sense of humor pries the ridiculousness out. It’s effective - some of the scenes made me cringe, touching on my sensitivity. But any book full of criticisms, no matter how skillfully presented, is not much of a read. Country Driving is much more. For one, Hessler is a brilliant writer. His sentences are fluid, and he is a master at the thought provoking sentence to end a chapter. Combined with his eye (and ear) for important details, he packs insights to the Chinese way of life into memorable scenes: a peasant family venturing into Beijing to care for their sick child, a young girl celebrating her sixteenth birthday after a full day - 10 hours - of factory work. I could tell how much of China Hessler absorbed during his stay there, and I’m grateful that he translated his experiences from spoken Chinese all the way to beautifully written English. I suspect that much of my affinity for this book comes from my ability to relate. I visited China every summer with my family from 2004 to 2008, which overlaps with the period that Hessler spent there. As I was younger, I was less tolerant to certain aspects: the trash, the rampant pollution, the suffocating heat, the sheer overpopulation. But reading this book made me want to visit China again, to be in that land of inescapable heritage and unprecedented change. Hessler now lives in the Middle East as a correspondent. I hope he writes about his experiences there as well. I won’t be able to pronounce the names as effortlessly as I can with his books about China, but I already know I will read everything he writes.

This is the first of Hessler's books that I've read: perhaps it suffices to say that I've already ordered copies of his two preceding books set in China, and can't wait to start those. Other reviews describe the structure of this book, three long sections featuring different characters and locations. Only the first part describes road trips, but the transformative effects of the sudden increase in highways and private cars in China is present throughout. The central section ("The Village") is the heart of the book for me: Hessler moves from off-the-beaten-path travel writer to describing an intimate long-term connection with the Wei family in a tiny (population 150) village a couple of hours outside of Beijing. Throughout the book, Hessler creates vivid portraits of remarkable characters: Mr. Wang, the rental car dealer who delights in Hessler's adventurous flouting of the rental agreement; the drunk museum guide who wants Hessler to confess he's a spy; Tao Yufeng, the fifteen-year-old country girl who brazenly talked factory bosses into hiring her, then her entire family. The head-spinning political and economic changes in China in recent decades are the subject of many books, but Hessler is exceptional in presenting a fine-grained and gracefully written account of the day-to-day experience and aspirations of people who live there.

As interesting and perceptive ingsight - well written and with sensitivity - but, as with all reviews of such nature, one has to draw on a variety of different writings to build a picture of the complex situations that face any country and, whilst the writing can be humorous at times, one needs to be careful not draw on all these perspectives in creating any opinion. Well worth reading. You will not be disappoitned and it is a captivating book - offering a variety of insights into the complexity of any developing situation - the dangers and the benefits. This book will certainly add to your understanding and should be appoached as the input of someone who has a creative understanding of China and repsect for its people.

A super sequel to River Town. Not quite as compelling but nonetheless a wonderful insightful, slightly idiosyncratic, exploration of life in a rapidly evolving China, though the various journeys are somewhat disjointed. Really a collection of observations beautifully written.

After reading Peter Hesslers "River Town" this lives up to his affectionate and intimate relationship with the Chinese people. His writing is fluid and humerous and betrays his love for the people with whom he spent a good part of his life.Don't make the mistake if believing that this book is all about driving - far from it - driving is merely the vehicle (oops) for his experiences, thoughts and encounters in his journey. The second section of the book is reminicent of "River Town" where, based in a small village, he charts the changes that occur to the people and the surroundings as urbanisation encroaches.If you have read and enjoyed "River Town" this will not disappoint.

Having read and loved Peter's earlier book, River Town, while travelling in China, I was keen to read more. His writing is excellent, the people and stories really come to life to provide an extraordinary insight into the people, place and perculiarities of China today. Some lot the tales might be hard to believe if you have never been to China, but to me they massively enriched the experiences we had exploring there. Please write another book!

Having read Peter Hesslers other books I found this book most interesting. He has probably visited more out of the way places in China than most and put a very human face on whom we in the west think as an inscrutable people. Utterly fascinating and am looking forward to his book on Egypt.