From the Water's Edge

Imagine explaining to chinese farmers pushing oxen through wet rice terraces that in California rice is planted from airplanes. Or coming across an old man scrubbing syringes and needles in a basin for reuse in the local hospital. Or watching fireworks soaring over the beautiful gorges of the Yangtze on Chinese New Year and realizing the town will soon be submerged by the biggest dam in the world.

Such were the mind-stretching experiences of Peter Hessler, an American Peace Corps volunteer from Missouri who arrived in 1996, at age 27, in a small city called Fuling on the banks of the Yangtze River to teach English for two years. River Town (HarperCollins; 402 pages; $26) chronicles his conversations there with farmers, teachers, porters, cooks and prostitutes and, in the process, provides a wonderful portrait of contemporary China, in all its unsettling contradictions.

Hessler and his one American colleague are the first foreigners seen in Fuling in 50 years: they get catcalls in the streets, their mail is opened and censored, and what they teach in class--Beowulf, Hamlet, a ballad about Robin Hood--is strictly vetted by local party officials. Yet in private, people open up to Hessler about their marital difficulties, dislike of party control, career plans and all the other complexities of their everyday lives.

The central fact of Fuling is that along with many other towns on the banks of the Yangtze, it is going to be submerged over the next decade as the water rises behind the Three Gorges Dam. Red lines have been painted on buildings to show how high the water will go. Hessler is mystified at first by the lack of concern in Fuling about the huge project. It will displace at least 2 million people, could cause substantial environmental damage and, should it fail, leave casualties in the millions (3,200 dams have burst in China in the past half-century).

But slowly Hessler comes to realize that compared with the turmoil of the past 60 years--war, revolution, a famine that killed 30 million, the Cultural Revolution and the recent opening to the outside world--the disruption of the dam is relatively minor from the Chinese perspective. And he sees that the quaint old houses built on the cobbled streets leading up from the Yangtze--the structures Western tourists like to photograph--are in fact dirty, cramped and without running water or toilets. Many Chinese prefer to move to the industrial new towns built in all their tasteless utility. Writes Hessler: "In some ways it was like the American generation of my parents, who grew up on stories of the Depression and World War II ... There was the same sense of future glory in China, but the past was far more brutal, which complicated things." China's troubled history has left it with many unsettled accounts that will take decades to work through.

But China is more a civilization than a country, and to attain an overview requires rising to a great altitude. Hessler mostly stays low, but his micro-view of life in Fuling brings the people alive, in all their diversity, down to the mystified farmer still wondering about rice seedlings' dropping from an Air China jet.