Category: Cultural Critics

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Filling Emptiness: On Reading Peter Hessler

By Lou Hsienhua (Tome Loulin)

Jiangcheng1, the book title of River Town by Peter Hessler in its Chinese translation, is a nickname for several southern cities in China along the Yangtze River2 such as Wuhan and Chongqing. But in the book, it’s the nickname for Fuling, another city by the river. For Chinese readers, the name itself could evoke complicated feelings because the cultural connotation of the word Jiangcheng—literally meaning river city in Chinese—suggests something poetic. To mention it would, mostly in the southern regions, means to say something about the central Chinese city of Wuhan where Li Bai, a poet in the Tang dynasty, wrote the poem Listening to upstairs flute sounds from the Yellow Crane Tower with Shilangzhong3:

Going towards Changsha due to demotion,
The man, looking out westwards, was unable to see home.
There were sounds from the flute playing in the Yellow Crane Tower;
Also In the river town, Wuchang, were Chinese plum petals falling in May. 
By poet Li Bai, the English version is translated from Chinese by Lou Hsienhua in 2021.

So, it might have appeared counterintuitive for readers of the book in its Chinese translation, to discover it’s a collection of reminiscences by an American author recollecting his life as a Peace Crops volunteer in Fuling, in the southwest, in the 1990s, a period that saw rapid economic and cultural transformation happening in the country. At first glance, it’s rather easy to mistake the book as a collection of travel writing authored by someone native of China. But as we look further inside the world portrayed by the author, it’s understandable and sensible for a reader of Chinese to find out in deep awe that the carefully observed details about the river town appear to have been so resonating that the nationality of the author becomes something we gradually forget. Perhaps, besides providing a different perspective on certain things that the locals find to be normal, observations on things closely related to us from the outside offer a rare opportunity for us to see ourselves critically on mature reflection. Overall, one may conclude, from the popularity in China of Peter Hessler’s books even in the translated versions—mostly sold in the category of travel writing—that there is such a thing universally existed as a desire for critical reflections of oneself from the other side. People in one culture crave diverse views of themselves from the outside perhaps for criticalness entails a kind of centrality being given to the overlooked. To be observed, in the first place, suggests a sense of worthiness, a kind of feeling that solaces—albeit temporarily—the lonely minds hungry for serious artistic observation.

Hessler’s language in his writings seems like a treasure seldom in lack of a sense of humor, even in his observations about small places in southwestern China whose artistic presence—in creative nonfiction writing—seemed, at that time, in short supply as evident in his recollections of the noises from the retired teachers playing croquet in Fuling’s teachers college, which he found lovely. Lovely also is his choice of words in part because there was not much serious attention, then, being paid on areas where economic development was relatively lagged behind, compared to large urban areas in the coastal regions of China.

Reading Hessler, anyone from China born before the year 2000 and perhaps many more born after would understand how nostalgic it seems to read and reread his recollections of the days and nights he spent living there in Fuling in part because China back in the 1990s is vastly different from where it is now and largely because of a reminiscence of—almost—an era of people—despite relative material and financial restrictions—living their life in simple ways. Certainly living in the last 90s didn’t seem to be an experience dissimilar to living in the 2020s in terms of humanity though reflections on the era vary person-to-person. But everyone knows that back then, in celebration of entering a new millennium, there were various expectations for a new era. Some were not willing to kiss goodbye the ‘old days’; some willing. But mostly, it was those deeply nostalgic about the past rather than those desiring the unprecedented that came to tell us stories critical to our understanding of who we are and where we come from.

In southern Wuhan, photograph by Lou Hsienhua (Tome Loulin)

Back in the 90s, living mostly in the rural areas where no one truly owned a colored television until they got married though housing didn’t appear to be such a big issue to many youngsters at that time as is now, I remembered from my mother’s conversations with her friends, that people desired a bigger size of family which means more children and living with grandparents. And, at that time, the influence of postmodern dogmas that merit individualistic ideals, it appeared, didn’t grow so prevalent; and the notion of personal liberity didn’t, yet, evolve into who-cares ideology and radical self-centeredness. People, it seemed then, tend to form more lasting friendships than now in part because social media didn’t emerge at that time; and when it did in this age of information, we bear the brunt of a damaged sense of selfhood. It’s not considered news to discover that people seem to rely completely on virtual and online means to communicate with our friends rather than in-person ways. Thus, no wonder the gradual death of letter writing practice becomes the most significant mark of a divide between the past and now. The 90s, many would argue, is already a distant past so don’t dwell in it.

But how can one not dwell in it when in the end, it is with the fact that our memories, ableit sometimes inaccurate, shaped our narrative that we come to tell our stories.

Perhaps, one should know very early on that Hessler’s River Town is not a book about nostalgia nor is any book by certain similar authors like Fuchsia Dunlop, author of Shark Fin and Sichuan Pepper, in part because time is a theme that we write about all our lives. What the authors writing about small places share is an kind of mindfulness fully aware of the vastness of an landscape tainted by its artistic underrepresentation and an understanding that artistic valuation doesn’t need to be centered on certain corners of the world that have already received, relatively, greater attention such as Paris, London, Hong Kong—and the list could be extended. Certainly no truthful and visceral observations about anything related to the ‘big’ places like Hemingway writing about his experience of living in Paris or like Victor Serge writing about his participation in and reflection on the Soviet revolutions would be considered superfluous; rather, they are essential to our moral and intellectual becoming.

Though, like many other observers from the West, political and ideological elements certainly —if not centrally—captured the attention of the author of River Town, seeing our world in the lens of ideological preferences is, well, almost inevitable. One without the need to cite George Orwell and Victor Serge could easily demonstrate the difficult relationship between politics and art. It’s something every person who wrote and write has to come across. Reflecting on and contemplating the eventful and significant years of the last 60-70s in the US characterized by the civil rights movements and segregation, Toni Morrison made a point about politics influencing art in her preface to her work Sula, stating that if the novel was good, it was because it was faithful to a certain kind of politics; if it was bad, it was because it was faithless to them. One could not help but feel serious literary works of art could hardly be free of ideological influences perhaps in part because ideology is itself a central element that influences how we live. To many, politically influenced writing like those pieces appearing on the op-ed sections with hidden agendas is something whose presence gets larger day by day with the help of social media. What this age in which we live lacks is a calmer voice that tells firsthand experiences about certain matters somewhere distant from a readership that has been told different versions of a story far away from truth. Could we state plainly that what is most in lack in this age of social indifference is truth? Perhaps not with much certainty.

Notes

  1. Jiangcheng, 江城 in Chinese, is a nickname for several Chinese cities along the river of Changjiang such as Wuhan, Chongqing and other river cities.
  2. The Long River, also called the Yangtze River by the Westerners, is the longest river in Asia. The river is named differently through its vast catchment area or basin covering almost the entire southern part of China exluding areas in Guangdong, Fujian, and Guangxi provinces in the deep south. In Sichuan or the western basin of the Long River, it’s called the Jinsha River whereas in the central Chinese province of Hubei, the middle basin of the Long River, it’s called the Jing River or Jing Jiang. The lower stretch of the river is called the Yangzi River, or the Yangtze, which is now the name widely adopted by the Westerners to refer to the entire Long River. The preferred name for the entire river is simply Chang Jiang, or the Long River.
  3. The poem is 《与史郎中钦听黄鹤楼上吹笛》 in Chinese.
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Goodbye Wuhan

By Lou Hsienhua

It is said that every dream has an origin. Yet, the origin of my dream to travel around the world, it appears, is hard to trace.

With ambiguities, I could remember what attracted my attention the most when I was a child: the beautiful landscape pictures. At that moment, the existence of picturesque natural wonders reminded me of how beautiful our ‘life journeys’ could be as long as we insist our wish to travel be fulfilled.

In the early 2000s, there was an inclination inside the circle of geographical magazines to narrow their focus on places that were topographically diverse and culturally central, such as big urban centers whose past was deemed essential to the formation of our specific cultural identity—like Beijing, Shanghai in China, Toronto, Quito, New York, Paris, London, Moscow etc. around the world—and mountainous areas in southwestern China.

Plains were not getting much attention from the geographical magazines or landscape photographers. Perhaps its geographical blandness is a put-off for an industry driven by ‘visual freshness’. And it turned out because my hometown locates in central China’s Jianghan Plain, I could hardly find any representative presence of it on media, geography documentaries, or geographic books. It’s the flatness of it that shaped the way I see the outside of it.

Faraway lands seem to be a metaphor for something we yearn for. Its unreachability represents the most prominent aspect of desiring passions

I saw, in pictures, the Loess Plateau in the north where lands were overlain by a mantle of yellowish alluvium. And where the mountains were bare, forestless, and standing like an old man with a face wrinkled, weathered but still looking unshakably strong.

In The Bloodstain of Mountain Changbai, Xiao Hong, a Chinese writer born in the northeastern province of Heilongjiang in 1911, wrote: the landscape of China’s north, comparing to that of the south where moistness and serenity defined its feature, is sublimely majestic and vigorous, which is second to none.

I have never been to China’s northeast.

I have only been to China’s north in Beijing several years ago midway in summer. That summer, in my memory, was characterized by aridness, and extreme heat. Though it’s common in the south to expect extreme heat in hot summer days, it’s considered less common to experience that kind of climate aridness in southerners’ living memories about summer.

Swaths of poplar saplings in a southern city in Hubei by Lou Hsienhua.

Onscreen, there were forest-covered mountains that seemed like a passing fancy for a ten-year old growing up in small villages. I knew, from an early time of my life, it would only be a matter of time before what I thought was normal gradually became what I could hardly afford to lose, and forget. As I stood gazing up aimlessly around the stary sky, I started to miss the things I could hardly afford to lose but that had faded away anyway. Things like buffaloes roaming around the wasted grassland near my childhood residence in the countryside, and blooming colza flowers yellowing the entire field. Something I could not afford to lose.

All four seasons are leaving me now.
What I could grasp were only these autumn winds in which
Falling leaves blew along the streets outside of the theatre.

You greeted me with a smile almost unnoticeable, gradually away.
’twas about five years past.
With tears welling up,
I recognize what hasn’t come would never come.

Walk along the beach in the evenings.
Inside windows that open and shut,
Candlelights are what appears the most consolatory for those with a broken heart.
Fishing lamps, where have they gone?

All four seasons are like waves both serene and rippling.
Welcoming autumn is for years what I wish to do.

Let the chrysanthemum bloom in fatigue, like a sigh.
Let it bloom like me unable to meet the one I love.
Spreading out the whitish notepaper,
I write down those summer days,
During which we walked together along the beach.

Welcoming Autumn by Lao Mu
Translated from Chinese by Lou Hsienhua

“It’s easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.” Joan Didion wrote in Goodby to All That. At that time, I could almost recollect, though with a little uncertainty that makes me less certain about the accuracy of the words I wrote, when the city of Qianjiang, in south Hubei, began for me but I could hardly figure out at which moment it suspended. Maybe it never ended. Maybe I could go back where it was again in my memory as long as I felt I was as expectant as I once was.

But the moment of change certainly starts when I reflected on the question of belonging. The problem of rootedness. There is always a pause when I was asked where is worth visiting in the city of Qianjiang. It’s hard to see the standards by which a place is considered worth visiting. For Chinese bibliophiles, a museum dedicated for the remembrance of Cao Yu, a Chinese playwright whose ancestral home is in Qianjiang may be considered a must-go. But for others whose personal interests vary, it’s harder to tell by which standard, a place is for them. Overall, it’s a small city not dissimilar to any other same-sized ones.

What do we mean when we express our love for travelling? Travelling is life, it is said. It’s like an ideal used by those who wish to metaphorize their desire for a fulfilling life. This metaphor is so widely accepted that it is almost our second nature to liken the places we haven’t been to anything desirable, majestically serene, or adventurous as if anything familiar to us is tediously uninteresting. Life, some may argue, is about pursuing things, instead of holding them. This, it is only too common to lose our interest to something when it’s gained, or obtained. We have goals. But in the end, we could hardly lay a finger upon the exact point that our goals are for.

It’s not uncommon for some writers to appear a bit superstitious. Life is one of the most mythicized things that we feel no control of. Better believe in something. And for some writers, this believing in something turned out to be youth. If life is a floral plant, youth is certainly its blossom. And in the end, where we’d been in the early years of our life gradually becomes the memento of our youth. In Ernest Hemingway’s later years, he was trying to finish his ‘Paris stuff”, a recollection of his youth time spent in Paris that was later, posthumously, published and titled A Moveable Feast.

Perhaps in the end, the only way to reconnect to our youth, besides photographs, could truly be the places where our younger selves stayed. As Hemingway put it, “there were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity.”

Decades ago when I, for the first time in my life, headed for the city of Wuhan to start my college years, life after seventeen still seems mixed with complex feelings of bittersweetness and expectations of a better future. The lastingness of youth, we truly believed, seemed to be something we took for granted. My grandparents reminded me to get thicker beddings and quilts lest I get cold. Life outside home, at that time, seemed deeply unsatisfying, yet, it provided a priceless freedom whose value we took an awfully long time to realize. At first, it’s the kind of freedom that requires no other additional efforts to earn. Yet when we grew up, it gives no chance for us to regain it. It is the fleetingness of youth that is what we didn’t see. By the time we realise the value of it, it’s gone.

Life at that time seemed so beautifully innocent that even the most unendurable disturbances such as chaotic verbal conflictions witnessed on bus could be rendered as the bassline of a grand symphony of life.

When we talk about cities, what do we exactly mean? Do we, for example, mean we feel the time we spent there or the atmosphere that specific city posed bears a special meaning to us? Perhaps. More often than not, when I think of the city of Qianjiang, I start to recollect my teen years during which I learned various ‘life lessons’ others considered important by certain standards. When I think of the city of Wuhan, I, almost immediately, remember my early twenties during which I tried to explore the options for me to live my life in a fulfilling way.

Many years ago when I was there in Wuhan, it was largely under upgrade mode—a scheme to gentrify its old boroughs and blocks considered, by the officials, dysfunctional and cut off. I was, at that time, living in a rented apartment near the Nanhu region of the city, trying to build a life based on my own ideals, hopeful of freeing myself from the intellectual restrictions set by capitalistically caused financial difficulties by thinking only about the ‘fact’ that anyone alive should be free of defining what to love, what to value.

The city of Wuhan at that period was still under ‘infrastructure transformation’. Almost every street where I walked across in the city, as my memory has it, was gradually becoming unrecognisable in a matter of days. A speed faster than my ability to perceive it. And then, every time it rained, the roads near the lake-bound regions of the city would, usually, turned into muddy riverbeds, making it hard for pedestrians to walk back home, or go working. In the night, it was most expected that piercing noises of tracks carrying sands to disturb your sleep.

Looking back at the city of Wuhan across whose streets I roamed, taking photographs several years ago, I assumed that maybe every city under ‘upgrading scheme’ might look like this, messy and disorderly. But such disturbances like noises in the night were not considered a nausea during my stay at the city in my life after 18 because the power of beauty and self-regarding—all characteristic of youth—is so enticing and great that no thing—including those disturbances— seemed able to suppress it.