I was in China last month, and I was in awe. Shanghai, at least, is everything I love in Asia and lots of things I don't. It is high tech, and it is inefficient as hell. It is souped up Ferraris and ancient mopeds, the latter not infrequently usurping the pedestrians' right-of-way on sidewalks. It is gleaming skyscrapers and ancient temples and back alleys that were formerly opium dens. Gucci and Prada and "Gucci" and "Prada." You get the idea. And, yet, Peter Hessler makes me feel I have missed the essential China. (Admittedly, I felt the same after reading Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper.)
Hessler's Country Driving is a compilation of his adventures in China 15-20 years ago, when cars were rare(ish), roads were new, and farmers regularly tossed crops into the middle of the road, where vehicles could not miss them. (As Hessler observes, "there's no other act that so publicly violates both traffic safety and food hygiene," but the practice was tolerated "because threshing is easiest when somebody else's tires do the work.") Also, Hessler encounters a licensed Zhejiang Province Demolitioner, who he notes was fully licensed to blow up the province. Literally: mountain upon mountain met its end at the hands of this particular demolitioner, who carried a separate certification attesting to the fact that he'd never had an accident - no small thing in a place where Hessler repeatedly witnesses flame in close proximity to natural gas.
Some of the tales were familiar from his Strange Stones, and the commentary on immigration from farm to factory was slightly reminiscent of Factory Girls (whose author, I learned in the acknowledgements is Hessler's wife), but on the whole, Country Driving was a look at lighter and funnier side of life in China.
Five stars for those who love travel writing and tales of the wider world.
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