The book Country Driving A Chinese Road Trip, by Peter Hessler , chronicles his road trip across China in 2001. The book is broken into three sections: Book I, The Wall, Book II The Village, and Book III The Factory. In each section, Hessler goes into detail about his experience and information he learned, first about The Great Wall, which often misunderstood by outsiders is actually a series of walls built during different time periods and made from different materials. Hessler describes how some parts of the wall are built from brick and to this day looks like quite a fortress while other parts of the wall are made from dirt mounds. My favorite part of Book I however had to do with the passages describing the questions on the written driver’s exam in China. The traditional educational approach of “drill and kill” has carried its way into the driver’s instruction program as well as the reader learns how driving instructors take months teaching and practicing the most basic steps to driving, like how to start the engine, and yet all drivers must also be able to balance two wheels of the car on a raised ramp while driving-a skill not likely to be encountered when driving, however it is hard to do, so it must be valuable.
During Book II The Village, Hessler and a friend had rented a house in a somewhat remote village in the countryside. Hessler not only introduces the reader to the villagers, but also goes into detail regarding their interdependence upon each other and the communist politics present even in a small distant village. The most interesting parts of this section for me had to do with the only young child in the entire village, a little boy named Wei Jai. Wei Jai moves from a free spirit without judgement over others regardless if the person be a disabled uncle or a white man from America, to a future Communist society member. This change begins once Wei Jai is sent away to a boarding school since there is no school in the village. It did cause me to consider how much the American school system also requires a certain amount of conformity in order for the student to be a member of our society. One big difference however is in America there is still much emphasis on the individual as opposed to the Chinese system where school achievement has more to do with group’s success.
The final portion of the book tells of two men who are trying to open a new factory together. In China a towns and cities become specialized in a particular type of manufacturing. Located in one area of China will be all the factories that produce a specific product like buttons or pleather. Once one factory becomes successful with a product it does not take long until another factory opens up making the same product and undercutting the price. Hessler also describes the layers of bosses a factory may have and the negotiations that go on between the hierarchy of bosses. Many of the jobs in these factories require a middle school education or less. These “factory towns” are often the place where rural young people go to looking for work.
The book was easy to read and I believe there are sections of it that would be useful and interesting to students learning about China.