In Country Driving, a Chinese Road Trip, Peter Hessler provides an account of his adventures in China from about 1995 into the 2007, which he published in 2010. Mr. Hessler is an international traveler and journalist. In his book, he provides a wonderful, witty account of the people of China, in both rural and urban settings. He broke the book into three sections: “The Wall,” “The Village,” and “The Factory’” all three are interrelated. He relays a great deal of cultural practices and weaves so many historical facts into his storytelling that the reader comes away with both the old and the new history of China. He also provides a tremendous amount of data regarding the economic expansion of China and the shift of its people from rural farming to factory workers. If I were to assign this book to middle schoolers, I would like to have my students pre-read the current United Nations listing of Sustainable Development Goals, then read Mr. Hessler’s recent Chinese encounters. I would provide the students with a study guide asking them to comment on specific cultural aspects of the people that Mr. Hessler writes about, the history he provides as it relates to their current daily lives and practices, and then consider what they are reading comparatively to the possibilities of the practices being sustainable and leading into China’s future. There are so many to choose from in each section, that a student truly would only need to read one section. If a class presented a synopsis of what they completed, each student could end up with a gallery walk of all the book’s sections.
To help a student choose which section to read, here are some highlights of each section and what might catch a middle school student's attention.
In “The Wall,” Mr. Hessler obtains a Chinese driving permit, and he decides to take excursions into rural China to find all the pieces of the Great Wall. He uses maps provided by China, and he drives mostly back roads and sometimes even streambeds in his quest to explore western reaches of the Great Wall. As he recounts his exploration, Mr. Hessler tells about the people he encounters. No one is too insignificant for him to mention. For example, he describes the man with twenty-one different occupations on his business card, everything from Feng Schwa master to funeral planning. He describes a Mongolian woman who leads tours of a fake museum which supposedly is the burial site of Ghengis Khan. He also tells of his run in with youthful policemen and the actual fine he received at the far end of his westward journey for entering into a forbidden town. These are just a few of his adventures. I believe that with some supervision from the teacher and follow-up discussions about key points, middle schoolers could enjoy the frank and open reveals that Mr. Hessler has made part of his book. Certainly, any reader would be amazed at the historical detail that is included. Mr. Hessler has completed exhaustive research and expertly woven those details into his tales. I was able to better understand a college text of Chinese history based on parallel reading with this book. As the author drives through the countryside, he mentions repeatedly how the younger populations are moving away from the rural areas to find employment. He explains the environmental reasons for this change as well as the cultural changes that are occurring which are leading the young away from their ancestral homelands.
In “The Village,” the second portion of the book, Mr. Hessler explores a remote village that is still within Beijing’s city limits. He describes the difficulties he initially had as an outsider being accepted as a resident in the quiet little town. He hikes and explores a cattle trail only to find a man living so remotely that he only sees people about four times a year. Yet that gentleman offers him, a stranger, tea and spends some time telling his story. A key event in this portion of the book is Mr. Hessler’s struggle to find proper health care for a son of a villager of whom he has become fond. In the first portion of the book, Mr. Hessler encounters the Chinese philosophy that “nothing can be done,” It seems to be a resounding resignation on the part of people who have accepted their plight and learn to live with things they cannot change. In this portion of the book, he fights with everything he has against that philosophy, even risking arguing with hospital providers and bargaining with the only tool he has left which is cold, hard cash – all to save the life of this one little five year old. The little five year old’s family is also examined in great detail in this portion of the book. The dad changes from a rural farmer into a bed and breakfast innkeeper. He finds strength to challenge the political heads who are withholding funding and resources needed to take care of a special needs man that he must support. The whole village transforms because the state chose to pave its road and the residents encouraged a change to tourism as a source of employment. The mom and dad get a car. The mom turns to her religious roots to help her through the changes, and the dad holds fast to his beliefs that hard work will get in through all the increased stress and changes. There is much for a middle school to consider as they read both the good and the bad effects on the people that are portrayed in this portion of the book. A middle school student will also undoubtedly draw comparisons between the types of schools he/she has personally attended and those described in “The Village” section. The public parent/teacher conferences, the boarding school requirements, and the existence of class monitors and public shaming for misbehavior. The author takes an observers point of view as he recounts his stories, but clearly he had become much vested in the life of the Wei Zigi family in Sancha during the several years he lived in the village.
The final portion of this book is “The Factory.” Mr. Hessler had previously described the movement of the youth from the rural areas into the cities. He said they were pursuing jobs at factories, a better source of income than farming. In this section, Mr. Hessler finds a town called Lishui which is on the fringe of major factory development in the province of Zhejiang. Then he observes the sweep of change as the little rural area high in the mountains gets bought up by factory developers. Middle schoolers might enjoy thinking about the products that the factories are producing. Mr. Hessler even gives some statistics, like the one which produces one-fourth of all the world’s socks. The Zhejiang became connected by the construction of a major new highway that included 29 tunnels. The students might enjoy looking up these locations on Google Earth to see an Arial view of the terrain and the still existing highway. Mr. Hessler includes a posting for hiring on a worker door: it reads “Ages 18 to 35, middle-school education.” This might spark a good discussion among readers about why there would be workers with only a middle-school education. Students could try researching to find out education success in China or find first person accounts of school conditions. Students could also compare the several examples of job postings with those found in our local papers or those online on Monster.com. Mr. Hessler follows the life of a fifteen year old from Anhui Province who hides her age to get a job at a bra factory, and he states the life of Master Luo who started working at age 14, without completing middle school because his parents could no longer afford the school fees. Because my students will be 14 year olds by the end of 8th grade, I believe they may identify with the story told about this girl’s life. In addition to the human aspects of this section, Mr. Hessler weaves in cold, hard business facts. He tracks the changes in Lishui from the initial bulldozer breaking ground to the development of entertainment for the workers that came long after the factory development was in full swing. He also tracks taxes, the kickbacks of government officials, and the methods that lead to funds used for development. He discusses the promotion and advancement opportunities or lack of those for the employees, along with their working conditions. He tells of the employees’ long hours doing repetitive tasks, with what he recalls from one employee an “empty mind.” He explains that the employees write on the walls surrounding their work space. The subject of their writings are self-help sayings. This reminded me of the Chinese Song of Song, which was one of the early Confucian annuals that school children studied. Mr. Hessler also took another look at the Chinese education system in this section of the book to help explain the success or failure of business models. He stated that because the system relies so heavily on memorization and rote tasks, there is little room for innovative thinking, so when the employees are hired for low skilled jobs, low pay, with lower educations, they have trouble helping with the efficiencies needed to make the businesses run successfully. There’s little motivation for the employees to stay put in a failing business to try to rescue it because they can just move on to another new start up and take their chances there. One last item from this section is the environmental effects of the rapid development start-ups and cycle of failures. Mr. Hessler brought out the fine line walked by the company bosses and the environmental control officials. Middle schoolers could be encouraged to review articles in National Geographic which over the course of the last 15 years or so have brought to light the tremendous environmental impact on China’s Yellow River and the practice of burning computer wires for recycling at the cost of exposing humans to the toxic gases released during the process. Mr. Hessler chose to close his book by mentioning that he left China and was back home living in the United States by 2007. He visited again the bra factory which had closed and noted that the self-help sayings of the workers from the factory were still on the walls in the abandoned factory. The reader is left at the end of the book with very real experience of vacancy left by the factory closing, of the strife of the employees who had to pick up again and move on, and the environmental impact of the abandoned concrete and equipment and even bra clasps that were left just as they were.