Blizzardboy | A Kiwi in Japan

Peter Hessler
John Murray (Publishers) 2001

Living in a new place, and especially a new country, is something that can take a lot of get used to. Peter Hessler in River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze captures well his experience of living and working for two years as an English teacher on a Peace Corps programme in Sichuan. Sichuan is famous for its fiery food, incomprehensible dialect and of course for the Three Gorges Dam project.

This book reminded me a lot of my first couple of years in Japan. A lot of what he wrote about holds true not just for China but also for the rest of Asia. If you are coming to teach in Asia then I would defiantly recommend this book. When I first moved to Futatsui on the Yonoshirogawa River, in Akita, Tohoku (Northern) Japan, I really was amazed by the differences and the wonderful people. This is the honeymoon phase of interacting with a new culture. After a few weeks, my first real example of culture shock came – not from the local Japanese, but from the people I was on the Jet Programme with, and especially the Americans. They looked like kiwis, they spoke almost like kiwis, but in so many indescribable ways they were different, brash, strong minded. This took some getting used to.

Now that my wife and I are living and working in Xinjiang I can also see many similarities between my life here and Hessler’s descriptions of his time in China although it must be noted that the controls do not seem to be as strict where I teach.

Learning a new language, getting along with the locals on a day to day basis and dealing with sensitive issues such as politics are all dealt with in River Town. The opening of China and such constructions as “democracy with Chinese Characteristics” are topics that when discussed need to be dealt with with tact and delicacy and Hessler’s treatment of them give the book an added depth.

River Town is an excellent read and I would highly recommend it if one is coming to work here in China or even in another foreign country for there is a great deal of material to think about and learn from in Hessler’s honest and humanistic account.