Summary of Peter Hessler's River Town

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 I came to Fuling on the slow boat downstream from Chongqing. It was a warm, clear night at the end of August in 1996. The city was small, and there was only one other foreigner in town.
#2 The Fuling group, which was the biggest of the Long March groups, had walked more than a thousand miles. They had been sponsored by Magnificent Sound cigarettes, and they had run out of cash. President Li of the college had been able to bail them out.
#3 The people of Fuling have a reputation for being beautiful. I was told this in my Chinese class in Chengdu, and a Fuling native told me the same thing.
#4 The students were excited to see us, and we were quickly dragged into the center of the auditorium to be pinned with red flowers by local officials. We were honored as heroes for helping build the country.

Sujets

• Travel
• Essays
• Travelogues

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 17 mai 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9798822513198
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Peter Hessler's River Town
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4 Insights from Chapter 5 Insights from Chapter 6 Insights from Chapter 7 Insights from Chapter 8 Insights from Chapter 9 Insights from Chapter 10 Insights from Chapter 11 Insights from Chapter 12 Insights from Chapter 13 Insights from Chapter 14 Insights from Chapter 15 Insights from Chapter 16 Insights from Chapter 17 Insights from Chapter 18 Insights from Chapter 19 Insights from Chapter 20 Insights from Chapter 21 Insights from Chapter 22 Insights from Chapter 23
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

I came to Fuling on the slow boat downstream from Chongqing. It was a warm, clear night at the end of August in 1996. The city was small, and there was only one other foreigner in town.

#2

The Fuling group, which was the biggest of the Long March groups, had walked more than a thousand miles. They had been sponsored by Magnificent Sound cigarettes, and they had run out of cash. President Li of the college had been able to bail them out.

#3

The people of Fuling have a reputation for being beautiful. I was told this in my Chinese class in Chengdu, and a Fuling native told me the same thing.

#4

The students were excited to see us, and we were quickly dragged into the center of the auditorium to be pinned with red flowers by local officials. We were honored as heroes for helping build the country.

#5

I was a Peace Corps volunteer, but I wasn’t in China. The country was Communist, but it wasn’t. Everything was half a step off, and that was how life was in those early days.

#6

The college had decided to buy Adam a washing machine, and he had protested. But the college had decided to buy him tennis, and he had protested that, too. The college had decided to buy him tennis, and he had protested that, too.

#7

In Fuling, we were afraid that the workers would start buying tennis courts. We were also afraid that the college would start buying things for our apartments. In the end, we were fine, and the college stopped buying things for our apartments.

#8

Fuling was a city I lived in for six weeks. It was a loud city, but the sounds were different from anything I had experienced before. I liked hearing the students repeat their lessons, as that made me feel as if I were in step with the college’s routine.

#9

At the start of the year, the freshmen had military training. They learned songs and patriotic songs, and they were taught how to salute, goose-step, and march at attention. They also learned how to shoot rifles.

#10

I began to listen to the students in my class, and I learned that everything I did was being watched and analyzed. The students wrote about the way I always carried a water bottle to class, my pace, and my laugh.

#11

The American teachers, Peter and Adam, were more casual than us Chinese people. They would scratch themselves casually without paying attention to what others may say. They would dress up casually, with their belts dropping and hanging.

#12

I didn’t know that the local industry had been moved to Fuling from Shanghai as a direct result of the American nuclear threat in the 1950s and 1960s, when Mao Zedong dispersed China’s military factories throughout the remote mountains of the southwest.

#13

I had one student, Anne, who was a girl from the ground floor of my building. She was one of the brightest students in the class, and she liked being alone. She made up her own mind, and she rarely veered away from the political cant that most of her classmates rehashed.

#14

I was in Fuling to teach American students, but I couldn’t judge them for anything they wrote in their journals. Their backgrounds were too different from what I had known before coming to Fuling.

#15

The generation of my students was a watershed generation, in the same way that opening was a watershed issue for China. They had grown up during one of the most difficult periods in Chinese history, but they were still politically brainwashed.

#16

The students in Fuling were extremely respectful and eager to learn, which was a stark contrast to the students I had previously encountered in other countries. They were also extremely smart, and their intelligence was reflected in their thoughts and reflections.

#17

Adam and his team visited a primary school in Sichuan, China, and taught the students how to write essays. The students wrote about anything they wanted, and what Adam collected was forty-five shopping lists.
Insights from Chapter 2

#1

There are no bicycles in Fuling because the city is full of steps. The stairs are the main streets of the city, and they carry most of its traffic. Everything is public.

#2

The city of Fuling is not an easy place to live. The porters, or stick-stick soldiers, who carry loads on the streets are from the countryside and have to compete with each other to get jobs.

#3

Fuling is a city of legs, and it is common to spend a morning shopping there and never look up at the buildings. The city is all steps and legs. The buildings are not worth looking at, as they are made of cheap blue glass and white tile.

#4

The city is filled with sounds: honking horns, roaring television shops, blaring cassette tape stands, and the uneven buzz of streetside salespeople calling out to the passersby. But some sounds are more powerful than others: the music of the erhu, played by a blind man.

#5

The erhu is the instrument of the blind man’s music. It is a snake-skin-bound box that plays effortless music, never drowned out by the rushing cars, the stream of pedestrians, or the nearby televisions.
Insights from Chapter 3

#1

I taught English and American literature at a Chinese college. I had classes in writing and speaking, but most of my time was spent teaching lit. The students were from the countryside, and their English was sometimes poor. But they were enthusiastic about learning.

#2

I loved teaching at the college, and I enjoyed the view of the city that came with it. I would often look down at the traffic on the rivers, and think: I’m working, too.

#3

The students were split on whether Robin Hood was a good role model for China, with some comparing him to Mao Zedong, who they said was a revolutionary against injustice, and others comparing him to the heroes of the Long March, who they said would be nowhere without people like Robin Hood.

#4

Fuling Teachers College was a dual purpose school. It trained teachers, but it also served as an educational extension of the Chinese Communist Party. Each student carried a red identity card, and on the front page of the card were eight Student Regulations. The first three were as follows: ardently love the Motherland, support the Chinese Communist Party’s leadership, and serve Socialism’s undertaking.

#5

Adam taught American culture, which used a textbook called Survey of Britain and America. The book had been published in 1994, and its portrait of America was rarely recognizable. It described America’s social problems as a result of the capitalist system.

#6

I had to teach American students the art of reading poetry, and even though they struggled with the form of the poem, they were able to understand its rhythm. They knew where the stresses were in each line, and they could find the inconsistencies.