www射-国产免费一级-欧美福利-亚洲成人福利-成人一区在线观看-亚州成人

Make me your Homepage
left corner left corner
China Daily Website

Playful prose

Updated: 2013-07-09 14:17
( China Daily)
Playful prose

Peter Hessler records his amazing experiences in fast-changing societies like China in his collection of essays Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West. [Photo/Provided to China Daily]


 

Playful prose

Storyteller Peter Hessler embraces humor to depict life in China. Writing in first-person narrative, Hessler's work now appears online and elsewhere in Chinese. Kelly Chung Dawson reports in New York.

On a visa run to Hong Kong in 1999, Peter Hessler made a stop in a tiny village with competing rat restaurants.

He was working as a freelance reporter at the time, and stories in the Chinese press about Luogang, in the southern province of Guangdong, had caught his eye.

At the Highest Ranking Wild Flavor Restaurant, a waitress casually asked Hessler a question he hadn't ever considered.

"Do you want a big rat or a small rat?"

At the next table, a little boy was contentedly chewing on a miniature drumstick. A small rat, then.

Later, the American e-mailed an account of his trip to a group of family and friends that included his former professor in narrative nonfiction, author John McPhee.

Only in the first person could Hessler do the story justice, the better to chronicle his experience of being wooed by rival rat eateries bent on conquering his foreign palate.

As he had discovered as a volunteer in the Peace Corps, humor wasn't just a coping mechanism in China, it was necessary for accurate depiction.

McPhee forwarded the e-mail to the editor of the New Yorker, David Remnick, who eventually hired Hessler as the magazine's China correspondent.

A version of that e-mail, now titled Wild Flavor, appears in a new collection of Hessler's essays. Fittingly, Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West, is dedicated to McPhee.

"I take humor seriously," Hessler says. "We don't do this enough when we write about the developing world, and that gives people the impression that people in these places live dark, poor lives. There are funny things happening everywhere, and sometimes in the effort to be respectful writers can be condescending. We have to be able to laugh."

Hessler, who now lives in Egypt, is the author of three other books about China: River Town (2006), Oracle Bones (2007) and Country Driving (2011).

With Strange Stones, he expands his focus to Nepal, Japan and the US, in the hope of demonstrating that his interests don't begin and end in China.

In other essays he touches on life in Colorado, where he and his wife Leslie, also a writer, spent four years in between China and Egypt.

His position with the New Yorker affords Hessler the luxury of spending weeks and sometimes months on a story, he admits.

Unlike many journalists, tasked with breaking news and often at the mercy of translators and fixers when working abroad, Hessler put his fluency in Mandarin toward the slow cultivation of relationships with people in cities all over China during his tenure.

He had lived in a Beijing hutong (alleyway) apartment for more than four years before writing about the neighborhood's WC Julebu (WC Club), so named for its installation in a public restroom built in advance of the 2008 Olympics.

Hessler joined the club as a Young Pioneer, the highest rank eligible to him as a foreigner, he recalls dryly in the story Hutong Karma.

His experience of China was consistently shaped by the way people reacted to his ethnicity, he writes in the preface to Strange Stones.

As a result, first-person narrative seemed necessary in communicating an important part of the tale.

"Mostly though, I wanted to convey how things actually felt - the experience of living in a Beijing hutong, or driving on Chinese roads, or moving to a small town in rural Colorado," he writes.

"The joy of nonfiction is searching for balance between storytelling and reporting, finding a way to be both loquacious and observant."

Hessler, who grew up in Missouri with a father who loved to tell stories, observes that a major difference between Chinese and Americans relates to narrative.

In Colorado, new acquaintances were often prone to falling silent upon learning that he had spent over a decade in China. He found Americans to be much more comfortable talking about themselves.

In contrast, the less individualistic nature of Chinese culture often made his work in China more difficult. His Chinese subjects were surprised at his interest, and lacked the instinct for which details he might find interesting.

Chinese were more likely to be interested in his life in the US, a natural response to the opportunities that have become available to them over the last decades, he says.

"China is going through a period of intense curiosity, whereas since 9/11, the outside world has for many people in the US offered a threat," he says.

The occasional naivete of his Chinese subjects has made Hessler acutely conscious of trying not to exploit their life stories. He remains in touch with most of the people he has written about, some of whom have had complicated reactions to his essays.

The fact that his work now appears online and elsewhere in Chinese has also been a welcome development.

Although Hessler returned to Colorado after China in part to prove to himself he could still live in the US, he ultimately believes there is important work to be done overseas.

"In places like China and Egypt, they're still figuring out what direction they're moving in and who they are," he says.

"As a writer, it's an amazing opportunity to be able to spend real time with a society in the process of major change."


Hessler's works

?

Playful prose
River Town

records Peter Hessler's two years on the Yangtze River, in the remote town of Fuling. He was the first American to arrive in more than half a century. Teaching English at the local college, he wrote about the aspiring students as well as a radically different and developing society.

Playful prose

Oracle Bones

combs through his experiences in China from 1999 to 2002 with a handful of ordinary Chinese. The author follows their choices and changes in the quickly morphing society, intersecting his narration with maps and information about oracle-bone inscriptions or ancient Chinese writing.

 

Playful prose

Country Driving

is the final book in Hessler's China trilogy, where he looks at the country's farms and factories. He records how the country is building roads and factory towns, and investigates the status of migrant workers as well as concerns about urban development.

 

Playful prose

Playful prose


Unraveling the secrets of the Silk Road


The art of the sleuth

 

 

8.03K
 
 
...
...
...
主站蜘蛛池模板: 国产成人在线观看免费网站 | 成人做爰毛片免费视频 | 久久久久久88色愉愉 | 久久国产美女免费观看精品 | 天堂中文资源在线8 | 久久视奸 | 精品国产亚一区二区三区 | 亚洲男人天堂 | 女人被男人桶 | 久久久国产免费影院 | 一区二区三区日韩精品 | 亚洲成年人在线观看 | 黑人一级片 | 日本免费一区二区三区三州 | 久久福利资源国产精品999 | 国产一级一级毛片 | 女人把腿劈开让男人桶的网站 | 亚洲国产精品一区二区三区 | 日韩在线视频免费不卡一区 | 91福利国产在线观看香蕉 | 成人网18免费软件大全 | 毛片com| 高清欧美日本视频免费观看 | 国产一区二区在线播放 | 欧美成人毛片 | 国产精品2020观看久久 | 成人国产三级精品 | 欧美日韩在线视频不卡一区二区三区 | 午夜不卡视频 | 久久国产影视 | 九九在线观看精品视频6 | 日本精品视频一区二区三区 | 成人国产精品高清在线观看 | 亚洲国产成人久久精品影视 | 免费a级在线观看播放 | 亚洲爱视频 | 九草网| 在线中文字幕精品第5页 | 美女视频免费黄色 | 国模在线播放 | 三级色网|