Transcript: Peter Hessler, live at Duke University's Nasher Museum
Modern Revolutions in Ancient Civilizations
This week on Sinica, a live recording from November 10, 2023, with the amazing Peter Hessler. I had the pleasure of interviewing Pete at the beautiful Nasher Museum Auditorium on Duke University’s campus, in a program presented jointly by Duke Middle East Study Center and the Asia Pacific Studies Institute at Duke University. The program was titled “Modern Revolutions in Ancient Civilizations.” Special thanks to Griffin Orlando of the Middle East Study Center and Alex Nickley from the Asia Pacific Studies Institute, and Ralph Litzinger from Duke Anthropology.
6:27 – What Peter’s China experience brought to his writing on China — and vice-versa
9:45 – Contrasting the Chinese and Egyptian revolutions
18:37 – Revolution in thinking in Egypt and China
35:49 – Peter on his approach to the craft of reporting and writing
51:47 – Peter’s work in China as a longitudinal cohort study — and what it reveals so far
58:03 – A preview of Peter’s forthcoming book, Other Rivers
Recommendations:
Peter: Gerald Durrell, My Family and Other Animals is one of the books
Kaiser: Kenneth W. Harl’s book Empires of the Steppes: A History of the Nomadic Tribes Who Shaped Civilization.
Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we’ll look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends that can help us better understand what’s happening in China’s politics, foreign relations, economics, and society. Join me each week for in-depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to the way we think and talk about China.
Sinica is supported this year by the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin Madison — a National Resource Center for the study of East Asia. If your organization cares about deepening our understanding of China, please consider sponsoring Sinica. Email me at sinicapod@gmail.com and let’s see what we can do together. You can also support me as an individual by subscribing to the Sinica Substack. That’s sinica.substack.com, which features bonus podcasts and essays that listeners will enjoy. You can also find all that same content at patreon.com/sinica if you prefer that platform.
I’m Kaiser Kuo, coming to you from Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Today, I’ve got a special treat for listeners — Peter Hessler, whose name will be familiar to most of the listenership. He came to Duke University in November, and I had the chance to interview him on stage at the Nasher Museum. I hope you enjoy the conversation we had as much as I enjoyed having it.
Welcome to this special live recording of the Sinica Podcast, coming to you from Duke University’s beautiful Nasher Museum. Hello, Durham.
Audience: Woo!
Kaiser: I’m just looking around, I see so many friends in the audience. I’m delighted. It’s just been so wonderful to be part of this community which is just one of the best places on the planet. I absolutely love it. Thank you so much to my dear friend, Ralph Litzinger, from Duke Anthropology for that very kind and embarrassing intro. A huge thanks also to Griffin Orlando of the Duke Middle East Study Center, and to Alex Nickley of the Asian Pacific Studies Institute, also here at Duke, who worked so hard to make this event happen and to bring in our guest today.
It is such a huge treat to record a live show right here, up the street from where I live, and an even bigger treat because today I am chatting with somebody who not only do I admire and respect, but who I’ve known since the ’90s, and really count as a friend. Someone who also happens to be my favorite nonfiction writer. Full stop.
I really mean that. For the last quarter century, Pete Hessler has been writing deeply empathic articles and books on China, which, for a change, present characters who I do recognize. Like a gifted Chinese painter working in ink on silk, he can capture the inner life and essence of people with only a few deft strokes. They emerge in his spare and elegant prose with all their humanity and their dignity, or their goofiness, or their awkward shyness, or their pomposity, or their just utter ridiculousness, or their sly humor, whatever it’s called for. And he is a master of show, don’t tell. He’s able to convey all those attributes without explicitly using those modifiers or those nouns that I just used. It’s just never that on the nose with him.
It’s a gift. You all know his bio, his years in the Peace Corps in Fuling and Chongqing, his books — Rivertown, Oracle Bones, and Country Driving, his writing for the fabulous New Yorker, his time in Cairo with his wife and twin daughters during the Tahrir Square uprising, the election and downfall of Mohamed Morsi, and the coming to power of Abdel Fattah El-Sisi — out of which he wrote The Unburied, which is a fantastic book.
And as you probably all know, Peter went back to China to teach, was basically freshman comp at Sichuan University in Chengdu. And he wrote some of the best pieces that I read, reported from the ground, from ground zero, in fact, in China, the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan during the COVID pandemic. These were the most humane and, again, empathic stories, and we will be talking about his technique and his craft. Peter Hessler, welcome to the Triangle. Welcome back to Sinica. Great to have you back on what will be the first sort of posthumous show that I’m recording. So, a very warm welcome for Peter Hessler. Give it up.
Peter Hessler: Yeah, thank you very much, and thanks to everybody for coming, and thanks to the university for hosting me. And thank you, Kaiser. It has been a long time. I think we met in Jam House, right? Was that…
Kaiser: Yeah on South Street.
Pete: In Sanlitun maybe, I think. Wasn’t that where you used to hang out, The Jam House? I think that’s where we first.
Kaiser: Jam House.
Pete: 1999. Yeah.
Kaiser: We’ll talk about the good old days at the end if we have a little bit of time because I do want to nostalgia a little. I’m feeling nostalgic recently. I know they’ve kept you pretty busy here in your few days here. Have you had a chance to explore the area, check out this lovely campus?
Pete: Yeah, it’s great. I’ve been for a couple long runs. That’s sort of my thing.
Kaiser: Yeah. Good. That’s his thing. Yeah. Eight miles this morning, I think, right?
Pete: Yeah. Eight miles. It’s the usual.
Kaiser: All right. So fortunately, his energy never flags, so this is going to be fun. We spoke a couple of years ago, actually, at one of our conferences when I had just finished reading The Buried as well as much of your great COVID era writing from Chengdu and from elsewhere in China. I remember that ski resort piece. Anyone read that ski resort piece that Pete did in the New Yorker? Listening back to that show, though, that we recorded, Jeremy and I recorded with you, I think I blew the chance to really draw you out more on the sort of Egypt and China experience and how they affected one another. I mean, superficially, anyone who’s read your Egypt oeuevre, in the New Yorker, or has read The Buried, can see that, yeah, of course, you had all these Chinese families that you portray who are selling lingerie and other things in cities all up and down the Nile.
But that’s not what I’m actually talking about. For me, reading The Buried, as somebody from a China-focused background, the ready availability, it’s always there at hand, of that comparative angle, always being able to sort of bounce your vision off of China and triangulate on Egypt that way, that is what I think really enhanced the book on. It’s one of the great strengths of the book — many strengths of the book. So I’m going to ask you again, and hopefully we can go into this a little more — how did your time in China shape the way that you approached reporting on Egypt? And how did that time in Egypt then, when you went back to China, affect the way that you reported on China?
Pete: Yeah, I mean, I was definitely shaped as a writer by starting out in China, and so that, I think, set certain foundations. So, studying Arabic was important to me because in China, that made me so much more mobile and so much more independent. I also, in China, I tried to write as much as I could from the provinces. Actually, at the New Yorker, I wrote very few stories from Beijing. I was almost always finding things outside, partly because I started out in the Peace Corps in a small town in Fuling, and I felt like places like that mattered. And so when I was in Egypt, I made a real effort to kind of establish myself in places other than Cairo. It’s very hard in Egypt because Cairo really dominates in a way that Beijing does not, right? I mean, it’s much more of a dominant capital city.
And it’s also hard for security reasons to be elsewhere. And the way I did it in Egypt was actually starting by doing archeological research in small towns in the south, what they call upper Egypt. And that was a good tactic because then the police in the areas kind of knew who I was, and then I kept coming back and doing non-archeology reporting, so I did apply some of those things from China to Egypt. And I think it helped — helped greatly. In terms of going back to China, I mean, in some sense, my patterns in Chengdu were very much established by the nature of what I was doing. I was teaching pretty much full-time, actually a pretty heavy load. And I was also revisiting Fuling and my students there. So when I showed up, I didn’t really have plans to do a great deal of reporting.
And then the pandemic happened. So I wasn’t making a lot of other choices. Those were sort of the things that I was following. But Egypt made me think about China in different ways. When I lived in China before, it was not the Xi Jinping era, and I returned to the Xi Jinping era, which was sort of an open-ended era. We don’t know how long this person’s going to be in power, what this… It’s different than when Jiang Zemin was there or Hu Jintao. And Egypt was a place that had The Revolution. One of the reasons the revolution happened in Egypt was because they had a leader without a timeline. Hosni Mubarak was in his ’80s. There was no clear successor. And that situation can sort of bring about unrest, and that’s what happened in Egypt. So I thought about that a lot in China, and then the difference of having this leader in a different way than I’d had in previous years I lived in China. And of course, you’re always thinking about change and revolution, and what, when we talk about a society undergoing a revolution, what does that mean when we talk about a society undergoing change? What are the limits and the natures of change in each of these places?
Kaiser: So when Griffin and Alex asked me to come up with a title for this, I went straight to this very idea you talked about, just about revolution, “Modern Revolutions in Ancient Civilizations.” And that’s something that I thought was an interesting parallel and also a really important point of comparison. If you think about the revolution of 1952, it’s only three years when Gamal Abdel Nasser came to power in the July coup, really, essentially. We call it a coup, and we call it a revolution. And maybe the thinness of it, the fact that it was a coup and not a thorough-going societal revolution is part of what makes a difference. And also, because it was brief and sharp and took place at the top as coups do, instead of being a revolution that went really from, well, let’s call it 1928 until 1949, with the war interrupting into the middle and also creating revolutionary change itself.
But I wanted to ask you about that because people who haven’t read the book, well, some of the things that you saw and experienced led you to real reflections on the difference between the outcomes of revolution, the extent of revolution in them. So maybe I could get you to talk a little about what led you to the conclusion that China’s had been so much deeper and so much more thorough going?
Pete: Yeah. Going back in 2019, I was very much, of course, struck by all the ways in which things had changed. When I was in Fuling all of my students, almost all of them were from the countryside. China was still roughly 80% rural. And these were all folks who had grown up on farms. Many of them had illiterate parents. At that time, one out of every 12 Chinese could go to university, so as 8%, very rare. I went back to Sichuan. And 2019, and by that point, I think it’s 51%, 52% of Chinese of that age can go to the university. That’s an enormous change. And almost, whereas in Fuling too, a lot of my students, they were all from big families, often they were the youngest child because the educational opportunities had just started to open up. And also the family had invested all of the resources to get this kid to college.
And then at Sichuan, more than 80% of my students were only children. And none of them, their first semester, had grown up in the countryside. Some of them had spent time, but none of them was from proper countryside. They were all urban kids. And if they did have a sibling, they always was a younger one who was a lot younger because, of course, the law had been changed in like 2016. So some of them, you’d have a kid who was 20 in my class or 19, and they would’ve like a three or 4-year-old sibling. Right? So, it was almost like a reverse of what I had experienced in Fuling.
And the other thing, sometimes I would show them an image, and I did this in subsequent semesters, me with my students in Fuling, and then with students at Sichuan. And they would laugh because at Fuling, I was towering over my students. It looked like almost like a middle school instructor. But then Sichuan, suddenly, as I would say to them, I was like, “How did I get so much shorter?” Because suddenly, all of these kids are bigger. And then I looked it up and when I researched this, The Lancet did a study on this. And out of 200 countries, China, since 1985, China had the largest increase in height. An average 19-year-old Chinese was three and a half inches taller.
That’s a very visceral change. As a teacher, you do feel like the physicality of your students. And I remembered those really skinny, small kids in Fuling than I taught. They had chilblains from the cold in the winter because of, partly because of poor nutrition, also being in cold environments. And so this physicality, and you realize that’s a powerful thing. That’s not a small change. And I was always thinking about that earlier era. And actually during that first semester, I taught a journalism class, and sometimes we would look at sections, and I gave them a section from Rivertown at one point to read. There’s a short section where I wrote about, when we first showed up in the college in Fuling, they had the long March singing contest because it was the 60th anniversary of the Long March.
And the college in Fuling had this competition where they sang songs about the Long March. And it was kind of a funny description because I said the musical potential of the Long March is limited so they had the… everybody sang the same songs over and over again and they also had the same uniforms. One department would sing, and then they would go off stage and they’d give their shirts and stuff to the next department, and they’d go on and sing the same songs. And it was a somewhat comic thing. And I was curious how the Sichuan, how the Chuanda students would respond to this. We read in class, and one of them said, “Yeah, we just did this last week.”
And they’re like, “Yeah, because it was a 70th anniversary of the Revolution.” And so they had had a singing contest, and the guy sent me the link, and it was like, exactly, the images looked exactly the same as the Fuling days. And he is like, “They also sang the same songs. We sang the same songs.” He’s like, “But you were wrong because in your book, you said that it makes the judging difficult because it's the same song over and over. But it’s actually easier if they’re doing the same song over and over.”
Kaiser: That’s true.
Pete: “Because you can just compare.” And I was like, “Oh, that actually kind of makes sense. And maybe I should go back and change that in Rivertown.” But, so this really made me think a lot about, in one sense, so many things had changed, but in another sense, it’s the same stuff, right? It was like the same…
Kaiser: Plus ças change, plus c’est la même chose.
Pete: Yeah. It was just the same images, and they had a party cadre giving, some official giving a speech, which was the same kind of rhetoric. So, you’re constantly aware of this when you returned to replace like that.
Kaiser: I guess I was looking for more about the political culture, though. I mean, and maybe we can just… When we talked a couple years ago, you had this fantastic anecdote about elections or about local politics, really. It was an example that really illustrated how persistent, the kind of patrimonialism, the kind of client-patron relations, where that characterize traditional societies; how still ensconced that is in the Egyptian countryside versus the city of Sancha, or the village of Sancha where you lived. You had the place that you bought with my little sister, Mimi, years ago, and what was happening politically there. Can you retell that? I don’t feel like we dug into that enough and what it reveals about the differences in political culture.
Pete: Yeah. That came out of, partly from reporting in Egypt because the years I was in Egypt, the political landscape changed a lot. Before I was there. It was run by the NDP, which was National Democratic Party. That was Mubarak’s organization. After the revolution, there was open political competition, and a lot of the Islamist parties…
Kaiser: The Brotherhood, right?
Pete: Brotherhood and other, the Salafis and other Islamist parties became ascendant. And then after the coup, they were gone. And then people who supported Sisi were ascendant. As part of my research in Upper Egypt, I covered elections and local politics in this one sort of village. And it was fascinating because there was one family that had been in power before, and they were always associated with the NDP, with the National Democratic Party. And then after the revolution, they very quickly adjusted and became…. One of them actually became a Salafi. Like he grew the beard and was sort of acting like he was an Islamist, and he won the election. Then there was the coup and all the Islamists were thrown in jail and so the beard comes off. And next time he’s running, he’s talking about how great Sisi is, the guy that put all the Islamists in jail.
All throughout all of this, the same family. That’s what mattered. It was the family. It didn’t matter what was happening at the national level. They were just going to tap into whatever symbolism they needed. But the power was local. It was theirs. In contrast to what you’re talking about in Beijing, I also witnessed kind of village politics in that little village that we lived in, and one of the fascinating things about that place was that the shuji, the Party Secretary, the most important official was not from a local clan. First of all, she was a woman. And she had married in to the local clan of the Wei family, which was the most prominent family. But she’d married a not very important member of that family, wasn’t a powerful person.
But she was the one put in charge. And when you met her, you understood why, like, she was a really strong figure — very charismatic and really on top of everything. A really tough person who would the Party had recognized her talent and put her in charge. And so that just… You realize the power of institutions, right? The Party was what mattered. The locals were not using the Party for their purposes. The Party was using the locals for their purposes or outsiders, and putting in positions there. You never got to that level in Egypt. The politics was always very shallow at the top and deep at the family level.
Kaiser: There’s another real question here. And oh, by the way, I do want to come back to the fact that this person is a woman. And that’s very significant. And I’ll come back to this, but there’s nothing that I thought about when I was thinking about these two in comparison. That’s just, you think about everyone from Francis Fukuyama to, more recently, Yasheng Huang in his book have talked about the very modern nature of pre-modern China in terms of the administrative bureaucracy, right? That they had a bureaucratic administrative state, really from arguably as early as the Qing Dynasty, the Han dynasty for sure. That scaling tools like Yasheng talks about so much in his newest book, like the keju, civil service examination system ensure that that was so. There were systems by which bureaucrats were not allowed to build those sort of patron-client networks in local areas because they had to be rotated through very modern. And that, I can’t help but think, must account for some of the revolutionary work already having been done in China. What are your thoughts on that? The importance of…
Pete: You mean the revolutionary work having been done… Oh, before the-
Kaiser: Just to say that, that part didn’t need to be so revolutionized. I mean, you, yourself, you’ve talked about how, for example, in your reporting, we talk about the neighborhood committees and how they’re really kind of old wine in new bottles, right?
Pete: Mm-Hmm.
Kaiser: They’re reincarnation of the Baojia system.
Pete: Yeah, it goes back to the Ming.
Kaiser: The Ming or the Song even.
Pete: Song. Yeah. No, those traditions, it makes a difference, right? Because People become used to functioning within structures, and not only used to it, but that’s what they expect, right? And so it’s very easy to adapt those systems to whatever you’re doing in a new sense. Yeah.
Kaiser: Yeah. I mean, I guess there’s not much more to say to that except to point it out. But there’s another thing that you made. Pete gave a talk yesterday, and I’m sure a lot of you were here. One of the things that he pointed out was, I mean, we’ve all taken political science and sociology classes or history classes when we talk about one of the great effects of the Industrial Revolution was how moving to the cities, urbanization and factory work itself broke down so many of the vertical structures that dominated society in the village, right? So, suddenly, you were making horizontal connections among peers in the city, in the workplace, and things like that. In fact, your wife, Leslie, wrote this fantastic book — Factory Girls — which is about that kind of modernizing effect of leaving the… follows women who leave the village, come to the factory cities of Southern Guangdong Province and become very modern in a lot of… It’s a kind of microcosm of that whole experience.
And you told this fascinating story about that and these two twins that you knew in Egypt who had also, one of them is really interesting, twins, two women, one of them who had gone to the big city and another who hadn’t. But what was the result there?
Pete: Yeah. I reported for a long time on, actually, it was a garbage man in my neighborhood who lived in one of the informal areas of Cairo. And I wrote a lot about his life, got to know him well, and visited his family. And one time we were visiting his sort of ancestral village in upper Egypt, and we stopped by to see his aunt. And so his aunt was an identical twin of his mother, who I — yeah, so these were identical twins who grew up in his village in upper Egypt. And one of them moved with her husband to Cairo, like it was 30, 35 years earlier. So, basically, her adulthood had been there, and the other one stayed in the village. And what was really amazing was that they dressed the same way, they both wore the same style of hijab of the headscarf. They were both equally religious. There was no real economic difference. Actually, the one who had gone to Cairo, like most people in Cairo, worked in the informal economy. She wasn’t part of a factory or anything. Just different little jobs over the years. No difference in educational level.
And when I saw that, I was just struck, like, if you had done this in China and had somebody who stayed in the village, and a twin went off to Shenzhen or something, after 30 years, the differences… I mean, I see this with my students. Like I have a student named Willie, who was that youngest sibling who got educated, and his two older siblings did not. And now Willie makes $100,000 a year, and he’s got a bunch of apartments and cars. And he’s very well dressed. He’s got great jobs, and his brothers are laborers. Their outcomes are completely different because of that step. But in Egypt, there wasn’t anything doing that to those people. When she comes to Cairo, she’s not being institutionalized in the sense of working for a factory or learning structures. She’s just working in an informal economy. Another phrase I even using the book is when migrants went to the cities in China, they became city people. The city turned them into city people. When migrants in Egypt went to Cairo, they turned Cairo into a village, which is really, it’s a joke people would say. It’s like it’s the biggest village in the world or something. And it was true, two thirds of the people lived in informal housing, and the majority worked in the informal economy.
Kaiser: What is the percentage of Egypt’s GDP that comes from manufacturing?
Pete: It’s 15.
Kaiser: 15, one-five.
Pete: One-five, yeah.
Kaiser: And comparably in China?
Pete: In China, it was over 30 for 30 years. It dipped now to maybe 27, I think, or something like that. But it was over 30 for 30 years.
Kaiser: But because so much more of it is from the more modern service sector, not because…
Pete: Yeah.
Kaiser: Right. Agriculture-
Pete: Until you’ve sort of lived in both these places, you really can’t grasp what that difference means. And also that’s 15% of a pretty weak GDP, right? I mean, China is 30% of what became a fairly strong GDP. But just the way that these people, in China, when they go to factories and they learn how to live by the clock, they learn to come on time, they learn to do certain tasks. I mean, one of my former students went to Shanghai and worked in factories, and eventually, he kind of got educated on the side, and he worked for a factory that made phones for Motorola, and they got him on something called Six Sigma, which is like a manufacturing process you write. And so this is like…
Kaiser: Quality control.
Pete: Quality control that became a big deal in the U.S. And then they started bringing it to China, and they trained him and 20 people in his factory to teach this and to implement it. And he said, before they did this, people didn’t really know how to do processes. Like how to have protocols labeled for workers to look at, to know what they’re supposed to do, how to train people. It was all informal he said before they got this. And they have a statistic, I think it’s called PPM or something like this, parts per million, which is how many errors you’re making in manufacturing. And his factory, it was 5,000 PPM. And they implemented this. And within a year, it was down to 20. He became an evangelist for this.
He became a consultant. He would go to other factories implementing this manufacturing strategy, right? And as Americans, we always think that China like taking our ideas or the competition, but for him, it was really, this was like a human rights issue. One of his brothers died on the factory floor. He was electrocuted because of the way that many people were in the early part of that economic era. And so he felt this is really important. This is a fundamentally important American idea, and I want to spread this. And then he was a fascinating case. I write about him in my new book because, of course, he was trained first by the Peace Corps. I was a teacher when Adam Meyer was a teacher by the U.S. government, and then he was trained by Motorola in American corporations. You could kind of see these two different sides of the American experience influencing this kid who still has never been to the United States, but it became part of his life.
But yeah. To grasp, you have to see those stories to understand what it means for people to become parts of systems and institutions. But again, a lot of outside of Egypt’s control. Like, look how big China is. If a kid, he goes to Shanghai, he’s not going back to Sichuan very often. In Egypt, I think it’s like two thirds of the people live within three hours of Cairo. It’s not that big of a country, and it’s pretty much all along the Nile. And the highways are pretty good. So, it’s harder to break those village structures. Leslie wrote about going with those girls back to the villages. And in China, they would get very frustrated because the people are still doing things the old way. They’re trying to teach them to throw stuff in a waste basket and behave like city people, and then they would finally just throw up their hands and go back. They kind of washed their hands off it. But in Egypt, it’s really hard to do that. It’s hard for a number of reasons to break that.
Kaiser: It just occurred to me that those of us who studied Chinese, of a certain age, invariably read this essay, a very famous essay by 胡适 Hú Shì called 《差不多先生》Chàbùduō xiānshēng. Anyone remember Chabuduo xiansheng? Yeah. I see a lot of hands up. Six Sigma, this sort of evangelism of elimination of error, the death of Chabuduo, that is so inherent in the process of this kind of modernity, huh? Yeah. Really interesting. Egypt, as is very clear from your book, Chabuduo is alive and well.
Pete: Yeah. No, it’s the informal rules there and the family rules. There’s no Party that’s in charge, and the military is the strongest institution, but it’s not going down to the village level and changing the way people live.
Kaiser: For the non-Mandarin speakers, the chabuduo is a Chinese expression, it’s like, eh, good enough. So, it’s like, Mr. Good Enough. Yeah, he was the bane of Hu Shi, who was, of course, one of the great leading luminaries of the Chinese Enlightenment. I want to get back to women, which I think is a really, really important topic here. And I want to talk about the gigantic difference between the roles that women play in China versus Egypt. And I want to look at it in a second. You talk to a lot of these Chinese business people, often from places like Wenzhou, very, very sort of hardheaded, pragmatic people. They’re not big ideas people, but one area where you could draw them out, it seems, and where they would talk about, when do you ask them about what they think accounts for the differences, one thing they seem to have lit on is gender roles. Can you talk about what were some of the responses? I mean, there was one gentleman in particular, I can’t remember which one, but one of the lingerie guys, I think, right?
Pete: Yeah. No, his comment was, when I said, “What does Egypt need to do?” And he is like, “They have to raise the status of women.” And this was a guy with fifth grade education. He’s not a political theorist. He was just doing business in Upper Egypt. But he said, “The women don’t work and they need… look at, look at my wife. Look at my daughter. I couldn’t run my business without my wife. My daughter runs the shop for us. It’s very important." And you would see other things. I also spent time with Chinese manufacturers in Egypt. So they were trying to set up factories, which was very hard. It was very hard for them to hire workers because you couldn’t have workers live in the dormitory the way they would in China so you couldn’t do ships around the clock.
The work, the families wouldn’t let the girls do that. But also the type, when women worked in Egypt, what they were usually doing, and Leslie’s writing more about this, but the ones that I was observing were doing the same thing, which is women would work in order to save some money to buy what they call the gehaz, which is like their dowry.
Kaiser: Trousseau, right?
Pete: Yeah, The trousseau, the stuff they need to get married. It’s a very important part of the Egyptian tradition. And so they would work at the factory until they’ve done that and then they go back and get married, basically. And one of the, like on Chinese factory, owners come to me, he’s like because he had had factories in China before he went to Egypt. He’s like, “When I was in China, all those women who worked for me, they left the village because they wanted to escape. They just wanted to get out.” He said, “They didn’t have any real ideas, they just wanted out. And then they got to the factory and they started working. They met other people, and then they got ideas as they worked.” And they would have things that they wanted to do, and they learned to do. He’s like, “Here, they’re not trying to escape. They want to go back. They want to make the money, get the gehaz, and then go back and get married in return.”
And study after study has shown that there was all their motivations, that it isn’t to break free of the family. It’s actually to solidify your position in the family. Because If you have a good gehaz, you’re more likely to get married and your husband treats you better if you’ve brought all of these things to the union.
Kaiser: Peter, one thing that I’ve often asked guests on this show, and I think I’m asking you because I think you do thread this needle so very well, is when you’re thinking about writing about China, on the one hand, it’s blindingly obvious that history still exerts tremendous inertia. That tradition still has a substantial impact on thinking, on behavior. At the same time, and maybe the other side of the coin is that it’s also blindingly obvious that there has been massive change. And trying to write about China in a way that doesn’t fall into this trap of essentialism, where you’re invoking this unchanging China isn’t always easy. I mean, we’re still treated routinely to writing that suggests, for example, that China is hellbent on recreating the old imperial tributary system in its foreign relations.
Or insists that we must understand the Communist Party as just another dynasty, which, to me, strikes, it’s nonsense. Or we must understand this Warring States-era philosopher who lived 2,300 years ago in order to understand Xi Jinping today, which strikes me as ludicrous if you were to transpose that into the key of the West. It’s like Aristophanes is important if you want to understand Bill Clinton or something. I mean, it would be ludicrous. So there’s the sort of essentialism, but at the same time, it’s foolish to ignore. How do you calibrate that? How do you get that right?
Pete: I mean, I think it’s different for different topics. I mean, there are definitely things that I think don’t fall into old patterns. I mean, if you look at all of the students here and think about, there’s a number of students from China here, and the number of people who have been studying overseas in the last 15, 20 years. I don’t think there’s really a precedent for that. I don’t think we can put that into some old model and say, this means X or Y. We don’t know where that goes. There’s a lot of things like that in China.
Kaiser: But it’s just like those students that went to Japan.
Pete: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it is important to understand that there are things that are totally different and shaking things up and will continue. I’m often struck by the echoes, not just like historical, but even when I talk about those students I taught in Fuling, who are now… they were farm kids. They were nongmin when they came to the class, and they looked like nongmin, and then they changed, right? And they’re totally…
Kaiser: Nongmin is peasants or farmers, right?
Pete: They’re totally urban people now. They’re very much middle class. They’re relatively prosperous, have stable jobs. Their kids are getting well educated. But it was interesting when I surveyed them, I asked them, what’s your social class? Very few of them said middle class. The numbers may be bogus. Maybe like 20% or 15%. Almost always they would say lower class. Like that student Willie who was making like a hundred thousand dollars a year or something, he said low class… lower class which is definitely not true. But that echo is there, like, I think the prosperity-
Kaiser: Echo of humility and modesty.
Pete: Not just that. I think they still see themselves in certain ways, you know? I felt like this with the middle class when I was there this last time. They don’t feel the way middle class feels in America. They haven’t been there that long. And also they don’t take it for granted, I think, which I think in America you often do. There’s a sense of entitlement, I think, in America. There’s the way the people in China continue to push, right? I mean, the sort of almost like this fear that your child’s going to fall behind, which is so intense, I think there’s an echo of that from this previous gen. I mean, I think it’s probably not totally necessary, right? But there is this need to strive that I think comes from the memory of what it was like not that long ago when people weren’t prosperous.
Kaiser: I think this is, every time I ask you one of these questions and you bring it down to the level of the things you know and the individuals. That is, I think, a source of the great strength in your analysis in your writing is that you never try to make these grand lofty generalizations, but you’d rather bring it back to the particular-
Pete: Yeah. I’m not a very intellectual person in a way. So it’s just like,
Kaiser: Ha!
Pete: Honestly, like I just observe. I never liked theory very much. I was never somebody who was interested very much in theory. I like to observe what people do and the way they behave and interact and trying to figure out motivations and how they see their lives.
Kaiser: Yeah. In fact, I mean, when you’ve talked about your approach to writing, I think you started off writing fiction, and there was something that you said once. Peter and I had the privilege of speaking to a really great group from the American Council Learned societies, I think it was maybe 30 people watching, and 270 people since then have watched the goddamnYouTube video. It’s really aggravating. So I’m going to repeat some of the things that we said since nobody else heard it anyway, only nobody in this room. But one of the things you talked about was in your approach to writing, you center on place, and person.
Pete: Yeah, I mean, it tended to be what brought me to a story as well. I was trained as a fiction writer. That was my major in college. I was in English and creative writing at Princeton. I didn’t do any journalism or nonfiction there until the very end when I took a class by John McPhee. So, most time I was taking fiction, I studied with Joyce Carol Oates and Russell Banks and some great fiction writers.
Kaiser: I love Russell Banks.
Pete: Yeah. So I spent all my time thinking about short stories and novels, and that’s what I wanted to do. And I think in some ways that does shape my work as a journalist in the sense that what attracts me to a story is almost always character replace. Pretty much never theme or topic or issue. Certainly not issue.
Kaiser: What’s the danger of starting with issue or topic?
Pete: Yeah. Then it can be reductive, right? Or then the people are just instruments to show this issue. I’d like to start with the people, and then the issue comes in, right? So, I talk about those lingerie dealers in Egypt, and it very quickly gets into China, and China and Egypt and what Chinese people view this place that they’re in and also issues of gender. Like all that stuff comes in naturally. But I didn’t have to start there. I can start with this individual and what brought him here and then what brought her here and what they’re doing. So I think that’s a fiction writer’s instinct that…
Kaiser: You didn’t even seek out these lingerie merchants either. It was entirely serendipitous. You drove down to a town called Malawi, because this museum had been blown up and looted, and you wanted to cover that. But then standing outside by this bombed car...
Pete: Yeah, no, it was just a conversation with people…
Kaiser: Hey, there’s a Chinese guy.
Pete: The Egyptians told me there was a Chinese guy in the market, and I went in there, and sure enough, there was this guy and he’s selling lingerie, and that’s how that whole project started. But again, not from an issue, and not even from Chinese in Egypt. It is from meeting this person, and just meeting this guy. He’s like a character out of Conrad or V. S. Naipaul, like A Bend in the River, right? I think that story begins with a reference to A Bend in the River as kind of an illusion to Naipaul because you can’t be more of an outsider than a Chinese guy selling lingerie in Malawi, Egypt. I mean, he is really out there. Him and his wife are just completely out there. And that’s a fascinating character, right? And so that’s where I’m starting from. That’s the story that is the beginning story, and I want to create that mood and that sense.
Kaiser: I think you’ve been one of the most effective critics of certain structural issues at the heart of foreign correspondence, especially when you apply it to a country [like China], and I’m sure Egypt is the same. But you tell a story and you told, I think it was a fantastic story yesterday in your talk, but I’ve heard it before about your own first arriving as a Peace Corps volunteer, teaching English, and being given one of the textbooks, which I have it written down here, it’s called… what’s it called here?
Pete: Survey of Britain.
Kaiser: Survey of Britain and America with great lines like, “the Constitution of 1787 established a dictatorship of the American bourgeoisie. And it had or this long litany of American social problems, a long litany of actual crimes that had been committed on American college campuses.” Talk about what happened in your mind and how that led you to the approach you have and to the critique you now have about some aspects of foreign correspondence.
Pete: Yeah, I mean, these were just decontextualized stories that were taken out of American media and then put in front of young Chinese. And so, they were true, but they weren’t necessarily representative or proportional. And so it kind of confuses people, right? I mean, it is information, it’s true information, but true information can be misleading if it’s not with other context. And I felt that very much, and we were in a pretty remote place, and the students there didn’t have a lot of other sources of information. So it was hard to talk them through some of these things. Like, yeah, this does happen in America, but it doesn’t mean this is the first thing that happens, or the most important thing. That made me think, once I started writing, after leaving the Peace Corps, that I didn’t want to do that on the other side. I didn’t want to take weird or unrepresented bits of China and put them in front of Americans who might not have context. It’s hard, and I sympathize with journalists because they have limited space and you’re trying to convey this place. And also your editors get bored if it’s not a flashy story, you know?
Kaiser: That’s right. I mean, you’re not going to write about the bridges that didn’t collapse.
Pete: Yeah. And to be frank, you don’t get awards for those kind of things either. It’s a lot easier at The New Yorker, that was an advantage. Like I do have these long stories and they do have patience for sort of quirky topics that go deep, and that allows you to get the context. But it is really important to try to convey that. I think that’s the hardest thing about being a foreign correspondent. And a lot of the structures of the newspapers, the structures of editorial systems work against good coverage in a lot of ways, I think.
Kaiser: And they work for great coverage domestically. I mean, I am very, very glad of the adversarial nature of journalism in America because it produces some really great… because it does ferret out malfeasance, you know?
Pete: Yeah. No, you can’t solve problems in China the same way. You do, of course, want to convey the things in China that are wrong in the things that even if you can’t solve them, it’s still important to acknowledge these things and to acknowledge human rights issues. It just has to be in the right kind of proportion.
Kaiser: Everything you’ve just said — true for Egypt, too?
Pete: Yeah. I mean, yeah, no, I think it’s the same. I mean, Egypt is just not being covered in that way. I see very little about Egypt in general now. I don’t really know why, but there’s not much about it. I mean, there is now with Gaza, but not Egypt, most of Egypt.
Kaiser: Obviously. Yeah, and they’re also not the great enemy somehow. They’re not the existent enemy.
Pete: I mean, I often think, yeah, they’re not, Egypt’s not an enemy, right? So, imagine if you had an American senator who had been taking gold bars from China, right? I mean, what kind of story would that be? Is they found out this senator had taken a bunch of gold bars and other bribe…
Kaiser: Bob Menendez.
Pete: … from the Chinese, but the fact that he’d done it from Egypt, it’s like hardly a story, right? I mean, it’s a story, but people would be going ballistic if Chinese were doing that.
Kaiser: Pete, you have contrasted the sort of welcome you’ve gotten as an interloper covering Egypt and China. In China, you’ve described the welcome as well, very welcoming, right? People didn’t care that you didn’t have an academic background in China. You were really sort of, I mean, everyone opened up to you. Everyone was really happy to give you, accommodated, to share sources with you, to do everything, right? That wasn’t the reception you had in Egypt. Why? Why do you think that is? And then talk about the reception you had among, what are we talking about? Egyptologists or Middle East experts, or what?
Pete: Yeah, I mean, I guess looking at China first, I mean I think if I had published things about China earlier, the reception wouldn’t have been as positive like right when I wrote Rivertown, right at that moment, like if I was writing about Fuling, and it appeared immediately in Chinese, I think. And actually when I wrote that book, I was very concerned that local… I thought locals wouldn’t like it. I described, look, poverty and, and remoteness of this place. I had to write that. But people in China traditionally were very sensitive about this when it came from foreigners.
Kaiser: You’re not talking about so much the Chinese reception, which we all know. Everyone knows him in China now-
Pete:: No, but I’m saying I think it would’ve been negative then. Like, for example, I had a student, Emily, who did read that book when it was in draft form very early, and she sent periodic responses while she was reading. And it was a very emotional process. Like one day she would write, she was actually sending faxes, she was working in Shenzhen in an office, and she would send a fax, and she’s like, “This is really funny. I like reading this.” And then the next day she’s like, “I feel terrible about my hometown is so dirty and so poor. I think nobody’s going to like Fuling when they read this book.” And so her responses were really varied, and she was a very open student, right? And I got those responses.
I felt like people were probably not going to like this. If her feelings are mixed, then everybody’s, I think, more likely to be negative. But the book didn’t come out till about 10 years later, and actually about 10 years later, she reread it and she sent a letter to me, and she said, "After this time, it’s all so charming. It brings back those memories. Thank you for recording this.” So I think by the time stuff started to appear in China, people’s lives had changed quite dramatically. And they were nostalgic about this earlier period. And reading about poverty that you’ve surpassed or that you’ve come out of is not the same as reading about poverty that you’re currently suffering from, right? And so I think that response was more generous than it had been for previous generations of China writers, for example, like Pearl S. Buck was attacked by Chinese intellectuals, even though I think her stuff was really knowledgeable and was really accurate.
And she knew China very well. Lived most of her adult life there and spoke the language beautifully. But people didn’t like it. And I think they couldn’t deal with it. But by the time my stuff was appearing in Chinese, I think people were at a different stage. And Egypt was not there. I mean, the Egyptians, they’re not comfortable with where they are in the world and not comfortable with where they’re in the society. They don’t like an outsider coming in and talking to them. I also did feel like people trained in Middle Eastern studies are, I think they’re more ideological, in my opinion. They were closed to outsiders. But there’s more theory that’s narrow. I just think Orientalism to some degree is like such a faith and such a dogma in those fields that sometimes it can work against good thinking. And sometimes it becomes something that people fear and they don’t want to get labeled a certain way.
There were some issues, like it amazed me when I got to Egypt and realized, and started learning Arabic, that the Egyptian Arabic, if Sisi gives a speech, he speaks in Egyptian Arabic. And when it’s quoted in the newspaper, it’s translated into Farsi, into classical Arabic, like Naguib Mahfouz, those books that people know, like Palace Walk, the Nobel Prize winner, his characters are speaking in ways that no Egyptian would ever speak. It’s like Wen-Yen or Guwen, and it’s because they have not had the language revolution.
Kaiser: Classical Chinese, right?
Pete: It’s classical Chinese. You can’t write, there is no orthography for spoken Egyptian. But for many years, anybody who brings this up as a potential problem for education, a potential problem for political participation, just for basic thought, you get labeled as an orientalist. Like Edward Said viciously attacked a woman named Lela Ahmed who suggested that this is a tradition that needs to change. Like it changed with the Baguwen movement, like it changed in Greece, like it changed in Turkey, like it changed all over Europe. And that to me was an amazing issue that I had not seen people write about that. It’s like at the language level. Like when the garbage man who worked in my neighborhood who was illiterate, if he wanted to learn to write Arabic, he first had to learn Farsi, which is like classical Arabic. So he wasn’t going to do it. It’s hard, right?
Kaiser: Yeah.
Pete And that to me is a basic issue, right? But people don’t look at it in a very… I don’t know, they weren’t going to compare it with China. They didn’t like doing that either. But yeah, so I found it a little bit rigid, basically, some of the response to these things.
Kaiser (48:58): Speaking about academic theory and the rigidity of it, another thing that you talked about during our ACLS session, I thought it was really great, you were asked about how do we bust all this knowledge out of the ivory tower and make it more accessible to people? And your answer really surprised, but also, frankly, delighted me, you said, “They need to learn to write better.” Okay, no offense to the academics, and I know there are plenty of you here. Okay, maybe some offense, but I mean, I have a certain allergy to academese writing and it bothers me, but maybe it’s not as virulent as your reaction to it.
Pete: Yeah, I mean, it’s kind of what took me. I was originally thinking of being an English professor and writing fiction on the side. And after starting graduate school at Oxford, I decided I didn’t want to do that. But one of the reasons was I didn’t like the way that you had to write for most scholarly articles. And I felt like it’s especially stark if you’re doing literature because you read this beautiful book and then you write this kind of stilted thing. And to me, it is like, I just couldn’t do that. It didn’t feel right. And also, I had the experience of having very good writing teachers and I could see the difference it made. Writers are not born. I think maybe there’s some gift, but that’s not the main thing. The main thing is, is how you’re trained and how you learn to improve. I mean, when I went to Princeton, I came out of a big public school in Missouri. They had a strong creative writing program at Princeton. You had to apply to get into the fiction class. And I was rejected three straight times. So, three semesters in a row, I applied to just take the lowest-level creative writing class, and I could not get into that class.
Kaiser: There’s hope for all of us. You too can be a Peter Hessler.
Pete: And then once you’re in the classes, I mean, there were things that the teachers taught us that were really useful, and often quite technical, and so it did made a big difference, right? So I do believe in that, and I think there should be more specific training in writing. It’s not that it’s not impossible to do.
Kaiser: Yeah. It’s weird. I work in editorial room, or I did until very recently, and then I think we teach you — this is a billboard, this is a nut graph. This is a set piece. I mean, we know how to do these things, right? I mean, it shouldn’t be that hard. A good editor on fly can really teach you a lot about writing as well.
Pete: Yeah. But it really helps to have somebody get to you at the undergraduate level, I think. And to me, that made a big difference because I had that training before I went into the Peace Corps. And so, even though I hadn’t gone to graduate school, or I hadn’t been… I’d gone to two years at Oxford, but I hadn’t done a PhD or anything like that. I did have these very important foundational lessons from the writing instructors at Princeton. And that allowed me to process what I was doing, observing in Fuling and to turn it into what became Rivertown.
Kaiser: Yeah. One of the things that, one of the great things that came out of your experience in Rivertown is you have this group of a hundred individual students with whom you are still in touch a quarter of a century later. This is remarkable. This represents, I think, a kind of longitudinal cohort study. And it’s being done not just quantitatively with occasional sort of survey questions on a scale of one to 10, but also qualitatively. And I think more importantly, qualitatively, where you meet with them, you talk with them, you’re on WeChat with them, you write to them. And this, look, we’re in the middle of the worst U.S.-China downturn since God knows when. And I feel like the perspectives of ordinary Chinese people are not cutting through, we’re not breaking through. And I’m really counting on you to help surface those voices and make them... But give us a preview, talk a little bit, even if impressionistically, about the qualitative and maybe some of the quantitative as well, of where they are and why they see how we’ve gotten to where we are, their attitudes toward the United States right now and toward the situation we fight ourselves in.
Pete: I mean, I did notice with those students when we’ve done surveys and a couple times when I’ve asked questions about the United States, I can tell that they’re probably more positive about the U.S. than the average person in their position would be because of contact with me and Adam, which is not insignificant. And somebody who’s wondering about the value of the Peace Corps, you think about that, these are people who remember this experience that they had with these American teachers, and it meant something to them. And it does affect their… I remember a series of surveys when I talked about their impressions of different countries, and their view of America, I could tell was much better than it should be, basically, for people of their age and where they are in China.
You do notice things like that. But no, it’s a great combination because… And I was lucky because I went back to China in 1999 which was only a year after I left the Peace Corps, less than a year after. And so that allowed me to keep these contacts immediately. And in those days, people didn’t have WeChat, they didn’t have phones. They weren’t on email. It was all paper letters. I still have files full of this, full of these letters that were sent to me back when I was in Beijing. And they wrote, they were in their early 20s, and they were trying to figure out new lives. And so they wrote these really long letters about what they’re thinking, what they’re going through. And that sort of set also a foundation for our conversation.
Now, the students I taught in Sichuan, I just did my first survey with them, the student I taught from 2019 to 2021. And that’s also been an amazing experience. I got, I think, 47 responses. And they’re at that stage where they’ve got their lives in front of them and they’re processing a lot. And they wrote these beautiful long responses to questions I asked. But one of the big differences is I’m getting these from Berlin, from Berkeley, from all over the world.
Kaiser: From Duke.
Pete: Yeah. Well, there’s one here in Duke. And so it’s a different generation, but it’s the same idea, I think. And yeah, when you have a conversation over that length of time, you become comfortable with each other. And while I think there is some selection bias, like these are my students and that’s going to influence how they respond and who they are, you have a high level of trust which is important too that I feel like they’re willing to answer things honestly. Now I have these two cohorts and you notice differences, right? When you do them. Like, I mean, when I was in Chuanda, I remember there was a class, I used to try to set up debates in the class. And one year I was thinking about debating — should gay marriage be legal in China? Which I thought, I don’t know, this might be too tricky of a topic, so maybe I’ll give it to them in a survey first.
So, I kind of asked the students, and I would often do surveys in class, and I asked them that question, and it was like 80% of them said yes. So I decided not to do the debate because it wasn’t competitive, like, it just wasn’t a big issue for them, for these younger people.
Kaiser: This was Chengdu, right?
Pete: It’s Chengdu, but, of course, the kids are from all over.
Kaiser: It’s called Gaydu.
Pete: Yeah. But these are, these are students from all over China, not just Sichuanese. But then I asked the same question to my Fuling cohort, and it was the exact opposite. It was…
Kaiser: Who do you think you’re fooling?
Pete: … 80% against gay marriage. And comments, like, “That’s disgusting. I would never want my child to do that.” The generational difference is really stark. And the students at Chuanda would often say, “This is something I can’t talk with my parents about. Like, they don’t understand this. They don’t understand why.” So you notice these differences, and that’s also something that I’m always processing and thinking about.
Kaiser: So, Pete, is there a comparable group or even a few individuals who you’re in that kind of communication with from your Cairo days? I mean, it’s almost been, what? 10, it’s getting on 10 years now.
Pete: Yeah. It’s been more than 10 years since I went there. I went there in 2011.
Kaiser: 2011. And you were there for three years?
Pete: And yeah, an answer to your question, no, there’s not. I actually wanted to, when I got there, I wanted to find a way to teach part-time or to do something with the university, and I could make no headway. And in some ways, that reflects the weakness of the educational. So, the universities are really chaotic there. It was very hard to get anybody interested. And so I didn’t set up the same kind of thing there. I mean, it’s one advantage of having taught in China. And as a journalist, you’re usually so separate from society. And I went back for multiple reasons as a teacher, but that was one reason. I think sometimes it’s nice to be attached to an institution. It could be a hassle because they’re hard to deal with often in China, but you learn a lot that way. And it gives you a different perspective. And the remove that journalists always have, the distance can be a problem. You’re not really integrated in some way into society. And I wanted to step into a different role for a bit to kind of counter that journalistic distance.
Kaiser: Pete, give us a preview of the next book. It’s called Other Rivers, is that right? And it comes out when?
Pete: I think it’s July.
Kaiser: In July 2024.
Pete: Yeah.
Kaiser: Oh, fantastic. I can’t wait galley copy. You got to send me one when it comes out. But give us a preview. What do we expect in it?
Pete: Yeah, I mean, I guess there’s really four things that are part of it. One is what it was like to go back and teach and to teach young people today. I mean, some of the comments I made today about teaching at SiChuan and things I observed with young people now. And it’s also about reconnecting with those Fuling students and seeing how they’re describing how their lives have changed. Like, the student who did the Six Sigma, he’s one of the people I write about in a lot of depth. It’s also about having had children in public school in Chengdu. My daughters entered the third grade there and what that was like to be a parent. There’s education runs. Different levels of education are really important in this book. And then the last part of it is we were there in the pandemic so that was the unexpected thing.
We arrived there in August of 2019, and I just finished the first semester. Our daughters had just kind of gotten comfortable in the school, and then the pandemic hit. So I do write about the pandemic as well. It’s definitely not a pandemic book, but I couldn’t write that book without describing when it happened. The pandemic told us a lot about China. It tells us a lot about structures and things. And of course, the way my students reacted to that, the way the girls’ school reacted was interesting and helped me understand better.
Kaiser: One thing about all your work is a river always runs through it for some reason. What is with you and riparian themes?
Pete: No, actually, I took that title from Steinbeck. That was the title that he thought about for East of Eden. And he didn’t use it. I thought, Other Rivers, and I thought, I kind of like that. That’s a nice title, so I’ll just grab it. But yeah, I don’t know. Not only have do I live near a river, but I guess very few people have done this, but three times in my life I’ve lived next to rivers that run North. So I don’t know.
Kaiser: They run North.
Pete: The Nile. The Wujiang in Fuling that goes into the Yangtze, and then the Uncompahgre River in Colorado, which is right next to our house, basically.
Kaiser: All right. I mean, the kind of contrarian riparian.
Pete: Yeah. That’s a terrible title. And I’m not going to use that.
Kaiser: That’s what your new epithet is — Pete Hessler, contrarian riparian.
Pete: I mean, I talked about that because when I was in in Fuling, one of the thing is when I wrote Rivertown was I knew that people in Fuling would also not be that thrilled about the title because nobody called Fuling Jiangcheng. Where is Jiangcheng? Does anybody know? What’s Jiangcheng?
Kaiser: Yeah, I mean Chongqing is…
PeteNo, it’s Wuhan.
Kaiser: Oh, Wuhan is, right.
Pete: Wuhan is Jiangcheng, right.
Kaiser: Shancheng is Chongqing.
Pete: Yeah, Chenchong is Chongqing. I mean, Li Bai like named it.
Kaiser: Damn it, I just lost Chong quiz.
Pete: So I knew that people in Fuling would not like, but it was like, in Fuling, it was actually called [Chinese 1:01:06]. So the Little Mountain City, which was, could be a terrible title in English. Yeah. But it’s true. When I went to Wuhan, people were saying, “Did you know we’re really the one that’s called Jiangcheng?”
Kaiser: I was really hoping to keep Egypt and China always sort of, at least, if not in frame, at least in the same scene here. We drifted a little bit down the river away from Egypt. But that’s okay. But I think the Egypt work is really important here. I think, without setting out to do so, also Pete has contributed invariably to our understanding of the fascinating and hugely consequential story of China in Africa, China, in the global south at this level of, again, individual human beings and their unique stories. What a tremendous pleasure it has been. Speaking with you, Pete. Let’s do recommendations before we wrap up, shall we? Pete, do you have something you want to recommend for our Sinica listeners and for the Duke audience here?
Pete: Yeah, I guess, I mean, I would just give a couple books that I’ve been reading recently. Recently, and my daughters have been reading these as well, reading the Gerald Durrell, a writer that used to be read a lot more. But he wrote, I think it’s called My Family and Other Animals is one of the books. But he wrote a series of three books about living in Corfu with this kind of quirky family. They’re nonfiction. And his brother was Lawrence Durrell.
Kaiser: Yeah, I was going to say.
Pete: Yeah. So it’s an interest, it’s a fascinating…
Kaiser: The Alexandria Quartet. Yeah.
Pete: Yeah, the Alexander Quartet. I would reckon in all these books. The Alexandria Quartet I read when I was in Egypt, and it’s beautifully written.
Kaiser: Oh, God, it’s gorgeous.
Pete: And just, I mean, not really my writing style. It’s very, descriptive and very lush, but I just love-
Kaiser: More like my writing so...
Pete: So, I would recommend both of those authors. And they’re kind of an interesting pair because they came out of this unusual family where the father had died young, and they had sort of a scattered education, but they produced these amazing two writers.
Kaiser: Oh, fantastic. Great recommendation. I’m also going to recommend a book. I’m currently reading Kenneth W. Harl’s book, Empires of the Steppes: A History of The Nomadic Tribes Who Shaped Civilization. I’m sure that it’s named sort of deliberately after Grousset’s monumental work Empire of the Steppes. Anyway, it is great. It’s a synthesis of so much of the more recent scholarship on the pastoral nomads of the great Eurasian grasslands. And it weaves together archeology, sort of yeah, I think it’s not philology. Yeah, really philology, and sort of study of languages and the Proto-Indo-Europeans and how the different language groups spread out, genetics, anthropology. It’s fantastic. It’s really written in a very, very, very good lucid approachable style. Harl, he’s at Tulane. He’s a classicist. He does Greece and Rome primarily.
And he has clearly done his homework with all the secondary materials. He has a long list of people he thinks who’s sort of who’s who of people who are working on Central Asia. So, it checks out. It’s very, very good. The results are very impressive. So, let’s hear it one more time for my fantastic guest today, Peter Hessler. All right.
Audience: Woo.
Kaiser: I want to thank each and every one of you for coming today. I’m going to go ahead and open up the floor for questions and answers now. We have a couple of microphones and Alex and Griffin have them there. If you would just raise your hand, tell us quickly who you are. And by the way, a question ends with a question mark, and we like them if they’re nice and brief. And if there’s only one question mark in the question, that’s even better. So, just ask one question each so we get more people. And if it’s a comment, I’m going to say, “I’ll take that as a comment,” and move on.
Mark: A longtime fan of your writing. I once asked you a question at the Beijing Bookworm Festival many years ago. I’m curious about the counting. I was recently reading your article about your daughter, The Double Education, and there’s a lot of quantification of the number of WeChat messages, that sort of thing. Has that come to you naturally? Is that sort of a thing that you do in your life? Or is it something that you developed as a writing tool?
Pete: It sounds like a spectrum question, I guess, that I’m… Yeah. It’s a writing tool. It’s details, right? I mean, details really matter. I mean; actually, I’m not a numbers person at all. I was fine at math as a kid, but it wasn’t my thing. But as a writer, yeah, the details are so important, like, to get specifics. And by the time I was in Chengdu and my daughters were in school, and I was thinking about writing about it, I’m very much aware of this. And so when I keep track of things, like I would count those… I talked, I think there’s one story that ends with, like, I got 1,376 messages about children’s body temperatures that month or something because The, the parents had to take their temperatures, and you send it out on these crazy longgie chats that you’d have.
Yeah, the numbers were…If I said I got a ton of messages, it doesn’t mean the same thing. So I try to keep track of things like that. And after you’ve written for a while, you learn to recognize these details, and you’re like, "Okay, let’s get that down." And actually, a lot of times I record them even in ways so I can send it to the fact-checker because I know the next thing I’m going to hear is the New Yorker’s going to say, “How do you know it’s exactly…” So now I got to get that recorded in a way that they can verify. So yeah, your research routines change as you’re sort of professional, I guess.
Kaiser: Mark has just modeled for us the perfect kind of question. So, let’s keep it to that. All right, Griffin. Oh, and say who you are.
Ansel: Hi, my name is Ansel. I live just down the street. I’m a big fan of your writing and of the Sinica Podcast.
Kaiser: Thanks.
Ansel: You mentioned speaking with some of your Chinese students about gay marriage, and in The Buried, you wrote about your relationship with an acquaintance or/and a friend. A friend who is a queer Egyptian man. My question is, what has your experience been with people in China and gay communities and the spaces that those communities occupy?
Kaiser: Another model question.
Pete: Yeah, I mean, it’s funny because we often talked about this in the Peace Corps. Like, we had students that you sort of thought were probably gay. And I always wondered like, what’s going to happen to these… Will I hear from them later in life? And there were a couple of kids I specifically had thought about, and maybe someday I’ll get a letter. And it’s funny that that never happened. I still don’t know of a single student from that cohort who lived any kind of queer life. And I don’t think it’s possible that there were none, you know? But it has not been part of that conversation. And I don’t know if any of them have, have lives that are like that, that they’re living…. It was totally different at Sichuan in that I had a number of students who would write about being queer and who… I had one student who took me to a nightclub where… that was sort of on a queer night or something.
It was just a part of life. I had students who research gay communities. Of course, there was at the same time, while it was often very accepted, I felt, by the young people, for the most part, it was not institutionally accepted. I mean, it was no longer criminalized like it had been in the ’90s. But China has cracked down on the organizations that are pushing for LGBTQ, right? So, that has been part of the tightening in recent years. But that life does exist and thrives at certain levels.
Kaiser: And cracking down as much because they’re organizations.
Pete: Yeah. They don’t want organizations that are doing this and putting this out. Yeah, doing anything. Right? So that’s part of… I mean, I was mostly struck by how comfortable the young people were with it. And some of those students, actually one of the students from the ’90s wrote about… talked to me about he had two students, because he was teaching high, school, and he is like, these two boys have a relationship. And it concerned him. He was worried about it. First of all, worried because the relationship, of course, is going to ruin your Gaokao scores, right? So if you have a student in China who’s in a relationship, you have to tell the parents so they can break them up so they can study for the Gaokao, right? And so he told the parents, and the parents are like, “No, they’re just friends.”
And nobody could kind of recognize even that these two boys were gay. He finally called them in. He’s like, “I know that in America and other places, you can do this, and it doesn’t bother me, but this, you can’t do it here in China.” They said, “No, we’re proud to be this way. This is the way we are.” And he was somewhat befuddled by that. He wasn’t offended or anything, but he was worried for that. So you could see that generational difference there. And there was a different level of comfort with young people.
Kaiser: China, ever Gaokao uber alles. All right, next question. Yeah, from Tony here
Tony: My name is Tony. I came into United States as an IT engineer and I’ve been living here since 2001. And now I’m a parent teacher. I think your position is very much interesting me on your embedding into education system. Also, you have kids learning in China. So I wanted to understand the current recent policy on changing the after-school programs. How do you see that? Is that a positive thing for the kids? Is that a positive thing for the education system?
Kaiser (1:10:58): Just for some context, so everyone who doesn’t know, a couple of years ago, China basically cracked down on all after-school tutoring programs online, in person. And recently has even cracked down harder on these. The ostensible reason is because they think that this gives wealthier, especially urban people, an unfair leg up, an advantage. So that’s a great question. Thanks, Tony.
Pete: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s had limited impact basically. And I hear this because most of the people I taught in Fuling are now teachers, right? And they’re teachers in high schools and sometimes in middle schools. And they report to me the ways in which they’re getting around this, or their schools are getting around and doing extra classes, and parents are still doing tutoring. I think it’s very hard to crack down on that. The pressure is so intense, right? And this is something else I really noticed. I went back to Rivertown. I never mentioned the Gaokao in Rivertown. It wasn’t really part… I mentioned a couple times students talking about how they were happy when they got their college admission, but they never talked about the details of the test.
They never talked about how they had studied or what they’re… I never knew scores. But in Chengdu this last time, like my daughters came back early in fourth grade and said their teacher said, “If we want to go to Tsinghua, we have to get a 675 or whatever.” Like they were getting numbers. And my response is like, “I think that number is actually too low,” because I was hearing so much from my students, right? And my freshman students like, and just crazy stuff that they’re doing. Like they came and they would write with this Hengshui, I mean with the Hengshui font.
The Hengshui font, right? Which is like developed by this school in Hebei, where they’re writing these crazy like round letters. And you look at this and you’re like, was this generated by some machine or is this actually a person writing like this because it’s this bizarrely neat handwriting. They go, “We had to do that for the test,” because they think you get better scores if you’re English writing. So, you’re learning a fake English font just for that exam, right? It’s like crazy, the competitiveness, right? So I think this is very hard for the society to break out of. And I think it has a huge ramifications. Because of the recent survey I did with my students, one of the things I asked the Chuanda students is, do you intend to have children someday? The majority said, no. Of the women, 75%, no. That’s really scary. And a lot of them said, “I don’t want to have to raise a child in this system.” And sometimes there’s a political element, but it’s also, it’s like, “I don’t want the kid to have to learn the Hengshui font or all this other crap, and I don’t want to have to monitor it.”
So it is a big issue and I think it is part of this echo of extreme competitiveness. It probably isn’t really necessary, right? You don’t have to push this hard, but people don’t know how to back off, and there’s not really any other outlet. And this book, I kind of described competition almost as a faith in China. It is like something that works. It’s like a very foundational belief for Chinese people because that’s what drew them out of poverty. That’s what was opened up to them. It wasn’t democracy or it wasn’t freedom of expression, it was the ability to compete and to rise. And that is so deeply entrenched in the psychology that I think it’s hard to shake.
Kaiser: Three model workers already in questions. Fantastic questions. Let’s keep it going. Who else we got? Up here. Brian Kileff? Oh, back here. I’m sorry. I don’t know this one.
Miguel Rohas: Muchas Gracias. Thank you. My name is Miguel Rojas. I work for Latin American Studies, but I’m a big fan of Peter’s work. And my question is about you brought this image of revisiting the Long March now in Chengdu vis-à-vis your previous experience there 10 years after. And we know that 10 years in China means a qualitative jump into the future that we can really measure here. I’m from Latin America, we know that. And my question is, I had experience of being in China for more than a year living there. And we were in 2018, ’19 precisely. We came back in August ’19 when you went back, and we were completely amazed by the amount of documentaries about the Apollo mission and space-related issues on public TV in China. And they were getting ready for the seventh anniversary and the Long March was there all the time.
But this long march is not anymore about the unity of a nation, but like the huge expansion that is taking place, going up to disguise, right? Then just that image that you just brought, that is tradition, that is the same songs, but that has a different kind of meaning, probably. I just wanted to have, if you have any reaction about that. And second, I have a recommendation of a book also called Look Back, 2021, a book written by actually a Colombian writer Juan Gabriel Vasquez, about the story of a filmmaker, member of a family of anarchists, Spanish anarchists that they end in China in the Cultural Revolution. The children grow up there and they, 20 years living in China, went back to Latin America to start revolution, Maoist revolution. Very interesting book, just to put in your list.
Kaiser: Look Back, very interesting question about the sort of valence of the Long March. And it’s used in things like ambitious programs like space exploration.
Pete: Yeah, I mean, a lot of the same references that I think people used back in the ’90s when I was at Fuling or still, there is a vocabulary that has been the same, that has stayed the same, that has applied to all of these new things. And so even with the sort of generational change, you have a lot of these reminders of the foundation is still the same, certainly politically.
Kaiser: All right, lady here.
Griffin Orlando: I think we have time for one more question.
Speaker 8: Okay. I’m I last one? Okay. Both China and Egypt have Asian civilizations, and as you mentioned, the two twin ladies who one of them went to Cairo, and you mentioned they turned Cairo into countryside Cairo, versus Chinese go to big cities, they became citizens. I’m curious, your opinion, like why? What’s the reason behind it? As a Chinese, I’m constantly struggling between modern and tradition, and the East and the West. I know Egypt is going through modernization. Do they have the same struggle and do they have stronger tradition?
Pete : Yeah, no, their relationship to the ancient past is completely different from Chinese people’s. So, when you would go to the ancient sites, like in Cairo, I talked about those twins, the son was the garbage man in my neighborhood, and I wrote about him, and he lived maybe four miles from the pyramids. He had never been to the pyramids until I took him there with his family. There is not a strong connection among the average Egyptian and the ancient people. And I would go on the digs with the archeologists and they’re digging up a grave, and it’s pharaonic times, and I would say, “Well, would you do this if he was Muslim?” And he was like, “No way. You couldn’t do this.” I was like, “Well, why can you do with him?” And he is like, “Well, hamma q’ufar” They’re infidels.
They wouldn’t say, "These are our ancestors," these are infidels. This is a totally different relationship of the past because Islam came in and that became… The language changed, the culture changed, the religion changed, and that’s what people are connected to. They’re not connected to that ancient past. China is so unusual because the writing, you go look at the oracle bones and you can recognize, and you can learn to read those pretty quickly if you’re a literate Chinese person. And you also have all these structures from the Qin on. In Egypt, the last Pharaoh who was Egyptian was something like 200 BC or something like that.
Kaiser: Yeah, before the Ptolemies.
Pete: And then there was no Egyptian Pharaoh or president until 1952, right? Can you imagine? That’s like the Han Dynasty to Mao if you had had no Chinese people running China. So imagine what that does to your history, to your sense of self, to the way that you’re treated as… So, the a hundred years of humiliation is really nothing, right? It’s a drop in the bucket.
Kaiser: The two millenniums.
Pete: And you see the difference, like China was able to bounce back from that because it’s still very… And at some level, Chinese, when I was there in ’90s, they kind of knew that, yeah, we’ve had this sensory of humiliation, but we made a lot of mistakes. We screwed up. We’re behind everybody, but we can fix this too. But in Egypt, it’s always somebody else’s fault, always. And in some level, it is in a way. They haven’t been ruled by themselves for most of their history, and people use them as a colony and they came and went. So that has a huge impact on your kind of national psyche and the way in which you view yourself. Yeah.
Kaiser: What a treat this has been, an absolute treat to have beloved Peter here in our hometown. So one more, very, very warm round of applause for Peter Hessler.
Pete: Yeah, thanks Kaiser. Thanks. Great job. Thanks.
Kaiser: You’ve been listening to the Sinica Podcast. The show is produced, recorded, engineered, edited, and mastered by me, Kaiser Kuo. Support the show through Patreon, patreon.com/sinica, or on Substack, sinica.substack.com, or email me at sinicapod@gmail.com if you have ideas on how you can help out. And don’t forget to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Enormous gratitude to the University of Wisconsin, Madison’s Center for East Asian Studies for supporting the show this year. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next week. Take care.