Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West (P.S.)

by Peter Hessler

  Strange Stones

  Dispatches from East and West

  Peter Hessler

  Dedication

  For John McPhee

  Contents

  Dedication

  Preface

  Wild Flavor

  Hutong Karma

  Walking the Wall

  The Dirty Game

  Beach Summit

  Boomtown Girl

  Underwater

  The Uranium Widows

  Strange Stones

  All Due Respect

  When You Grow Up

  Quartet

  Home and Away

  The Home Team

  Car Town

  Chinese Barbizon

  Go West

  Dr. Don

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Peter Hessler

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Preface

  When I was growing up, my father occasionally brought his kids along to interviews. He was a medical sociologist at the University of Missouri, and his work took him to places that seemed exotic to me and my sisters: prisons, mental institutions, rural health clinics. Once, he met with the scion of an extended family that lived in the Mark Twain National Forest, deep in the Ozarks, where the clan was notorious for exerting heavy-handed control over surrounding hamlets. The old man’s name was Elijah, and during the interview he sat next to an open window with a .22 rifle in his lap, in case a squirrel entered the conversation. He was eighty years old. When my father asked if there was a local drug problem, Elijah nodded seriously. “Yes, we do have a drug problem,” he said. “There’s no drugstore down here. If we need something, we have to drive all the way to Salem.”

  Elijah mentioned that a while back he had suffered throat pain so serious that he had trouble eating even watermelon, the local crop. Finally he went to a nearby town and saw a veterinarian, who performed a quick examination and diagnosed polyps. Elijah asked him to remove the growths.

  “I’m sorry, but I’m not a medical doctor,” the veterinarian said. “I can’t do that.”

  “Well, mebbe you can’t,” Elijah said, “and mebbe you can.”

  And that was how it went—maybe nobody made a direct threat, and maybe Elijah didn’t leave that office until the surgery was done.

  My father was endlessly fascinated by the people he interviewed. Of course he enjoyed talking to the characters and the crazies, but he also had a deep interest in the quiet ones, the people who went about everyday lives with a sense of routine and decency. Missouri was like a foreign country to him and my mother. Both of them had grown up in Los Angeles, and they never expected to spend most of their lives in the Midwest. But they made it their home; my father spent years researching health care in rural communities, and my mother, a historian, wrote a dissertation about Jewish immigrants in Missouri.

  My father can strike up a conversation with anybody. If a workman comes to the house, my father knows his life story by the time the project is finished. Once, a plumber repaired our bathroom, and he got along so well with my father that they still go deer hunting together in northern Missouri. During my childhood, if my father and I happened to be sitting somewhere with nothing to do—a bus station, a hotel lobby—he would pick out an individual and ask me what I noticed about him. Is there anything interesting about the way he’s dressed? The way he carries himself? What do you think he does, why do you think he’s here?

  He had picked up this activity from his teacher in graduate school, a sociologist named Peter Kong-ming New. Peter New grew up in Shanghai but went to college in the United States; after the Communists took over in 1949, he stayed in America. He taught my father at the University of Pittsburgh, and then for a couple of years they worked together at Tufts, in Boston. Peter believed that I had been named after him, and although this wasn’t exclusively true—my parents had other friends and relatives with the same name—it was true enough that they didn’t disabuse him of the sense of honor. He was an unforgettable presence from my childhood. He stood well over six feet tall, with broad shoulders and a big belly. He had a huge bald head and a face as round as a mooncake. In addition to the way he liked to observe people, he developed a technique that he called “creative bumbling.” If Peter was in a situation where he needed to get something done—placate a traffic cop, or get a table at a crowded restaurant—he suddenly became a waiguoren, a stranger in a strange land, and invariably people did everything they could to ease this confused and stuttering Chinaman along without further incident. Peter New had a booming voice, and he loved telling stories; like my father, he had the rare combination of being both loquacious and observant. He also had the exile’s ability to make himself at home anywhere. That was my first impression of Chinese people—as a child I assumed they were all massive, charismatic figures. Whenever I heard the word “Shanghai,” I pictured a city of giants.

  Many years later, when I came to live in China, I realized how unusual Peter Kong-ming New really was. It wasn’t just his size—it was the way he talked, the way he observed. Most Chinese tend to be wary of strangers, and there isn’t a strong tradition of sociology and anthropology, of taking an interest in communities that are different from your own. In my experience, the Chinese aren’t natural storytellers—they are often deeply modest, and they dislike being at the center of attention. After I began working as a journalist, I learned to be patient, because it often took months or even years to get a person to talk freely. I remembered my father’s approach—if you want to truly understand somebody, you can’t become bored or impatient, and the everyday matters as much as the exceptional. And there were many moments in China that called for some creative bumbling on the part of the waiguoren.

  Despite these early influences, I didn’t plan to become a writer in China. Other than Peter New, I had no link to the region, and in college I never took a course in an Asian subject. My parents weren’t the type to guide their children’s careers. My father took me and my sisters to his interviews not because he hoped we would follow in his footsteps, but because he believed that life is more interesting if you can step outside of your own world every once in a while. And each sibling was encouraged to follow her own interests. Two of my sisters are married to policemen; one of them teaches, like my mother, and the other was a sociology major who is now a stay-at-home mom. My third sister is a sedimentary geologist.

  For many years I hoped to become a fiction writer. To me, it seemed a higher calling than journalism; I loved the language of great novels and the storyteller’s voice. In college, I majored in creative writing, focusing on short stories, but at the end of my junior year I took a seminar in nonfiction that was taught by John McPhee. He was the most exacting teacher I ever had—the margins of my papers bristled with comments written in a tight left-handed script. “You can’t make a silk purse out of this,” he wrote next to one bad sentence. When I loaded a phrase with adjectives and clauses, he responded, “This could be said with several pebbles removed from the mouth.” In one profile, I used the subject’s name four times in the span of two sentences, and McPhee wrote: “Listen to the character’s name thudding like horseshoes. Vary it. Use pronouns here and there.” He could be blunt: “This sort of thing is irritatingly repetitive.” Another comment said simply, “This is lame cleverness.”

  But there were also marks of praise—“yes” or “ah” or “a fine moment.” I realized that it’s possible to write very well and very badly at the same time, and that the best writers aren’t necessarily the most gifted but rather the ones who recognize their weaknesses and work
hard to improve. By the end of the course I understood that nonfiction writing could be every bit as demanding as the work of a novelist. As time passed, I sensed that the routines of a fiction writer felt too internal for me, especially since I had a tendency toward shyness. I wanted work that forced me out; I needed contact with other lives, other worlds. This instinct inspired me to sign up for the Peace Corps, which sent me to China. But the place itself was almost incidental—all I knew was that if I hoped to become a writer, I should go far from home.

  The stories in this book were written between the years 2000 and 2012. I wrote the first one when I was thirty years old, and over the next decade my life went through many changes. For a number of years I was single; then I was married, and finally (and all at once) a father of two after my wife and I had twin daughters. I lived in twelve different homes in three countries. A couple of these pieces were written in hotel rooms.

  But this period taught me that writing could be an anchor. It felt the same wherever I went, and the basics of reporting—the curiosity, the patience, the willingness to connect with somebody different—had been introduced to me during childhood. After living overseas for a long time, and spending much of my life in another language, I tried to combine the perspectives of both the local and the outsider. Many of these stories are from China, where I lived for more than a decade, but there are also pieces from the United States, as well as Japan and Nepal. The essay that examines what it means to feel half-foreign, “Go West,” is actually about returning to America.

  I often wrote about people who were also on the move. I found myself attracted to the migrants and the transplants, the ones who were searching and the ones who were fleeing. I liked the folks who felt a little out of place. Some were chameleonlike, and others dreamed of returning home; a few engaged in various forms of creative bumbling. But they were all good to talk to, because they had learned to describe their surroundings with an outsider’s eye.

  These stories are not chronological, and only a few are about historical events: the closing of the Three Gorges Dam, the Beijing Olympics, the first peaceful transition of a national leader in Communist China. I’ve arranged them in this order for purely personal reasons, because I like the idea of David Spindler standing next to Rajeev Goyal, and I think that the people of Paradox might have something to say to the people of Wushan. Almost all of these pieces first appeared in The New Yorker, although they have been revised, often substantially, for this book. The magazine was another anchor during this period. I was fortunate to have the support of excellent editing and fact-checking, but mostly I appreciated the range of subjects and voices that the magazine was willing to publish. Out in the great wide world, foreign reporting can be depressingly narrow, especially in the post-9/11 climate. Sometimes it seems as if there are only two possible subjects for stories: people we should fear and people we should pity. But those aren’t the individuals I met while living abroad.

  It helped that The New Yorker allowed me to write about them in my own voice. One challenge for a foreign correspondent is to figure out how much of yourself to include: If a story is too self-centered, it becomes a tourist’s diary. These days, the general trend is to reduce the writer’s presence, often to the point of invisibility. This is the standard approach of newspapers, and it’s described as a way of maintaining focus and impartiality. But it can make the subject feel even more distant and foreign. When I wrote about people, I wanted to describe the ways we interacted, the things we shared and the things that separated us. Chinese sometimes responded to me in certain ways because I was a waiguoren, and it seemed important to let the reader know this. 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. The joy of nonfiction is searching for balance between storytelling and reporting, finding a way to be both loquacious and observant.

  But that’s enough of that. China and Colorado are equally distant from me now; I’ve moved to a different country, with a new language to learn. Some days it feels overwhelming, and some days it feels like home.

  September 2012

  Cairo, Egypt

  Wild Flavor

  “Do you want a big rat or a small rat?” the waitress says.

  I’m getting used to making difficult decisions in Luogang. It’s a small village in southern China’s Guangdong Province, and I came here on a whim, having heard that Luogang has a famous rat restaurant. Upon arrival, however, I discovered that there are actually two celebrated restaurants—the Highest Ranking Wild Flavor Restaurant and the New Eight Sceneries Wild Flavor Food City. Both restaurants specialize in rat. They have the same bamboo and wood decor. They are next door to each other, and their owners are named Zhong and Zhong, respectively. Virtually everybody in Luogang village is named Zhong.

  The restaurant Zhongs are not related, and the competition between them is keen. As a foreign journalist, I’ve been cajoled to such an extent that, in an effort to please both Zhongs, I agreed to eat two lunches, one at each restaurant. But before the taste test can begin, I have to answer the question that’s been posed by the waitress at the Highest Ranking Wild Flavor Restaurant. Her name is Zhong. In Chinese it means “bell.” She asks the question again: “Do you want a big rat or a small rat?”

  “What’s the difference?” I say.

  “The big rats eat grass stems, and the small ones eat fruit.”

  This piece of information does not help much. I try a more direct tack. “Which tastes better?”

  “Both of them taste good.”

  “Which do you recommend?”

  “Either one.”

  I glance at the table next to mine. Two parents, a grandmother, and a little boy are having lunch. The boy is gnawing on a rat drumstick. I can’t tell if the drumstick once belonged to a big rat or a small rat. The boy eats quickly. It’s a warm afternoon. The sun is shining. I make my decision.

  “Small rat,” I say.

  The Chinese claim that folks in Guangdong will eat anything. Besides rat, a customer at the Highest Ranking Wild Flavor Restaurant can order turtledove, fox, cat, python, and an assortment of strange-looking local animals whose names do not translate well into English. All of them are kept live in pens at the back of the restaurant, and they are killed only when ordered by a customer. Choosing among them is complicated, and it involves more than exoticism. You do not eat cat simply for the thrill of eating cat. You eat cat because cats have a lively jingshen, or spirit, and thus by eating the animal you will improve your spirits. You eat snake to become stronger. You eat deer penis to improve virility. And you eat rat to improve your—well, to be honest, I never knew that there was a reason for rat-eating until I got to Luogang, where every Zhong was quick to explain the benefits of the local specialty.

  “It keeps you from going bald,” said Zhong Shaocong, the daughter of the owner of the Highest Ranking Wild Flavor Restaurant.

  “If you have white hair and eat rat regularly, it will turn black,” said Zhong Qingjiang, who owns the New Eight Sceneries Wild Flavor Food City. “And if you’re going bald and you eat rat every day your hair will stop falling out. A lot of the parents around here feed rat to a small child who doesn’t have much hair, and the hair grows better.”

  Earlier this year, Luogang opened a “Restaurant Street” in the new Luogang Economic Development Zone, which is designed to draw visitors from the nearby city of Guangzhou. The government invested $1.2 million in the project, which enabled the two rat restaurants to move from their old, cramped quarters in a local park. On March 18, the Highest Ranking Wild Flavor Restaurant began serving customers in a twenty-thousand-square-foot facility that cost $42,000. Six days later, the New Eight Sceneries Wild Flavor Food City opened, with an investment of $54,000. A third restaurant—a massive, air-conditioned facility, which is expected to cost $72,000—will open soon. A fourth is in the planning stages.

  “Their investment wasn’t as
much as mine,” Deng Ximing, the owner of the third restaurant, told me. “You can see that my place is going to be much nicer. We have air-conditioning, which none of the others have.”

  It was early morning, and we were watching the workers lay the cement floor of the new restaurant. Deng was the only local restaurateur with a different family name, but he was married to a Zhong. He was in his midforties, and he had the fast-talking confidence of a successful entrepreneur. I also noticed that he had a good head of hair. He took great pride in Luogang Village’s culinary tradition.

  “It’s more than a thousand years old,” he said. “And it’s always been rats from the mountains—we’re not eating city rats. The mountain rats are clean, because up there they aren’t eating anything dirty. Mostly they eat fruit—oranges, plums, jackfruit. People from the government hygiene department have been here to examine the rats. They took them to the laboratory and checked them out thoroughly to see if they had any diseases, and they found nothing. Not even the slightest problem.”

  Luogang’s Restaurant Street has been a resounding success. Newspapers and television stations have reported extensively on the benefits of the local specialty, and an increasing number of customers are making the half-hour trip from Guangzhou. Both the Highest Ranking Wild Flavor Restaurant and the New Eight Sceneries Wild Flavor Food City serve, on average, three thousand rats every day on the weekend. “Many people come from faraway places,” Zhong Qingjiang told me. “They come from Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Hong Kong, Macao. One customer came all the way from America with her son. They were visiting relatives in Luogang, and the family brought them here to eat. She said you couldn’t find this kind of food in America.”