River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze

River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze
by Peter Hessler
John Murray Paperbacks, 402pp.
ISBN 0-7195-6480-8



Travel literature today is the drained province of ‘rad’ snowboarders, contemplative chefs in Tuscany, gimmick artists with a story to grind, and a horde of d-grade wits who bring us snapshots of the world with plenty of yuks per page, conquistadors of irony devouring cultures in the name of their one true god, the lifestyle magazine.

Its authors are usually all men whose final report is there’s nothing new under the sun but themselves. It sells by the truckload, and given the oddly talented exception - outstanding figures who are so imitated they begin to imitate themselves as badly as their copyists (P.J. O’Rourke and Bill Bryson spring woefully to mind) - it is all niche marketing crap.

And yet there’s another side to the genre re-emerging: a melding of classical discipline and poetic natural observation in the grand line of Peter Matthiessen and Barry Lopez, along with evolving literary voices that hybridize memoir, history, reportage and a serious reflective ambition for what travel writing can do. This more committed groundswell – and there’s no other word for it but ‘committed’ - puts the best travel writing at the forefront of a renaissance in non-fiction storytelling just when it felt like the world was being horribly plundered all over again for the so-called Information Age.

Peter Hessler is certainly one of those writers who restore your faith in the travel genre’s revelatory potential, even its nobility. His book River Town documents the two years he spent as a Peace Corps volunteer teaching literature at a teachers’ college in Fuling, a small “by Chinese standards” town of some two hundred thousand people in the Sichuan province.

When he arrives in late 1996, “No Americans had lived there for half a century.” By story’s end he has won a local marathon race, mastered Mandarin, had a student commit suicide, been assaulted by a mob, struggled through classes on everybody from Shakespeare to Helen Keller and a Marxist version of Robin Hood, dealt with the bureaucratic absurdities of censorship and learnt a few things about “the Chinese smile” and the life that underlines it under Communist rule.

Subtitled ‘Two Years on the Yangtze’, Hessler’s book does this all quietly, assuming a detailed authority and flow that finally sweeps you away, whether he is dealing with local characters, Chinese history or the natural landscape and the many ways they intersect and impress their identity upon him. There’s something reasonable and true about Hessler’s subdued tone that grows on you page after page as he does this, an unhurried and precise quality to his prose, with subtly poetic turns that surprise you when they emerge.

In noting that Fuling is located at a junction between the Wu and the Yangtze Rivers, one blue and clear, the other a dirty brown, Hessler describes them as meeting “like two slivers of painted glass”. In discussing their pace and character he goes on to say, “The Yangtze in its size and majesty seems to be going somewhere important, while the Wu in its narrow swiftness seems to have come from some place wild and mysterious; and the faint forms of its distant hills suggest that the river will keep its secrets. You can fish all day long and the Wu will give you nothing.”

Hessler grieves for the damming of the Yangtze and the coming changes to Fuling life, let alone the drowned cities and landscapes that are all upriver from the monumental Three Gorges Project. But he also recognizes the strength of local needs (“Cold was like hunger; it had a way of simplifying everything”) and a stoicism – both impressive and frustrating - born out of “the ashes of the Cultural Revolution” and a century of constant, savage change in China. As Teacher Kong tells him when Hessler asks what people in Fuling think of the Three Gorges Project, “Well… the boats will all float, so they will be fine.”

In resisting a waiguoren (“people from outside the country”) tendency to see things in black and white, Hessler colours his book with a self-critical voice that opens up issues of how we engage with other cultures. Even so, the damming of the river finally lurks as a metaphysical crime in his imagination: “to turn the river into a lake – for some reason that bothered me more than anything else… I couldn’t explain it other than that they [rivers] were meant to rush forward; that was their essential nature.”

This feeling imbues River Town with a vaguely elegiac character. It is, of course, a diary of his time, and as such it also has the flavor of remembrance, of the past as another country. And yet its freshness and intimacy signal China’s unique vitality, the human torrent that can inspire or overwhelm. With this book Hessler gives the torrent a face, the history a meaning and a heart one could almost call ‘home’.

- Mark Mordue

* First published SMH Spectrum, August 31, 2002, then 12gauge.com (USA) in late 2002.

M Ward - Live

M WARD
@Newtown, Sydney
07.12.04


So you ask what magic is? And the roof above you has lights like long red teardrops hanging from it, splashing down stars into the green curve of my beer bottle as I think it over. Magic is light in the night, I say to myself as I look at them glow in the glass and spin them round and round. Like real stars when they come down to you from the real night sky and the truth is they died a long time ago, but they’re still shining, sending out messages in long waves from the times of Christ and Rembrandt and Keats and cowboys and Robert Johnson and way before them all and us.

On stage M Ward is starting his strum and all of a sudden we’re deep inside Bowie’s Let’s Dance – he’s playing it so slow, so spooky, it’s like this poem to a dying thing, not just a love, but what feels like the end of the world.

As it finally passes into silence, people turn to each other and nod. “That’s the best version of that song I have ever heard.”

Ward’s cap is over his face, typically hidden. He has a few hieroglyphic moves, some contrary tendencies - like someone half entertaining and sidestepping us at once - the vaguely arrogant politeness of an early Dylan and a similarly withdrawn quality that goes well with such a big comparison.

It could be The Gaslight, New York, 1961, here, now, tonight. But it’s Newtown RSL, or @Newtown (sick) in Sydney, 2004. Ward knows the dates, both of them. He’s like some bridge in our minds.

Pursuing such greatness is not easy - and as Ward swaps between acoustic guitar and piano there are moments when the night submerges between his dream of history and some big sleep that can’t be conquered. When you just want him to turn the flame on a little brighter. It’s when I see how much of a purist he is, dead set on his path.

Before you know it, though, as he seems to slip and nod, some enchantment or other is suddenly upon you again. Helicopter: the surreal tale of a man escaping through a hole in a wall, a child in his arms. Going To Carolina: which could be about a two-timer getting his comeuppance or a Rimbaud of the American road trying to decide where to call home. Outta My Head: Ward’s own near-hit song, which comes on so sweet and smooth you never want it to stop. Story of An Artist: by the American songwriter Daniel Johnston (to whom Ward pays great tribute), a kooked-out and funny-but-broken song about what it means to live creatively. And It’s A Wonderful World: the title lines so precious and ghosted by Louis Armstrong’s greatness Ward doesn’t sing them - he just goes quiet and gives us the melody like someone or something has passed away but might come back one day (he prefaces it by talking about how hard it is to stay optimistic in America right now, and then says, “this might possibly be the greatest song ever written”).

There’s plenty more: a song where he wants to be a bird; another about a friend who could make his guitar string buzz like it was 1989; notes on Ward’s own guitar that literally run and always make me think of Nick Drake; strokes where it sounds like his thumb has hit a bad place, shaking us from the wooden, shivering fret, back from some acoustic trance into consciousness. Then the piano that goes all dark and silvery when he touches it, delicately, hesitating, like his thinking his own songs over as his plays them; then an old style rag feeling when he gallops and rolls across the keys like the saloon is calling ‘time, ladies and gentlemen, time please!’

And yet in the end this is not a great night for M Ward. No. He’s too slow, too thick in the honey of his own mysterious history: the cracking voices and whispers, the hoarse-but-private confidences and their drowsy wit that colours everything he does in shades of blue and smoky reds. But then Ward’s chasing greatness and greatness doesn’t always come when you call. All of which still makes him the most marvelous company on a cool summer’s night in Sydney when the world is not so right and getting wronger and Matthew Ward is your strange little radio star dreaming of another time.


- Mark Mordue

* Story published in Drum Media. Australia 2004 and Plan B Magazine, UK 2004.

+ Photos sourced from The Rum Diaries, http://www.pbase.com/rumdiaries/ward

Stranger than Kindness

You wake up in the middle of the night. And the word ‘kindness’ is in your head. It’s not like you are very good at remembering your dreams, so why wake up with a word? Let alone a word like that?

So you lay there thinking about it, turning it over almost as if it were an image from some lost place in your unconscious, tasting the sound of it quietly in a whisper that wont wake your partner.

“Kindness”.

Your imagination is often more violent, sexual, angry or surreal. As if everything you suffer and which frustrates you finds some somnambulant catharsis in that boiling ocean of abstract visions and intense emotions we call a dream-life, thoughts given a sardonic narrative in your daylight hours that would shame Quentin Tarantino, thoughts let loose beyond the reach of even David Lynch in your sleeping ones.

Your friends talk about this violence as an emotional and fantastic condition in all their lives. This rage that snaps and crackles and pops in the mind’s eye; they see it in themselves and others, laugh about it, acknowledge its presence.

We want to hurt people, they say to you, punish them, slap them around, beat some sense into them, even just hit them because it’s just what you want to do and somehow it feels good to imagine it even if you would never really do it.

Consciously they don’t believe in the capital punishment yet they fantasize murder. Politically they are of the Left or small ‘l’ liberal persuasion yet they dream of crushing all who are in their way. They oppose war and stand for peace – but they dream of private revenge.

How did we get so angry they ask?

You try to fathom it as they sit round and talk about road rage, strange and sick crimes from Belgium to Baghdad, irrational arguments that seemed to come out of nowhere. They talk about Eminem songs and the film Fight Club (“a bit passé” someone says) and the constant pull of a sport like boxing as well as the way modern cultural criticism has become so cruel and witless and nasty in the newspapers these days.

You all try to draw some sense from this, as if there’s a thread that unites such feelings into something that can be analyzed, responded too, possibly changed. Maybe it’s to do with this ‘time of terror’ says one friend, but this anger has been burning well before September 11 came along. Perhaps it’s something about the inequities of society says another, the gross disjunction between the poor and the rich, but that’s as old as the hills too. We’ve always been violent insists another, it’s in our primal nature, which may well be true, but if that was once natural why do we all feel so sick and ill-at-ease about it now? We’ve lost touch with our morals and passions and we use irony to mask it till we turn cruel someone says - but is irony a mask or a brake - or the lid on a boiling pot? It’s more about the crisis of materialism in a capitalist society says another, the absence of any spiritual succor and the intuited desperation and panic this engenders. Do you know that Saul Bellow line about modern entertainment, “the ecstasies of destruction”? Have you seen Into the Wild? Have you read The Road by Cormac McCarthy and recognized the survivalist doctrine that underlines it? The connections and speculations roll on like a mad telegram from the frontlines of pop culture.

In an essay from 1996 entitled "Perchance to Dream" you know that Jonathan Franzen wrote of how “privacy is exactly what the American Century has tended toward. First there was mass suburbanization, then the perfection of at-home entertainment, and finally the creation of virtual communities whose most striking feature is that interaction within them is entirely optional-terminable the instant the experience ceases to gratify the user.”

As the conversation coheres around this finer theme of atomization and loneliness, it’s vaguely agreed that rage sets in when we no longer truly connect, and so it is that angry feelings flow sociologically too, from the disenfranchised towards the relatively better off, from the intelligent towards the glib and stupid, from the stupid and oppressed and beaten back towards the superior and the condescending, from the average towards the different.

It is some conversation.

And it is all yours, all in your head, imagined as a dialogue between people you know and people you don’t. This one night laying in bed. Play acting the drama of what is wrong with your world.

Are you still dreaming now you wonder?

Are you sick or is the society that spawned you ill? You want to hold your lover or your child or your parents in your arms and know the nature of softness and something like forgiveness, though you are unsure what there is to forgive. Let them know you are there – for them, with them.

There are days of course when you do generous-spirited things. Days when you hope a mere look from your eyes might send of rays of warmth over another troubled soul. When compassion lets you be a little better than you feel you actually are. In a funny way it as if you need to let go of the world, and by letting go you somehow release these bad feelings as well. You know it’s not a feeling you can stay high on, but it is there as another option to foul cursing, a foot on the accelerator, a fist, a gun, an American Bad Dream.

Is it about some form of tightness, you think, that finally closes around you. Yes, you have become tight, and even closed. Like that Paul Kelly song where he sings it so fatal and so sweet: “I’ve been careless, I’ve lost my tenderness, I’ve taken bad care of this.”

“Kindness.”

The word leaves you. Hovers close above you in the darkness like a being. A car passes by. And the night goes on. You don’t have an answer. But you let it go and the word travels through the streets with that car, an angel in a slipstream, visiting people in their beds in the darkness, while you dream and finally sleep, a thing of wishes and forgiveness in the black, black world.

- Mark Mordue

*Story first published in Mark magazine, Sydney 2004.

+ Film still above from Stalker by Andrei Tarkovsky

Nicolas Rothwell's Another Country

Another Country
Nicolas Rothwell
(Black Inc., $32.00)



“As I drive past a wrecked, burning vehicle from some military convoy, or the remains of an IED attack along the Baghdad International Airport Road, or as a roadblock manned by dubious-looking paramilitaries looms ahead, my fingers close around a little piece of ochre I always carry with me as a guardian charm, deep in my coat’s inmost pocket – it is white, with pink hues shot through it, like a constant mineralised, Kimberley dawn: and I see Freddie Timms leaning towards me, handing me this piece of country and murmuring, ‘We’ll be coming with you in your head – you won’t be lonely. Just remember us.’”

Passages like this are littered throughout Another Country, glittering with the same force as the Aboriginal artworks and Pilbara diamonds of the Kimberley region with which Nicolas Rothwell is so powerfully familiar. When it comes to colour, metaphor, historic detail and mysticism, you don’t get better in Australian non-fiction than Rothwell. And yet something is missing.

The above riff from ‘Jirrawun: Beyond the Frontier’ appears late in Another Country. It pinpoints a yearning central to this collection of stories and essays and portraits: to belong, and to feel this belonging through what might be termed ‘a calling’ from people and country itself.

One of Australia’s most fluent and intelligent journalists, Rothwell made his reputation decisively for The Australian during his twenties, reporting from Europe as Cold War divides fell away in the 80s and 90s. His work in America, the Pacific and periodically in the Middle East has only consolidated this reputation and the kind of stellar newspaper grooming that lays the world at your feet.

For him to return in 1996 and ask to be posted to Darwin as The Australian’s northern correspondent shows a uniqueness of character that must have surprised contemporaries. It was not the most obvious career move.



Of course the Territory houses some of this country’s finest non-fiction writers, a reflection of its frontier appeals. Among them the self-styled Hunter S. Thompson of the Top End, Andrew McMillan; Paul Toohey, who Rothwell calls “The Bulletin’s cunning northern correspondent”; and “the wraith-like, anarchistic Chips Mackinolty, sometime stringer for the Fairfax press and a current media svengali of the Labor government of the Territory”. All are members of the wryly named Darwin Foreign Correspondents Association.

Rothwell calls Darwin “the capital of the second chance” and captures a little of what Mackinolty calls “the lotus eating quality about the town”. But he’s better at watching rather than joining in, and it’s the eerie journeys into Aboriginal country and his own isolated reflections that really stun you.

A heady analyst of the world around him, he’s overly fond of flashing his intelligence forward in the odd word certain to send you to a dictionary. His sense of other people’s voices also jars, as if everyone is gifted with the Queen’s English and a perfect philosophical riposte. One senses in these Chatwin-esque flaws how hard he finds it to let the human world permeate him. How much more comfortable he is with landscape and dreams.

Rothwell opens this collection with a statement about “a dream that afflicts the writer and correspondent staring out across uncharted terrain: the dream of total coverage, a kind of Borgesian dream that one’s words will spread out and relate all the stories, all the nuances of landscape and every momentary thought and yearning that has ever been felt by those within it.”

He claims to refute this ambition, to be looking for “another way… the way of chance: a life path that is fragmentary, spasmodic, full of erasures and forgettings, of mirages and missed encounters.”

It’s a manifesto, of course, for a collection of articles like this. But Rothwell, a Romantic, is still bound up in the Borgesian project he claims to reject. He does want to sum it all up. Somewhat detached essays on everything from Aboriginal health to alcohol, violence and social dysfunction dominant the middle of the book: they’re important but they don’t advance the Kapuscinski-like dimensions of Rothwell’s earlier storytelling. His portraits of Aboriginal artists suffer even more by being lined up like so many same-shaped dominos, taking on the standardized hue of the 1000 word newspaper profile.

For all the hints of his inner self, the poetic grandeur, Rothwell is also oddly absent from the work. In a book with so much great writing, it’s as the frontier he has yet to break through is himself.

- Mark Mordue

* This review first appeared in the Sun Herald Extra, 15th April 2007.