A Chat with Peter Hessler

Ah, Peter Hessler. The China writer we all know and love, and whom we're all just a little bit jealous of, because, hey, who hasn't thought, "Oh man, I just got ripped off, I should write a book!" Of course, Hessler's written not one but three books about his experiences in China, each of them setting pretty high standards for depth, insight, and humor. But that's ok, it just means the rest of us have to come up with niche angles. Like, "Oh man, I just got ripped off and had the royal rumbles at the same time!" There you go.

Meanwhile, we have a chance to learn from the master as he touches down in Beijing this year for the Bookworm Festival. He'll be reading from his latest book Country Driving, as well as talking with wife Leslie Chang and New Yorker correspondent Evan Osnos about life in China and transitioning away from China. We spoke with Hessler on the phone at his home in Colorado as he prepared for his trip.

So what brought you to Colorado?

Nothing really, I mean Leslie and I had finished researching books - she was working on Factory Girls and I was almost done researching Country Driving and we just kind of wanted to find a different place to write them. I wrote my second book in China and I found that to be a bit of a distraction because of the intensity of the environment. I felt like I wanted a different experience this time and I kind of wanted to be somewhere quieter, and I also had been a long time out of the States - it had been about 15 years - so I felt like it was time to see what life was like here again.

So we just moved and neither of us have lived in the West before, so we just drove around until we found a place where we could rent a house. It was very, uh, you know, very sort of haphazard, but we found this very small town in southwestern Colorado and so it's been great. It's nice.

Wow, just drove around and found a place to live. That's very adventurous of you.

Yeah, and we're gonna be moving on later this year too. We always knew this was temporary, but we ended up staying a little longer because Leslie got pregnant and so we waited until the babies were born. But we'll be on the road again pretty soon.

Babies, plural?

Yep, twin girls, Ariel and Natasha. They're identical twins and I think if everything goes according to plan, everybody's going to be going to China in March, so we'll see how that goes.

Wow, that's bold. How do you think they'll like China?

I don't know, but I think if you have identical mixed race twins, I think they could sell tickets probably.

Oh yeah, you'll have to fight people off with a stick.

So you did some book tours in the States, then are coming here for the BILF. When you talk with audiences, do you find differences in responses between those who are familiar with China, and those who aren't?

Yeah, I think one of my goals as a writer has been to try to write things that work for both audiences. I think that is hard to do, and you sort of have to introduce China to some degree to people in the States. In some ways, it has to do with the way I structured this book. In the first section, I sort of wanted to introduce China to the reader and to introduce this concept of moving around the country and to let them see sort of the broader themes, which, you know, were migration and people leaving the countryside and this sort of big economic boom. And this infrastructure boom. So I wanted that first section to sort of ease people into what China is and what it's like to be there.

And then I wanted the second and the third sections to provide more focused deeper looks at specific communities, one rural and one urban. So I do think about that as a writer. Because I think you want something to work for both people, since these are all people that matter.Tthe ones who don't know China matter and the ones who do know China matter. And you're hoping to connect with both of them and to somehow give them something that deepens either their introduction to China or their current experience with China.

There are probably a lot of things, especially as you get deeper into it, that people in the states don't quite understand that someone who's lived in China does.

There's a scene in the third part of the book when I'm writing about Lishui, where I describe going to a hot pot restaurant and it's just this sort of crazy scene where these guys have been sent there by a rival restaurant to cause trouble and the people I'm with start complaining about the food. I think a scene like that people in China understand in a way that people in the states don't. So I think sometimes the humor works like that, might be more China-specific.

That, to me, is one of the pleasures of reading your books - the humor.

Yeah, humor's important to me. I feel like this is one of the things we often lack when we write about countries in the developing world. There can be a tendency to be very political and to think of everything as being very serious and maybe sad. But it's important for Americans to realize that that's not the case. There is a great deal of humor and life in places, regardless of what people's income levels are.

Of course, I do think China is just a very funny place. It would be impossible for me to write about it without humor. I mean I really can't imagine doing that.

I appreciate it because in some ways, the culture shock of living here never ends, and it's easy to become pissed off all the time.

That was a really important lesson in the peace corps. You can respond to China in a lot of emotional ways, and people can get very angry and frustrated. I did feel like that was one of the real benefits of the peace corps, of sort of having this very intense experience in a place like Fuling, that by the end of that time, I had been through those emotions and I had sort of found ways to avoid them. I generally felt like from the time I moved to Beijing and started writing full-time, I didn't feel that kind of anger and frustration anymore. And the humor certainly helped. And of course it helps that you're a writer and as a writer, you're just describing things. So if someone's driving me up a wall, that's what I'm going to describe. I'm not trying to get things done in the same way that other people are. So that probably makes it a little easier.

So after all this experience in China, you're planning to shift your writing and life to another region? The Middle East?

Yeah, it was sort of a big decision. I felt very comfortable in China and I never felt burned out, never felt like I was tired of being there, certainly not as a writer. There's just an incredible richness there, you're never going to exhaust the place, there's never one definitive book or definitive experience about China and that's one of the wonderful things about living there.

But I felt like as a writer, it would really benefit me to write about different subjects, because I think you learn different things in different places. And I felt like I was still young enough to make that transition. You know, I feel very fortunate in that I wasn't so young when I went to China, I was 27, but I was able to start writing about it fairly soon after arriving. And it sort of allowed me to get across what I had observed and these experiences, and I still felt like I had the energy to do something different. So having made this transition to some degree now, because I've been writing stories about life in the United States, I did a story about Nepal in the winter of last year. At the end of last year I did a story about Uranium mining near where I live in Colorado, and I really enjoyed that. It has really been important to me; I think I'm learning new things.

So you know, I expect at some point I'll go back to China, that's the plan for both Leslie and me, we would like to live there again, but we want to do something different first. And I would really like to study another language, and so our plan now is to study Arabic and to spend a few years living in the Middle East. So it's not a permanent goodbye to China, but I think it's a way to learn new skills, to write in different ways, and then eventually you bring that perspective back to China, so I've been very happy with it so far.

These are a lot of big transitions. You seem to handle change pretty well?

Yeah, I mean there have been a few transitions. I transitioned to writing here in the States and to not writing about China and I kind of made a decision not to go back and do stories on China, which you can do periodically if you want. I didn't want to do that, so I've been researching things around where I live and in other places. But yeah, the next transition will be moving to the Middle East and studying Arabic.

I think it's interesting to learn another language when you're a little older and you can kind of describe that process. I did that to some degree in River Town and you know, I think that was the benefit of not being an undergrad. The drawback is that it's harder to learn in some ways and you're 27 years old or whatever, now I'm 41. But the benefit is that you have some perspective and you can sort of describe what that experience is like and I think as a writer, that's really valuable, so I'd like to do that one more time. That's the goal.

How do you think your experience in China will inform your future work?

It's really useful. I mean, you bring something from every place to another place. I was in Nepal and I was interviewing, I was sitting in on a meeting with a number of political people and one guy's cell phone rang and his ringtone was "The Internationale." And that's not a song that I would have recognized before, and immediately I said, "Is he a Maoist?" and he was. So you know, that's something I remembered from exercise days in Fuling living at a college.

So there's lot of little moments like that and then there's bigger moments; like for example, it's interesting going to a place like Nepal and looking at the different infrastructure development patterns from China.

Right. What about how China colors your experience of a place that's familiar, like the U.S.?

I wrote an article [in the New Yorker] about coming back to the U.S., it's called "Go West," and I talked about some of the things that really jumped out at me. Coming back to America, I really noticed the way people talk, how forthcoming they are, how open and how much they like to talk about themselves in a way that the Chinese don't. I also noticed that they don't listen as much as Chinese people probably do. So I think it's really valuable, and I think basically as a writer, I'm sort of a social scientist, I guess, I mean I'm trying to observe individuals and cultures and the greater your perspective is, the better you are at doing that. and so, I've been excited to sort of learn new things here in the States and I'm equally excited about throwing another culture into the mix and learning what that has to offer.

So can you tell us where in the Middle East you hope to be?

We're still in the process of figuring it out. We're applying to language schools now, we might try and study some in the States first. I think we might like to move to Damascus, it would be either Syria or Egypt, one of those two basically. We're not great at planning ahead. I've never been somebody who plans a lot.

When we moved back to the States, we shipped all of our stuff from China without a destination address. That's the kind of thing you can do in China, you just tell the guy, "We're going to find a home in 3 weeks," and he's like, "Mei wenti," but you could never do that here. but it worked. And so, we're trying to do a little bit of planning, but some of it will be spontaneous, for me that's always been important. As a writer, that's usually the way I went into projects. Like the last part of that book where I went to Lishui, I didn't have any idea what I was going to write about. I just spent a couple weeks wandering around until I found people that I thought would be interesting to stay in touch with. I kind of like working like that, I like living like that.

I know a lot of people who have a very hard time when they leave China. Any tips?

Yeah, it becomes sort of intimidating and the more comfortable you are there, the more connected and happy you are with your life, I think the more intimidating a move is. And it's often a very traumatic experience, I think. I've had a lot of friends who have really struggled with it. I think in our case, we were sort of surprised that we didn't struggle with it. But I think it might be a little easier for a writer. Also, we did arrive in the US with 2-3 years of work, because we had these books researched. So it made a big difference. And our focus was: Ok, let's find a quiet place where we can do this and then worry about the next transition. It turned out, the initial transition was first to having the 2 babies and then the next transition is coming.

So why the Middle East?

Partly my ignorance, I don't know much about it. I've never been there. I think it's also, I like the fact that there's a rich language, with a lot of history and a lot of culture. As a writer, it's great to be in a place where you can write about contemporary society but you can also write about the past and you can write about culture, you want to have as many directions as possible. It's also an area that my editors at the New Yorker are interested in, so it's a place where I can write stories as well as books. And, I think it's pretty different from China, which is good.

I wanted to go somewhere that would feel quite different to me. I felt like if I was going somewhere close to China then maybe I would continue to write about China in some way. And it would be hard to see the place on its own terms. I think there's a lot to be written about in the Middle East that we don't see much. I was having a conversation with Evan Osnos about this. He's lived in Egypt and he was talking about how funny it is; he liked that about Egypt, just like he liked it about China, but you don't read that, right? The humor in China does not get captured; when I was in the peace corps and was reading newspaper stories, I felt like, it seems so dark and serious, but China can be really kind of goofy and light, often. So I suspect there's more of that than we would think in the Middle East too.

It depends. I mean if you're like hanging out with the suicide bombers, probably not that funny.

Hmm. Probably not.

So you've had so much success as a nonfiction writer; would you ever consider writing fiction?

That was originally what I planned to do. My undergraduate major was creative writing and I wrote short stories. I studied with Joyce Carol Oates and Russell Banks, I took a course with Joseph Heller when I was at Oxford, and that was kind of my plan, but I took a nonfiction class with John Mcphee when I was in college and that sort of planted a seed. And then I started freelancing, and for me, it became more natural for me to write nonfiction. I think I was a naturally better nonfiction writer. For one thing, when I wrote fiction, it was always a little stiff. I think maybe I was too self-important, you think "Oh it's fiction, it's so important, it's art," but with nonfiction for some reason it just came out more naturally. One thing, too, I never had much humor in fiction, but with nonfiction I could always write the things that were funny because I think I was looser. It just felt more natural.

To be honest, I came to prefer the lifestyle too. I found that my friends who were doing fiction, inevitably you end up doing an MFA program and you teach and you end up on college campuses and you do writer in residences and fellowships and things. I didn't want to do that, I wanted to be out, I realized that non-fiction, I could support myself a lot more easily. And also, the non-fiction path is what led me to Beijing as a freelancer...

Lucky us.

We look forward to reading about Hessler's insights on the Middle East when he gets around to it, but for now catch him in Beijing. His Bookworm events (Wednesday and Thursday at 8pm, both at Studio-X, and Friday at 1pm at The Bookworm) are all sold out, but you can contact The Bookworm for details about the wait list.