I realize I’m about a decade late posting a review of Peter Hessler’s River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze
I can’t be certain why it took me so long to pick up Hessler’s seminal work, but I think it was due to the weight of it. Not the book itself mind you, though a bit weighty for a travelogue, it reads quick and handles well. Rather, because for any post-Y2K laowai, Hessler is definitively known as the laowai. Next to Mark Rowswell, few foreigners in modern China are as well known.
I suppose I was worried that reading Hessler’s experiences might colour my own. Lord knows I’m susceptible to such things, as it took me more than a couple years to stop spouting off facts learned from Jung Chang as gospel (worry not Changites, when last I visited an expat pub the doctrine was alive and well).
