Road Trip though China

8 years ago i spent a few months in China as part of grant. It was startling experience, it introduced me viscerally to the scale, growth and poverty in China. As a poor student i got, eat street food, live in 5 dollar a night beds (when i wasn't staying at universities) and just experience the sheltered privilege that is America and Western Europe. Also, as a New Yorker the cities, of Shanghai, Guandong and Beijing City moved with an exhaustive kinetic energy, that was recognizable to me as a native new yorker, but just multiplied by a factor of 100.  

like most westerns who visited i left the cities rarely, though i did manage a few times - i actually did visits some of the small town north of Beijing near the Great Wall, which i noted for the overwhelming gray and start weather ( i was their in jan). X book captures the feeling of life in the small townships in northern China, and give you a fascinating glimpse into where the majority of Chinese live, small townships, factory villages and cities that build around the two of them.

The politics, personal business risks, and work ethics that most of these small factory Business take on, is incredible and X fills his reporting with colorful vivid characters, stark landscapes and the harsh brutalism of the a transitioning economy from agrarian to manufacturing. The book is split in between 3 narratives, a single road trip from the authors home in Beijing to the edge of outer Mongolia, the small village of x where the author lived out side of Beijing for years, and the factory town of x. Each captures the contradiction and struggles of rapidly developing china.

The most memorial part of the book, comes from X relationship with a family he rents his house from in town x, north of Beijing, it is through them that the emotional toll of the rapid development find its self. The wu family start a restaurant and hotel for city visitors who have come to experience authentic country life, which of course has been somewhat sterilized of poverty and danger for the city tourist. Through their relative prosperity they are able to send their child to school and feed him dangerous amount of sugar (with the previous generation being concerned with eating, the concept of obesity and healthily diet is strange modern concept for the X parents) and having to experience the horrors of the China's medical system to treat x for a blood disorder.

A wonderful quick read of Contemporary china out side of the Major sites.

Party

Road china