Peter Hessler, originally of Missouri, first arrived in China as a Peace Corps volunteer in 1996 at the age of 27 with pointed ambitions of parlaying his experiences abroad into a career as a writer. Fourteen years on, he has largely – some might say, spectacularly – realised those ambitions, having worked his way up the foreign correspondents’ food chain to become the Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker and a frequent contributor to National Geographic, while also publishing three critically acclaimed nonfiction books on his personal impressions abroad and the various effects of China’s breakneck economic development on the lives of ordinary Chinese citizens. To many Western readers interested the region, Hessler has become the de facto, Mr. China.

His latest book, Country Driving – A Journey from Farm to Factory, surveys China in its ongoing moment of world-historical transition via the trope of the automobile. Arranged in three sections, the book begins with the story of the epic 11,000 km solo road trip Hessler embarked on across remote northern China in the autumn of 2001. An American journalist out on the open road alone, Hessler often meets farmers and hitchhikers who have never seen a Westerner in person, and he’s occasionally presumed to be a Mongolian interloper or international spy. Relying on out-of-date government maps, he chases the entire expanse of the Great Wall, encountering amusing cultural curios every step of the way and garnering an ever-broadening appreciation for the unprecedented changes being wrought on the traditional lifestyles of Chinese society by the booming factory cities of the south, and the country’s ever-expanding network of modern roadways – predicted to outdistance the American highway system by 2020. As he writes in the book’s opening pages: “To drive across China was to find yourself in the middle of the largest migration in human history.” After 10 years in China, Hessler has since moved back to the United States.

In conjunction with the release of Country Driving, Patrick Brzeski spoke with Peter Hessler by phone about his myriad impressions from behind the wheel in China, and where he’s headed next.

In your new book, you write of how living in China has taught you not to romanticise poverty, and that the new roads and new popularity of driving in China have brought money and modern comforts to the Chinese countryside, but you also observe country people taking on some new unhealthy modern habits. Could you talk about some of the positive and negative aspects of the change that mass car driving has brought to rural China?

Yeah, all the studies show that generally people in the countryside have been leaving for the factory towns and the income gap between rural and urban areas continues to grow wider. The rural areas are not getting poorer, per se, but they’re improving at a much slower rate than urban areas. And the government has tried to counteract this. You know really, with the new government of Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, it isn’t just lip service; their initiatives actually have had an impact and you do hear about it a lot among rural Chinese villagers. In the book you notice in the second section, that a lot of these campaigns are starting to trickle into the village, often in funny ways – they build a little replica of the Great Wall to try to boost tourism or something like that– and it seems a little strange, but the building projects do put money in people’s pockets. It is a noticeable difference and if you talk to farmers, they do talk about this.

But really, one of the main things for any rural region of China, is the road, and in areas where a new road is built in a way that puts villagers in reach of market centres and urban centres, living standards tend to respond quickly. And that’s the situation I saw in Sancha [a village about two hours drive from Beijing, where Hessler rented a weekend home (shack) for several years], because it’s a place that’s not hopelessly remote in the way that some of the villages that I drove through in the far west were, in the first part of my journey. I think that on the whole, my perspective on China is informed by having gone there first with the Peace Corps. For me that was always the starting point and that is my foundation for how I look at the place.

How did your Peace Corps experience influence your later view of China, broadly speaking?

I think that it made me probably take issues of poverty more seriously. In the Peace Corps we lived on a very basic salary of about $120 a month, which was quite a bit by local standards, but it wasn’t enough that we could enjoy anything like an expat lifestyle. We caught a lot of the same diseases local people had, and our electricity would get turned off when everyone else’s electricity got turned off and most of the students I had were from really poor areas. And I think that gave me perspective on why it’s so important for Chinese people of this generation to have material improvement. But you know, I have also become conscious of how hard this can be on people when it happens very fast.

Like I say in the book, I think as Westerners, we’re often sort of obsessed with this idea of unrest in China, particularly political unrest. You’re always reading about big protests and questions like, “is this going to cause the downfall of the political system”, and all this stuff. And the longer I lived there, the less impressed I was by that. I really feel like it’s basically a pretty stable place, politically, and quite functional. The real unrest that I noticed, and that I think is really significant, is much more internal: people trying to find their bearings – in particular within families and within groups, communities and villages. People are dealing with a lot of change, and it’s hard on them. Sometimes it can be a physical effect. I wrote about that with the Wei family, and how as they became a little more prosperous, each member of the family became less healthy. That was very striking to me. And I think that it’s a stage that China inevitably goes through, because these changes are happening so quickly. I wouldn’t say it’s a bad thing, and I don’t think China should turn back the clock. But some aspects of it are sobering and it’s basically a work in progress, people are figuring out their new relation to one another, and the new economy, and the world.

Yeah, in reading your books, one gets a palpable sense of the incredible energy of contemporary China as it undergoes these massive and dynamic changes, but you also note, "In China, rapid change has left many people with a hollow feeling: they no longer believe in the Communist ideology of old, and the forces of migration and urbanisation have radically transformed society. The new pursuit of wealth can seem empty and exhausting; many people wish for a more meaningful connection with others." Could you talk a little more about that, and was that a feeling that you yourself experienced during your time living there?

Well, it’s always different for me because I’m a foreigner. In each book I’ve written about China, there is a level of really significant personal involvement and connection. My first book was about living and teaching in China, and in the second one there was a lot about my former students whom I was very close with, and in the new book, I have the most personal connection to the village in the second part. As a writer working in China, I always wanted to include that – my personal relationship to the place. But it is a different relationship than that of a local, you know. I don’t think this issue weighs on me in the same way – it’s not like I’m searching for meaning, you know, because for me being in China had a great deal of meaning. As a writer, I found it very fulfilling. But I did observe this a lot in people, and I think, again, it’s really natural when a society is changing so quickly. Communities are broken up – you have migration, you have people moving within cities, and you just don’t have the traditional family, the traditional work unit, the neighbourhood and village structures – those are all changing.

On the whole, I’m probably generally an optimist about China and I certainly have a lot of admiration for the resourcefulness of the people and how hard they work, and that’s one of the reasons that there’s a lot of humour in the book. I think in the end, it’s not a dark dismal place, but there is this element that remains to be sorted out. And I felt that actually more and more as the years went on, the emptiness, the sense that there should be something else. And that’s why, in this book, each section begins and ends with some image of emptiness. Whether it’s the empty road, the empty village, the empty house that someone built as an act of speculation, or the empty factory. There’s a reason for that. I did that deliberately because I feel like symbolically this is one of the big issues I noticed in China. And I think it’s something that will become a bigger factor in the coming years.

So how do you see people coping with that?

It’s a work in progress. They haven’t figured out what to do about it yet. It’s why you see such an interest in religion, for example. I think as westerners we can sometimes overestimate what’s going on with religion in China. A lot of Americans are like, “God, there are so many Christians in China now; it’s becoming a really religious country.” In a way it is, there are a lot of people who are interested in religion and who are exploring – there’s no question. But religious institutions are still very weak, which is really critical. If you look at the experiences of Cao Chunmei [the mother of the family Hessler befriends in the village of Sancha], she becomes interested in Buddhism and she builds a shrine, but it doesn’t take her anywhere, it doesn’t take her to a group of people, a group who makes her feel connected and at peace, you know. It’s pretty lonely. I think that religions still haven’t quite been able to create a sense of community – partly because of the way the Communist Party does things that makes it hard for institutions to grow strong. And that’s why I often caution people to avoid overestimating the impact of religion in China right now. Basically, this all reflects the weakness of institutions and the weakness of civil society at this stage.

Turning back to the road, do you think that China building car infrastructure that’s largely modelled on the US system of roads and mass-transit is a good thing for the country to be doing? Do you think that’s an inevitable thing?

You know, it’s actually quite different from the US system. It’s similar in the sense that they really want to have a first-rate highway system. They plan to have more highway miles than the US by 2020. They want people to buy cars, and they want their car industry to continue to boom. And that’s one of the reasons they’ve made it so easy for people in China to buy cars – to boost that industry. And of course, they want to export cars, because it’s the type of product that has a higher profit margin, which they would like to be producing, as opposed to the small piecemeal parts of consumer goods that are cheap and don’t leave a lot of profit in China.

So that’s what they’re looking for, but it’s never going to be the same as the US model. There are just too many people and the country is too big. And I know a lot of people who have bought cars in China, but I don’t know any of them that don’t also regularly take public transport. Whereas in the States, there’s tons of people who never take public transport. I mean, I don’t. Where I live in Colorado, there’s no public transport whatsoever. It doesn’t matter whether you’re socially responsible or not, it’s just not there. And so for a lot of people buying cars in China and in Beijing, it’s more of a lifestyle thing. They don’t need it because they’ve moved to the suburbs and now they need to drive to work every day. Most of them are still taking the subways for moving around the city. It’s just that now they also have the chance to drive somewhere for the weekend. So I think it’s not as terrifying as people in the States might think. And I know people from other places are saying, “God, America is such a terrible model and now China is importing it”, but I don’t think it’s that direct. I think it certainly is a concern when you have a country of this size that’s modernising so quickly, but I wouldn’t really say that they’re being irresponsible, certainly not compared to western lifestyles – it would be very hard for us to legitimately accuse them of that. I think the concern, on my end, is that structurally, some of the ways that they build cities depends on taking land from rural people and it’s also a situation that could structurally lead to a real estate bubble very easily. And I also think the lack of long term thinking is an issue.

So you don’t see suburban sprawl becoming an issue as China continues to develop?

I think it is an issue, but it’s different from the US. Basically the US is a very bad model because you have all these people living very far from where they work, and they rely just entirely on the car – there’s no other option. And we’re not seeing that in China. The place just isn’t big enough for the population to assume that lifestyle, and people don’t have enough money for two-car households for everybody. It’s just not possible. But still, from another angle, sprawl is still an issue of concern. As I write about in the third section of the book, cities depend very heavily on continuous expansion. Otherwise they just don’t get funds. Structurally, they have a weak tax base – they don’t have property taxes – and that means they have to keep acquiring land from farmers and reselling it. So that’s not a great system and eventually it will probably have to be reformed.

OK, turning to your adventures out on the road. Did you ever feel that you were in any kind of danger, while driving through such remote parts of China all on your own?

No, not in terms of crime. I was nervous at first, because I really didn’t know what to expect. You know, I was camping on my own, on the side of remote roads. As I recount in the book, early on, one night I suddenly woke up with my tent flooded with light, and I thought it was headlights and was terrified, but realised it was just the full moon. I often was concerned about what might happen if someone came upon me while I was camping, but I was usually camping off very remote roads where it was really unlikely that someone would find me. It made me nervous. But as time went on, I realised I really didn’t have much to worry about. I was careful, but basically, the place is pretty safe. People are very friendly and I didn’t ever really feel like anyone had designs on me or was threatening me. The driving made me more nervous. You’ve got roads that are really mixed, and the quality can drop at any moment and the drivers are all new and very inexperienced. Fortunately, when I made that first trip, there weren’t that many drivers on the road yet, but those that were out there weren’t driving very well…at all [laughs]. So I didn’t push it. I didn’t have a strict schedule, so I could always just pull over if I felt like things were getting sketchy, or if the weather turned.

Yeah, that’s pretty remarkable. It’s hard to imagine someone undertaking a similar journey on their own with so little worry, in say, Russia or South America or Africa.

Yeah, it’s one of the very few developing countries where you can feel that level of personal safety. But I’ve done a lot of travelling and serious backpacking in various places, and through that experience, I kind of learned that things generally work out. You do your preparation and there shouldn’t be too much to worry about.

Yeah, I got the sense that your biggest concern, rather than street crime, as it would be in many developing countries, was just the opposite: encounters with the police. Technically you still need special permission to travel to remote regions of China, right?

Yeah, I was very concerned about that. Part of it is a journalist issue, because as a journalist you’re registered as such and they traditionally control journalists very carefully. A few years before I did this, the New York Times correspondent, Patrick Tyler, had an idea that he was going to try to drive to Tibet. He tried to drive the New York Times car and didn’t make it very far. He had their driver take the car to Lanzhuo, the capital of Guangzhou, and when he flew there and picked up the car he got detained almost immediately. But he was driving the bureau car, and if you’re a journalist or a diplomat, and have a car in Beijing, at least at that time, you had very recognisable plates on the car. So I realised that renting a car, which was something that foreigners hadn’t done much before for long trips from Beijing, gave me a car with normal plates, which allowed me to blend in. So that helped, and then also there’s the fact that there just really aren’t many cops out there on the roads [During his epic road trips, Hessler comes upon statues of policemen that the government has installed along remote roadways, presumably hoping the stern looking statuary will have a scarecrow effect on motorists]. So it didn’t turn out to be nearly the issue I thought it would be. But I was never supposed to take the rental car outside of Beijing. So when I started this journey, I had no idea how long it would last. I wouldn’t have been surprised if I got turned back after a week. But it worked out really well. On the first journey, I did eventually get turned back, but they didn’t say you have to go home, they basically just ran me out of their province.

At one point in the book, you observe an especially ridiculous episode… I think it’s when you’re stuck in a horrendous traffic jam in a remote northern part of the country and you see truck drivers laying under their engines trying to melt frozen fuel lines with flaming road flares, and you say that you had “crossed the shadowy line that separates the strange from the stupid”. So, while throughout the book you demonstrate a really impressive degree of humility and open mindedness towards the strangers you encounter and the people you befriend, it’s a recurrent thing, where you’re constantly encountering these incredibly absurd or unpredictable situations. So I wondered whether at times your humility might have been tested…

Yeah, I mean, it’s a weird place [laughs]. It’s also a very funny place. Again, some of this goes back to the Peace Corps for me. The Peace Corps in China can be a very tough two years. Everywhere you go in your town, you’ve got a mob of people following you and talking about “the foreigner”, and there’s just a lot of stuff that doesn’t work well. And very early on, after about six months, I realised, you can let this stuff get under your skin, and it will drive you insane, or you can go with the flow and just sort of laugh at it and accept it. In the Peace Corps, you really did see people take these two roads. Some people just hated it and stayed in their apartments. Most people, fortunately, sort of embraced things and became very flexible and they usually had a good sense of humour. So I think my attitude and approach to China followed from that – I tried not to take things too seriously, tried not to take myself too seriously. In the end you sorta think, well, I got myself into this. If I didn’t want to be in a place like this, where I’ve got twenty people watching me eat a bowl of noodles, I shouldn’t have signed up for the Peace Corps. I’ve got nobody to blame but myself [laughs]. And if I found myself driving across cold northern China in a crappy rented Jeep Cherokee all on my own, I reminded myself that if I hadn’t wanted to be in that situation, there were plenty of ways for me to avoid it. I made a decision to make this journey and that means I need to be patient and deal with it. The humour comes pretty naturally. After a number of years in China, I just didn’t feel a lot of frustration. It also has to do with what I was doing there. I’m a writer and I’m there to observe, so if there’s weird stuff going on, that’s good.

Were there some situations in which the absurdities or the confusion, struck you differently, though? For example, at one point in the middle section of the book, you recount an incident where you’re giving the family you had befriended a ride to a nearby town and they ask you to stop at a government office and then they leave, or basically abandon, their mentally disabled uncle there, in an effort to play hardball with the government officials who hadn’t been paying the assistance money the family was entitled to for caring for a disabled family member. And you write about how you felt a little guilty about your role in the incident, but you also say you had no idea what you could have or should have done differently, and whether it would have made any difference. And then you go on to explain how you commonly felt this way in China, and how life is complicated there and often there isn’t a good solution to problems, regardless of how quick on your feet or ethically committed you might be. So I kind of got the sense that the sheer numbers involved in China and the extremity of the change the country is undergoing often sort of overwhelms the everyday ethical apparatus that an outsider would bring to bear on many situations…

Yeah, I think that’s definitely part of it. But also, it’s a pretty functional society, you know. It’s not always fair, and it doesn’t follow the rules we would like it to follow, but it basically works. Like with that incident, the way he just drops his brother off there and leaves him, it’s really an awful thing; but it accomplished what he hoped to accomplish, and the poor guy wasn’t hurt. And things are often that way, where you’re like, “my god, I can’t believe he just did that.” But it turns out he had a reason for doing it and got the response that he wanted. And I really didn’t know what else I should have done. And as time went on, I realised it was a really complicated scenario. Initially, I thought it was just about the money. I thought he just wanted the payment, which was like $6 a month, and you know, that’s awfully petty. But as time passed I realised that there was this unspoken tension between him and the local Party Secretary. It’s not something that he’s going to tell me about, I have to wait and observe it. But that move of dropping his brother off was his way of sort of jockeying for position in the village. It showed the Party Secretary what he could do by circumventing her authority and his awareness of his legal rights. So it’s always much more complicated than you initially realise. And I think as a foreigner, in a way, it gave me a different perspective on my role there, in that I realised that I can’t solve all these problems and that wasn’t my proper role. I think it’s a useful lesson for people to have – maybe particularly for Americans. I think there is an American instinct to think that you can solve every problem and that America should solve every problem. I’m a little resistant to how a lot of the really popular books about the developing world seem to be about Americans going there and saving people, basically. You know like, Three Cups of Tea, or Mountains Beyond Mountains – these books are always about how Americans can help. And while it’s a good instinct, I think it’s probably overdone, and we can see that reflected in our foreign policy. Not just aid, but the fact that we’re so willing to find military solutions for things – it’s part of this same instinct. You know, it comes from oversimplifying these cultures. Something that I always wanted to communicate with my writing about China is that it’s a very complicated place. And as an outsider, even as one who has committed a lot of time and a lot of energy to understanding things, I didn’t want to put myself in a position where I was always trying to take charge. And besides, one of the things I kinda like about China, is that we don’t need to feel that way. Americans don’t need to feel like they have to save China. I think really, the goal right now is to try to understand China and to figure out how we work with this place – which is good. It’s a much better position to be in than the traditional attitude towards the developing world, of asking “how do we solve this place’s problems.”

So then the factory that you follow in the third section of the book…as you explain, they produce these tiny little rings that are sewn into bras and bra straps. And on the way there, you passed through an industrial town comprised of 380 factories, which collectively produce 70 per cent of all the buttons used for all the clothes made in China. You pass through another town that produces 1 billion decks of playing cards a year, and another that makes one third of the socks on earth. So when you left China did you take away a new appreciation for the origins and the history of all your material affects?

Certainly. It makes you see all that stuff very differently. It makes you realise that people’s whole lives and dreams hinge upon this little product that most of us never would even notice. First of all, the bra rings weren’t something I searched for [laughs]. It just happened to be what these guys were making. If I had met a different pair of entrepreneurs, they would have been making some different, equally strange, incredibly weird piece of something that we buy and never think about. But you come to realise it’s a serious world for these guys. There are 25 people in the factory eventually and they all depend on the production of this thing. There’s a lot going into it. Spending time in that area where they were literally clearing out mountains to make way for this huge development zone, and then I look at this tiny little product – it’s a really amazing transition, when you understand how much goes into it. I think the feeling that I don’t get as much, which you do see a lot in the US, is that feeling of guilt as a consumer. That’s not the goal of this book – to suggest that you shouldn’t buy things from China, or to say, “Look what we’re doing to these poor people”. I want people to realise these connections and the lengths that are gone to, but I don’t think it’s a bad thing that these people are making these products. You know, in the end, I admire the way they do it, basically. I certainly admire the energy and the drive and their ambition.

Have you gotten any feedback from the people you’ve written about in your books?

Yeah, when I wrote Rivertown [Hessler’s first book on China, which focuses on his experiences in the Peace Corps in Fuling Province and was published by Harper Perennial in 2001], I was really nervous about that and really unsure of how people would respond. I think it really helped me move forward as a writer that people seemed to be really positive about it. In some ways, I’ve found that people in China have responded much more positively than the Americans I’ve written about. I think maybe they’re less sensitive, or maybe because there isn’t a lot of reflection going on in China – since there isn’t a lot of space for such issues in the media – when a writer comes in and spends a lot of time trying to understand things and tries to analyze what’s going on, I think they appreciate it. In Fuling I was very struck by that. People didn’t seem sensitive about it, and they enjoyed the humour, which I was really worried about. I wasn’t sure how they would respond to that. My instinct was always, you know: I find China funny, it’s a funny place and there are a lot of things that I laugh at and that the local people laugh at. And so it’s hard for me to write about the place without that. I felt that avoiding humour is almost condescending in a way. To say, like, “oh, these are poor people, so it’s not funny – this is serious.” I didn’t want to take that approach. At the same time you don’t want to go too far in the other direction and say, this is all just a big joke, you know? So there’s a tone and a balance you want to strike and that was always my goal. I never wanted to remove the humour, and the people’s reaction to River Town – that they found this stuff funny too – helped me feel better about the balance. I’ve shown the village stories to the Wei’s because their stories were published in The New Yorker and then translated into Chinese and they were happy with them. But longer term, you don’t know. You’re never entirely sure how people will come to feel. At this stage, people know that I’m a writer and I show them examples of my work when I’m writing about them, so that they can get a sense of what I’m doing. But some of it is a leap of faith. That’s just the way it is with any nonfiction writing. You do your best and you hope that you’re being responsible; you hope that you’re treating people fairly and with respect. But only time tells.

Have you kept in touch with the Wei family?

Yeah, they call me all the time and I call them on Skype. I probably talk with them every two weeks or so. I’ve still got a house in Sancha. Wei Jia [the family’s young son] calls pretty frequently, usually at like six in the morning [laughs]. It’s easy with them because they’re in the same place. It’s much harder in the factory towns, because people move so much and they change their phones all the time. I’m in touch with over 100 of my former students. But some of the people, like the Tao family [the family Hessler befriended in the factory town of Lishui, whom he writes about extensively in the third and final section of Country Driving], I haven’t been able to find them. When I was doing the fact checking for the book, I tried to get in touch with them again, and I actually ended up paying someone to try to find them, but wasn’t able to. They’ve all changed their phones. That’s a hard thing in those factory towns; it’s very hard to keep in touch with people.

As the first person narrator of your books, for the attentive reader, you always obliquely emerge as the work’s central character. How self-conscious are you of this act of creating yourself as a character?

Yeah, well, I think the first person is really important for the kind of writing I’m doing in China. People respond to me differently because I’m a foreigner. And I don’t think that’s a problem, but it is true that I will change a situation to some degree because of who I am and what I look like. I think it really helps if you can let the reader know who you are and how people respond to you, especially when it’s so significant. It’s one of the reasons I always had trouble with newspaper writing in China. I felt like, if I can’t use the first person, I just really can’t describe these reactions. I can’t openly include all of the ways these people are responding to me as a foreigner, instead of just a reporter. And that’s one reason I gravitated towards travel writing early. For one thing, it was easy to sell freelance work, but it’s also one of the few places in a paper that you can write in the first person. But it’s changed for me too. I’m a much bigger character in Rivertown than in my later books, and the reason for this is that the book is about me coming to China as a person who knows nothing about the country, and I’m learning the language and learning about this town I’m living in. And there’s a lot of change happening in the town, but part of the main change is me – I’m becoming a different person, I’m learning the language, and I’m learning how to interact with these people. And it was really important for me to portray that, you know.

When you’re writing a nonfiction book, the thing you want is some kind of movement, some kind of plot, and if you’re writing a novel you can just invent that, you can just make things happen. You can’t do that for nonfiction, so you look to see where the movement is. And for Rivertown, naturally, a lot of the movement was me, so I became a major character. In the next two books, that’s not so much the case. I still want to orient the reader, I want the reader to know who I am, and what my relationships are with people. And sometimes that relationship is personal, like in Oracle Bones [Hessler’s second book, published by Harper Perennial in 2007 and a finalist for the National Book Award for nonfiction that same year] with my former students; it’s a friendship relationship, not just a reporter-subject thing. And it’s the same in this book. My relationship with the Wei’s is personal, and I want the reader to know that, but I didn’t want to overdo my position in this book. The movement in the second two thirds of this book comes from the Chinese people. By the time I got to Oracle Bones, I was pretty stable in my relationship to China. By the time I got to Country Driving, my attitudes towards China were much more stable. This is not a book about a foreigner in China; the real focus is on the local people. They are the ones who provide the plot. So yeah, I’m very much aware of my place in my books. I want the reader to know who I am, but I don’t want to take attention away from the more important story that I’m trying to tell.

At some point you said that you imagined your little shack in Sancha as something of a writer’s country retreat away from Beijing. What was it like for you working on New Yorker and National Geographic stories with a very worldly cosmopolitan western audience in mind, while at the same time living in a peasant village where only Chinese was spoken?

Yeah, you know, it’s weird. Sometimes I would have editors call me there late at night because of the time difference, or I’d have to excuse myself from dinner at the Wei’s house to go take a call. And the villagers would sometimes talk about it. So yeah, it’s a very different world. But I liked going there to write. It wasn’t always comfortable. In the winter it could be very cold. I used to boil water and put it in bottles and put it on my lap to try to stay warm while I wrote. But I liked it. It was very quiet and after I’d been there for a couple years, the villagers were comfortable with me. In the beginning they would come by and try to figure out who I was and would stand outside my window and stare, which could be distracting [laughs].

So what has it been like for you to return to the United States after a decade living and working and travelling in China?

I guess it was less disorienting than I expected. But in China I was often moving around, so I guess I was used to moving to new places where things were often quite different. And, as a person, I like that. It wasn’t difficult actually. I kind of thought it would be harder. I actually wrote an essay about this that will be in The New Yorker next month, I think. It was a good situation coming back when I came back, in that my wife and I both had books researched and ready to write. And so, when you’re at that stage, you basically have two or three years of work ready to go. So when I moved back to the States, I had a lot to do and was in a quiet place and ready to work. I also got back into good running shape. My lifestyle is much healthier in the states. China could sometimes be a little bit hard on me physically.

How is that?

Well, you know, the air quality is bad in Beijing and your diet’s not that great. You’re eating out every meal in China, because the restaurants are so damned good and cheap, you know? And so I finally learned to cook when I got back, because I had spent my whole adulthood in China basically. So my diet’s a lot better, I lost like 30 pounds and have gotten in really good running shape and have run a couple marathons. Part of it, moving back, is about figuring out what you want and finding that in the new environment. So when I moved back to the States, I wasn’t expecting to have the same kind of street vibrancy that I experienced in China. If I had really wanted that I wouldn’t have left, or I would have gone somewhere else. But I asked myself, what is it that I would like to have while I’m writing this book? And well, actually, I’d like to be somewhere quiet with great scenery and wildlife that allows for the kind of contact with the outdoors that I haven’t had in a long time. So I moved to Colorado.

Was it striking re-entering the American media bubble after being away for so long?

Well, not in Ridgeway, Colorado. You know, I go to local bars and I tell people I lived overseas for 10 years and they just ask if I was in the military. When I tell them I was a writer, they shrug and don’t really ask about it. They don’t really care about China. If I was in New York or San Francisco it would be very different. And that’s partly why my wife and I didn’t move to one of those cities. I felt like, in a way, I would still be in China, but not in China. If I was in New York, I would know all these people connected to China and would always be asked to go to dinners or give talks about China, and I kinda just wanted something different… I like being away from the media stuff. I love visiting New York because it’s a cool place, but it makes me feel a little claustrophobic because all the editors, and agents and publishers are there. I always enjoy just doing my own thing and not thinking too much about that side of it.

Have any of your Chinese friends come over to visit you in the US? Any of the people you’ve written about? I wonder what it would be like for them to visit your world…

Now that I think about it, no, never. It has a lot to do with the people I’m writing about. If you look at the books, most of my subjects have been pretty average Chinese who are from the countryside and making a transition to becoming urban people and educated people. If I was writing about intellectuals, I would have had a lot of contact with them in the States. But for the folks I’m writing about, it hasn’t yet become very common for them to travel abroad.

Do you read much contemporary fiction set in China? Have you come across any novel that gave you the sense that maybe the writer took some of the same experiences you’ve had and made fiction of them? And were you ever at all tempted to go that route?

Well, you know, I trained in fiction. That’s what I did in college. My thesis advisors were Russell Banks and Joyce Carol Oats and I studied under Joseph Heller. I originally wanted to be a fiction writer, but I kind of made a long transition, partly because I also took a course in college by John McPhee. And that was the first time I realised that you can write nonfiction in interesting ways. I kind of gravitated in that direction and I’ve never had any regrets. I really like the research routine combined with the writing. I like the way the research gets me out there and I have to really learn how to figure things out. I think that there’s a depth of research that you have to do as a nonfiction writer, which you’re never going to do as a novelist. Novelists of course do research, but you’re not going to go to Lishui every month for two years [as Hessler did in researching the final section of Country Driving]. It’s just not going to happen. Getting out like that is a great thing, I feel – especially in a place like China. I realise that it works for my personality, and I don’t see myself shifting to fiction anytime soon.

There should be good fiction out there though. I guess there’s a China novel by a foreigner called Heaven Lake [written by John Dalton, published by Scribner in 2004], which I’ve heard is pretty decent. Of course there’s a lot of Chinese fiction written by Chinese exiles, but I’m not that excited by it, I have to say. I think it’s a little heavy and I don’t feel like they’re getting it. It has a lot to do with the fact that a lot of these writers are exiles and are no longer living in China and are politically pretty unhappy about the place. And you really sense that in the writing; it’s very dark and really heavy. These tend to be really tragic stories. You don’t get the humour and I just feel like if you’re trying to capture China today the humour is important. There is an energy there and there’s a liveliness that the humour is a big part of. I feel like Chinese film gets it. So I always tell people, if you’re looking for a Chinese art form that is really capturing China at this moment, go for the film. I think the literature just isn’t doing it, for me at least [laughs]. The art is bullshit as far as I can tell. And the pop music is really derivative, and so on. The film is really interesting though and they get it. There’s a real range. There are good documentaries; good films of all genres. I find that more exciting. I think the writing gets overrated a lot. A book like Wolf Totem [winner of the inaugural Man Asia Literary Prize in 2007, written by Chinese dissident Lü Jiamin under the pseudonym Jiang Rong], I dunno, it’s like this really heavy book about wolves that’s supposed to be some kind of metaphor or something and you’ve got to read like 700 pages of this [laughs].

I wonder if this is related to what you said about there being this recurrent storyline in Western media that’s often looking for the fractures or the coming political instabilities…if maybe there’s a pre-established appetite in the west for this heavy, critical outsider stuff.

I think so, yeah. That’s a big part of it. The stuff that’s going to be translated in the West is much more likely to be that way. I also think it has something to do with the education system in China. It’s not a good education system for writers. And this is true of Hong Kong and Taiwan as well. And it’s very striking, if you think about it, that those places have not produced great works of literature. Look at Taiwan: it has this incredible history where these people lost this major war with the communists and fled to this island, and sort of changed the whole society and underwent this massive transformation to a factory island and then a bunch of them emigrated to the States and became scientists. I mean, like, you should be able to write a sweeping Tolstoy-esque novel about that place. But it’s not out there, you know? And that tells me it’s just not in the education system. Having spent time in Chinese schools, I don’t see it. If you want to be a writer, you need to be an individual, you have to be creative; and Chinese schools don’t emphasize those skills.

It’s especially striking if you compare the writer situation to what’s going on with the great filmmakers and where they come from. China has a really good system of film schools. They’re party-run and state-run, but they’re well-funded. So smart people go into these schools and learn the technical skills of filmmaking, and then they can go off and study foreign film and educate themselves. It’s easy to study foreign film. It’s a very translatable art. Much more so than literature and writing, which is something I really think you more so need to be taught. There’s always going to be people who develop out of nothing, but that’s rare. I was fortunate to have good teachers and was focused very early, and that’s what helped me become a writer. I think in China, it’s a much harder road. People think that material does it, but material isn’t enough. Like, saying, “wow, this guys lives in the ghetto in Newark and there’s drug deals happening all over the place; wow, that’s great material, he’s going to turn out a great novel.” But no, he’s probably not, because he’s only had a chance to go to shitty schools. It’s material combined with exposure to good education and perspective that lets you know what’s possible and how to write. It’s weird. It’s always an interesting question to me: how does a little place like Ireland produce tons of incredible writing and then you’ve got an enormous country like China which hasn’t really turned out that much quality stuff, from my perspective. There are a lot of cultural factors, and the culture is more important than the politics. I don’t think it’s censorship. If it was censorship, Taiwan would have already done great things.

So do you expect that China will continue to be your focus as a journalist and a writer?

No, not for the coming years. I see this as the last book I will do on China for a while. And now that I live outside of China, I don’t want to write about it from a distance. My wife and I would like to move overseas and study another language and investigate a new place. I’m sure I’ll return to China eventually, but I’d like to have a period of five or six years where I’m doing something different. It’s incredibly productive for me to be in China – there’s no question that there’s tons of material. But as a writer, it’s good to do new things and you want to make sure you’re continuing to learn and continuing to have new challenges. It just seemed to me like a good transition point. I think this book is different from the first two and creates a nice set. And I kind of feel like I’ve said what I have to say about my decade in China. Now I’d like to learn about something else and when I come back to China eventually it will look differently to me. And I think this step away, when I eventually come back to China, will have made me a better China writer, just as it will make me a better writer in general.

Any idea where you’d like to go next?

My wife and I would like to go to the Middle East, possibly Syria, to study Arabic and write about that part of the world. I think it would be interesting to write about another place that’s in the news a lot, but you don’t have a lot of stories about living there and the lives of ordinary people on the ground. I think that would be valuable. It’s different enough from China that you don’t always have to compare them, but there are some similarities in the sense that it’s a place with a really strong history, which, as a writer, gives you a lot of potential avenues of exploration. When you’re making this decision you want a place that interests you and you want a place that seems rich for a writer, where you can go in different directions depending on what strikes you. That’s the great thing about China: I could write about environmental issues, or population issues, or economic issues, or I can write about history. You know there are so many things, and you want to be in a part of the world that engages you like that. And I feel like the Middle East has that potential.

Yeah, I would love to read that book.

I know it’s not going to be the same. And I don’t think it’s possible for me to know the Middle East at the same depth that I came to know China, but that’s ok. I wrote my first book in China after only two years and that’s a book about someone approaching the culture in a two-year period. It’s not an expert book on China, but it can be very useful to have books like that. Where you show the things you notice as an outsider and how the place comes into focus, you know?