Quotes from Peter Hessler

As a girl she had washed her handkerchiefs in the river; or perhaps she had washed the river in her handkerchiefs, because finally the water ran fragrant, sweetened by the beauty on its banks, which was how it

When Chen Meizi had chosen her specialty, she didn't expect to find a job that matched her abilities; she expected to find new abilities that matched the available jobs.

But there were reports that Jiang and other members of the Old Guard were resisting retirement, and experts said that the Beidaihe meetings would be the first battleground of the political transition. Communist China had never had an orderly succession—for half a century, every transfer of power had involved coups or power struggles.

Like many Peace Corps volunteers all over the world, I found that the parent visit was a kind of revelation: suddenly I saw how much I had learned and how much I had forgotten.

The Chinese people had invented the compass, paper, the printing press, gunpowder, the seismograph, the crossbow, and the umbrella; they had sailed to Africa in the fifteenth century; they had constructed the Great Wall; over the past decade they had built their economy at a rate never before seen in the developing world. They could return a rental car with exactly three-eighths of a tank of gas, but filling it was apparently beyond the realm of cultural possibility.

Beijing maps featured cloverleaf exchanges that could have been designed by M. C. Escher.

I felt a sense of brotherhood with anybody who peddled stories... A crowd had gathered around one man who sold pamphlets. He was in his early twenties, and you could tell from his appearance - dark skin, dirty collar, cheap blue suit - that he was a migrant. But he spoke beautifully, holding the crowd with his words... He sold pamphlets not because he needed to, but because the pamphlets deserved to be sold.

Whenever somebody turned his head, he shouted, Stop looking behind you!: There was a strict rule against head turns. When reversing, you were supposed to rely on mirrors only; the blind spot didn't exist, at least not in Coach Tang's eyes. Nobody ever wore a seat belt. I never saw a turn signal flash on the parking range at the Public Safety Driving School.

The American appetite for loneliness impressed me, and there was something about this solitude that freed conversation. One night at a bar, I met a man, and within five minutes he explained that he had just been released from prison. Another drinker told me that his wife had passed away, and he had recently suffered a heart attack, and now he hoped that he would die within the year. I learned that there's no reliable small talk in America; at any moment a conversation can become personal.

I realized that as a thinking person his advantage lay precisely in his lack of formal education. Nobody told him what to think, and thus he was free to think clearly.

I like to play chess. I moved to a small town, and nobody played chess there, but one guy challenged me to checkers. I always thought it was kind of a simple game, but I accepted. And he beat me nine or ten games in a row. That's sort of like living in a small town. It's a simpler game, but it's played to a higher level.

People with good memories are liable to be crushed by the weight of their suffering. Only those with bad memories, the fittest to survive, can live on. - Lu Xun

The joy of nonfiction is searching for balance between storytelling and reporting, finding a way to be both loquacious and observant.

I looked at the terraced hills and noticed how the people had changed the earth, taming it into dizzying staircases of rice paddies; but the Chinese looked at the people and saw how they have been shaped by the land.

In China it's common for people in restaurants to complain about food. The Chinese can be passive about many things, but food is not one of them; I suppose this is one reason they've ended up with a first-rate cuisine and a long history of political disasters.

The history of China, like the history of any great culture, was written at the expense of other stories that have remained silent.

Akhenaten's kingship provides an unintended caricature of all modern leaders who indulge in the trappings of charismatic display.

Everything still revolves around memorization and repetition, the old cornerstones of Chinese education.

the American press tended to portray a China that was overwhelmingly negative and Beijing-centered. And yet like any waiguoren in China, I knew that I had access to a great deal of information that was unavailable to the Chinese, and as a result I often felt as if I understood the political situation better than the locals. It was impossible to avoid this type of arrogance, even though I realized that it was misleading and condescending, and I was careful not to voice my opinions openly.

She and her family hadn't invited me in order to make a point about xenophobia, or anything like that. They knew that I was alone on the holiday, and i was their friend; nothing else mattered. They were simply big-hearted people and that was the best meal I ever had in China.

Rasha had been employed by two different Chinese shops, and she said that after this experience she would never work for an Egyptian. She described the Chinese as direct and honest, and she appreciated their distance from local gossip networks. "They keep their secrets," she said.

I began to see motorcyclists who had attached computer discs to their back mudflaps, because they made good reflectors. In a place called Xingwuying, locals climbed the Great Wall whenever they wanted to receive a cell phone signal.

All the women who worked in the shops were unmarried, and invariably they were fascinated by the relationships of their foreign bosses. "They're equal," Rasha, the assistant at the Chinese Lingerie Corner, said about the couple whom she worked for. "And they discuss things. They have arguments, but they talk about it. Egyptians just try to dominate.

That's the underlying philosophy of Chinese driving courses: if something is technically difficult, then in must be useful.