Tam

“Do you have places like this in your country?" Wang Yumei asked. I tried to imagine having a reunion with my friends in America and picking up a random foreigner and spending the day with him, simply out of curiosity and kindness. "No,"...”
― Peter Hessler, River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze

“It seemed there was always something of this sort on television - at virtually any hour of the day you could find a channel that was focusing on some happy minority, usually the Tibetans. This kind of entertainment struck me as uniquely hypocritical, at least until the next year when I returned home from China and tutored at a public elementary school in Missouri, where the children celebrated Thanksgiving with traditional stories about the wonderful friendship between the Pilgrims and the Indians. I realized that these myths were a sort of link between America and China - both countries were arrogant enough to twist some of their greatest failures into sources of pride. And now that I thought about it, I remembered seeing Indians dance more than a few times on American television.”
― Peter Hessler, River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze

“The history of China, like the history of any great culture, was written at the expense of other stories that have remained silent.”
― Peter Hessler, Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China's Past and Present

“Wang Chaosu shouted everything at me, the way many Americans do when they meet foreigners with bad English.”
― Peter Hessler, River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze