Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
I love this book for many reasons. Firstly because he’s a beautiful writer and he gives you this wonderful sense of what it’s like to actually be there: the landscape and the people and the hustle and bustle, the pollution and the way the city’s built in the mountains with stairs going up and down, and the porters to carry your stuff that they call ‘stick-stick men’.
How would you describe the books you’ve chosen?
They’re memoirs. They’re five of the books I read when I was writing my own memoir of the time I’d spent in Yemen editing the Yemen Observer. I wanted to read a lot of other memoirs by Westerners who were travelling to Eastern places: how they structured their books, how personal they made their experience, how funny or serious… So with the exception of Three Cups of Tea, which is closer to a biography, they’re all written in the first person.
Which would you like to talk about first?
Let’s start with River Town by Peter Hessler. River Town is his memoir of two years teaching for the Peace Corps at a teacher training college in China in a very remote city – a small city of 200,000 people or so, very few of whom had ever met foreigners. So Hessler really was in a very isolated, alien place. I love this book for many reasons. Firstly because he’s a beautiful writer and he gives you this wonderful sense of what it’s like to actually be there: the landscape and the people and the hustle and bustle, the pollution and the way the city’s built in the mountains with stairs going up and down, and the porters to carry your stuff that they call ‘stick-stick men’. He makes it really easy for you to visualise this foreign place.
The chief influence for you was the visual aspect?
I liked that part of it, yes. But for me the most relevant thing to what I was doing was that he was teaching – in his case Shakespeare and other English and American literature to Chinese students – and a lot of his students wrote in ways that were similar to the way my Yemeni reporters wrote.
Not very well?
Their English wasn’t fantastic, but I mean in terms of the way the misunderstandings he’d have with his students reminded me of the misunderstandings I’d have with my reporters: differences of culture. So, for example, he was teaching with another man, Adam, who would ask his students to write about anything they wanted – ‘Write about anything you want!’ – and what he got from them were shopping lists. Everyone wrote: ‘What I want is a new TV, I want a new computer, a car…’ He talks a lot about how his relationship with his students changed as he learned Chinese, and how, as he learned the language, his own personality changed as well as his relationships with Chinese people.
He’s also very frank in criticising what he sees as political group-think in China. They’re very homogenous in many ways, and easily brainwashed with ideas about what the outside world is like, so he’d get a lot of essays about the sexual habits of Western women, about how they are bad women compared to Chinese women who are elegant and poised and refined.
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Jennifer Steil is a writer, journalist and actor currently living in Yemen. She has worked for several newspapers, both in America and abroad, while continuing to perform in theatres where it is legal for her to do so (ie, not in Yemen). Her memoir about running a newspaper in Yemen, The Woman Who Fell From the Sky, is published by Doubleday. ‘People who put themselves in uncomfortable situations end up with interesting stories to tell,’ she says. ‘If I’d believed the US State Department website I would never have come to Yemen.’
