I am surprised at how much I am enjoying Country Driving, which is subtitled A Journey From Farm to Factory.
I had known the book was based in China, and I thought it was literally a description of how things got from their farms to their factories, or something along those lines. Once I started reading it, I found that it was much more than that -- it's a travelogue, a panorama of modern China (in the cities) and historical China (in the towns and villages). Its how people live with the cadres and the Communist Party, working it to their advantage when they can, dodging it when they can. It's the people of China, and their attitudes towards everything from whether its better to sell buttons or bra rings (rings, by far; higher cost of entry bars competitors) to whether the Party Secretary is to be trusted (used to be, implicitly, now, not so much) to which cigarettes should you offer to a potential trading partner(Red Plums are always good).
It's their attitudes toward life, and it's fascinating.
2 comments:
It's always good to find something that spikes your interest. I recently read some Australian Bush Poetry that I found meaningful. I'm not always turned on to poetry, maybe because I don't read that much. Take care, Bill.
If someone had described it to me as a travelogue, I would have yawned and said 'that's nice', thinking of stories about the Glorious Great Wall and The Delicacies of the Orient. This was quite different. He had two other books in our library system, and I've requested one.
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