It is always a strange feeling to read an old essay, and found it highly relevant to current event. My son is struggling with writing. Peter Hessler (何伟）is my favorite author. His <River Town> is a master piece. Sometime I am wondering whether I can find some "tips and tricks" from Peter to help my son to write. Yesterday I was Googling "Peter Hessler on writing", it shows up what Peter wrote in 2012， "Why I Write", http://www.whyiwrite.net/2012/12/peter-hessler/
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Unfortunately I haven't found out the "Guide on how to write for 9 years old" from Peter's essay. I also have Peter's teacher John McPhee's book <Draft No. 4>. Still cannot find any quick and easy steps that can help my son to write. The only thing I thought might help is: "Be quiet, and keep on writing". Hope one day my son will find the joy of writing.
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Reading Peter's essay, near the very end, I was so surprised to find out what Peter has observed back in 2012. Now in 2019, in the main stream media, people are talking about "Clash of Civilization". Samuel Huntington's 1996 book is popular again. There are lots of great virtues in western tradition. Like critical thinking, which I strongly believe be one of the important factor pushed technical progress, then we have industrial revolution and prosperity in western society. Another virtue is empathy, the ability to think from different perspective, and to think in other people's shoes. But main stream media is really lacking empathy. Like Francis Fukuyama's "The end of history and the last man", western society believes liberal democracy is the only form of society. And it has the moral obligation to change other countries to be "like us". This reminds me of late Qing dynasty. Proud and arrogant, lost the ability to learn and adopt.
Does writing change anything?
To be honest, I don’t care, not in the strictest sense. I’ve never been a political person; I tend to get bored when people talk about policy and big-picture things. I suppose that my time in the Peace Corps made me more realistic about a person’s impact, and more cynical about a certain type of idealism.
But Americans are attached to this idea, especially with regard to the developing world. You look at the books that sell well in the States, the best-selling books about poor places, and they tend to be about a foreigner who is trying to save people. You have Three Cups of Tea or Mountains Beyond Mountains. Individually these books can be great, and they tell important stories, but it concerns me a little that this approach tends to dominate the bestseller readership with regard to the developing world. The other main option is books about atrocities – child soldiers, or sex slaves, or things like that.
I wonder about the impact of these books, and I wonder about the vision they promote of the developing world. Americans seem to read these books and conclude: Thank God I was born in the good old U.S. of A. instead of in some crazy country like this. Or they think, We really need to fix these places. They conclude that if you’re going to live overseas, you need to be either a saint or insane. There’s no sense of normal life in a developing country – no sense that you might live in one of these places and have an enjoyable life, and make friends you respect and like. Obviously, there are some countries where it’s just not possible to live a normal life, because things are so troubled – but these places tend to dominate our perception of the world; they are represented disproportionately.
As a result there’s no real connection with the people, not in terms of understanding them and being able to put yourself in their shoes. These books don’t come out of a deep anthropological instinct. The basic interest is more along the lines of changing the world than understanding the world. But this has always been the classic American weakness beyond its borders. People want to get involved, and they want to change the world, but they don’t want to be patient. And they aren’t inclined to grant others the dignity of figuring out their own path.
One thing I liked about being in China was that I couldn’t over-estimate my significance, either as a teacher or as a writer. When I arrived with the Peace Corps, the country was clearly going its own way, and that’s still the case. Foreigners have some impact, but they aren’t guiding the country, and it’s not a playground for NGOs like so many parts of the world. The state-level stuff is of questionable value. When a head of state like Obama goes to Beijing, he’s performing certain rituals that are part of big-picture politics, but he’s not making a lot of earth-shattering decisions that will change China. In a sense, he has a lot less leeway than a migrant going to Dongguan looking for a factory job. So as a writer you’re best off sticking with that migrant or somebody like him; you should try to understand Chinese people. You try to figure out their stories and their motivations, and you try to write in an artful way. As far as I’m concerned, that’s enough. Good writing should enlighten and entertain, and it should have some quality of art. But it doesn’t have to change policy or raise funds for a cause. Plenty of other people are trying to change the world, often in heavy-handed ways that do as much harm as good.
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