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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.
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Peter Hessler |
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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
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Peter Hessler |
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Virtually every Chinese citizen whom I came to know well was doing something technically illegal, although usually the infraction was so minor that they didn't have to worry. It might be a sketchy apartment registration or a small business that bought its products from unlicensed wholesalers. Sometimes, it was comic: late at night, there were always people out walking their dogs in Beijing, because the official dog registration was ridiculo..
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Peter Hessler |
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Sometimes they seemed to grasp instinctively at the worst of both worlds: the worst modern habits, the worst traditional beliefs.
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Peter Hessler |
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12567c0
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The joy of nonfiction is searching for balance between storytelling and reporting, finding a way to be both loquacious and observant.
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Peter Hessler |
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Everything still revolves around memorization and repetition, the old cornerstones of Chinese education.
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Peter Hessler |
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7bb11b3
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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."
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Peter Hessler |
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e7635ae
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In modern China, road building has often been a strategy for dealing with poverty or crisis.
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Peter Hessler |
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1057233
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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.
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Peter Hessler |
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34c0073
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Akhenaten's kingship provides an unintended caricature of all modern leaders who indulge in the trappings of charismatic display.
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Peter Hessler |
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4ee82ca
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Some slogans of modern political revolutionaries--" Make America Great Again"--echo the way that Akhenaten and other pharaohs manipulated nostalgia in order to justify change."
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Peter Hessler |
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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."
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Peter Hessler |
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69e91ce
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Look at America--children are taught to be independent and creative. In China, it's all about discipline. There isn't enough creativity, and if you don't have creativity, then you can't adapt and change. You just follow the same old patterns and you don't get any better. That
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Peter Hessler |
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6bec5f9
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In China, much of life involves skirting regulations, and one of the basic truths is that forgiveness comes easier than permission.
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Peter Hessler |
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6ccb197
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When you live in China as a foreigner, there are two critical moments of recognition. The first comes immediately upon arrival, when you are confronted with your own ignorance. Language, customs, history- all of it has to be learned, and the task seems impossible. Then, just as you begin to catch on, you realize that everybody else feels pretty much the same way. The place changes too fast; nobody in China has the luxury of being confident ..
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Peter Hessler |
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b6142f2
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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.
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Peter Hessler |
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Every always says that their product is the best," said Mr.Wang. "They have to talk about how much better they are than the competition, and usually they believe it. But the truth is that it's much easier once you realize that your product is inferior. Then you can focus on just doing business!" --
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Peter Hessler |
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1dc1e47
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The decorating scheme of Big World is simple in theme but complicated in execution. The theme is: things that shine and things that make noise. There are mirrors and glass railings and columns of polished steel; there are beeping lights and blaring loudspeakers; there are more reflective surfaces here than on a disco ball.
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Peter Hessler |
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08e61e9
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mental institutions, rural health clinics. Once, he met
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Peter Hessler |
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1a9ab8e
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For a Politeness Monitor, these responses seemed awfully terse and uncommunicative, but who was I to judge?
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Peter Hessler |
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13686f3
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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.
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Peter Hessler |
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3161545
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MIMI HAD ARRANGED A spot for Wei Jia in the children's ward of the Peking University Health Center Number Three,
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Peter Hessler |
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388b1bc
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a foreigner often feels most foreign while witnessing the early education of another culture.
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Peter Hessler |
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8cfccd6
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In the countryside, traditional parents avoid flattery, and the mother's responses were automatic--it was like knocking her knee with a rubber hammer. She didn't want to spoil the child, but there was also the Chinese superstition that pride attracts misfortune.
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Peter Hessler |
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b97f838
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The words of history are also the words of war.
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Peter Hessler |
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I sensed that this was a small part of what contributed to the passivity with regard to the Three Gorges Project in Fuling. The vast majority of the people would not be directly affected by the coming changes, and so they weren't concerned. Despite having large sections of the city scheduled to be flooded within the next decade, it wasn't really a community issue, because there wasn't a community as one would generally define it. There were..
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Peter Hessler |
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e952740
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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.
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Peter Hessler |
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e9ed113
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One challenge for a foreign correspondent is to figure out how much of yourself to include: If a story is too self-centered, it becomes a tourist's diary. These days, the general trend is to reduce the writer's presence, often to the point of invisibility. This is the standard approach of newspapers, and it's described as a way of maintaining focus and impartiality. But it can make the subject feel even more distant and foreign. When I wrot..
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Peter Hessler |
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bb75f61
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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 rea..
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Peter Hessler |
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e275e24
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In 1923, National Geographic Magazine claimed that the Great Wall is visible to the human eye from the moon. (In truth, nobody on the moon could see it in 1923, and they sill can't.) For a while, Chinese intellectuals tried to resist such exaggerations, believing rightly that the foreigners had confused both history and geography. But eventually the myths proved appealing to nationalists like Mao Zedong, who used the Great Wall in propagand..
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Peter Hessler |
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a7dd227
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Beijing maps featured cloverleaf exchanges that could have been designed by M. C. Escher.
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Peter Hessler |
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6a25575
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In China, the transition has been to abrupt that many traffic patterns come directly from pedestrian life - people drive the way they walk. They like to move in packs, and they tailgate whenever possible. They rarely use turn signals. Instead they rely on automobile body language: if a car edges to the left, you can guess that he's about to make a turn. And they are brilliant at improvising. They convert sidewalks into passing lanes, and th..
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Peter Hessler |
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05c69d1
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Nevertheless, Chinese drivers haven't grasped the subtleties of headlight use. Most people keep their lights off until it's pitch-dark, and then they flip on the brights. Almost nobody uses headlights in rain, fog, snow, or twilight conditions - in fact, this is one of the few acts guaranteed to annoy a Chinese driver. They don't mind if you tailgate, or pass on the right, or drive on the the sidewalk. You can back down a highway entrance r..
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Peter Hessler |
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6ebf252
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Average Egyptians take pride in their pharaonic history, but there's also a disconnect, because the tradition of the Islamic past is stronger and more immediate. This is captured perfectly by the design of Egypt's currency. Every denomination follows the same pattern: On one side of a bill, words are in Arabic, and there's an image of some famous Egyptian mosque. The other side pairs English text with a pharaonic statue or monument. The imp..
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Peter Hessler |
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6671075
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For some reason, it had become a tradition for tourists to throw money into the hole in front of the Sphinx. Of all the strange things that foreigners and rich Egyptians did at the ancient sites, this ritual most impressed Sayyid and his family.
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Peter Hessler |