Country Driving by Peter Hessler

The book is subtitled A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory. The author is a staff writer for the New Yorker and was the Beijing correspondent from 2000 to 2007. He had gone to China as a Peace Corps volunteer in the 1990s, and he spoke the language. The book is in 3 parts.

In the first section, he rents a car and drives across northern China, roughly following the various great walls.

In the second section he relates life in the small village of Sancha, a couple of hours north of Beijing, where he rented a getaway home and becomes friends with a village family. He tells their story and makes the reality of the rapid changes occurring in most of China easier to understand as these changes also become part of Wei Ziqi's life. Wei is the father of Wei Jia and the husband of Cao Chunmei. Wei Jia is a little boy who is sent away to school at a very young age, who develops a serious, life-threatening illness and who recovers, who continues with school and begins to like the Western "products" that make their way even to this small village.

The last section tells of the startup factories and the workers (mostly young) who migrate from the countryside all over China to work in them. This particular city is Lishui, south of Shanghai, and in the province of Zhejiang.

So the driving is really only the first part and is part travelogue, part history, part sociology...all interesting, with many curious and strange customs and situations (to us Westerners) that he encounters as he drives about. But, the village and the factory stories are equally compelling and informative as this writer manages to engage individuals and tell general stories through their specifics.

China is changing fast and for anyone who is at all curious about the 1.3 billion people who live there, this book will not be disappointing.