Quote from Peter Hessler’s “Country Driving”

I’ve been reading a new book about China by Peter Hessler called “Country Driving,” and I really like it.  He’s got a way of describing things about life in China that sometimes makes me wonder if he’s been in my head.  Here’s a quote that hit me hard one day:

The longer I lived in China, the more I worried about how people responded to rapid change.  This wasn’t an issue of modernization, at least not in the absolute sense; I never opposed progress.  I understood why people were eager to escape poverty, and I had a deep respect for their willingness to work and adapt.  But there were costs when this process happened so fast.  Often the problems were subtle–this was hard to recognize as an outsider.  In the West, newspaper stories about China tended to focus on the dramatic and the political, and they emphasized the risk of instability, especially the localized protests that often occurred in the countryside.  But from what I saw, the nation’s greatest turmoil was more personal and internal.  Many people were searching; they longed for some kind of religious or philosophical truth, and they wanted a meaningful connection with others.  They had trouble applying past experiences to current challenges.  Parents and children occupied different worlds, and marriages were complicated–rarely did I know a Chinese couple who seemed happy together.  It was all but impossible for people to keep their bearings in a country that changed so fast.