Travel writing as it should be.

River Town
Two Years on the Yangtze
Peter Hessler
HarperCollins, $26, 432 pp.

Peter Hessler's River Town is a gem, the best piece of travel writing I have read in many years. A Peace Corps volunteer, Hessler spent two years teaching English at a college in Fuling, China, one of those smog-palled concrete towns that tourists glimpse from the decks of ships cruising the Great River. The book is a gem not only because it is literate and well written, but because at its heart lies the Fuling landscape: the grimy town itself, the lovely hills and rivers that are its setting, and its people--the students, teachers, and others whom, as his Chinese improves, Hessler comes to know.

Unlike journalism, scholarly analysis, or even expatriate memoirs, travel writing generally makes no claim to the kind of expertise that comes from years of living in foreign parts, or grubbing around in the dust of the archives. Rather, it asks that we trust a record of things seen and heard, a record direct and unmediated by the knowledge and opinions of others. More than that, it appeals to our imaginative identification with the traveler, an identification we are less likely to make with the expert.

Yet as a record of impressions, such writing also implicitly warns that the traveler's own sensibility enters into the account and into the representations of the unfamiliar and the exotic. "Our observation in any foreign land is extremely superficial, and our remarks are happily not addressed to the inhabitants themselves, who would be sure to exclaim upon the impudence of the fancy-picture," wrote Henry James. Today, thanks to Edward Said and others, we are suspicious of any claims to accuracy in descriptions of the foreign. Perhaps that is why it has become common for narrators to place themselves at the center of travel writing, so that often it is they, more than the human and physical landscapes through which they travel, who claim our attention. The result is an all-too-frequent diminishment of those landscapes.

This is precisely what Hessler avoids. We learn something about him--that he is in his late twenties, a native of Missouri, a graduate of Princeton and Oxford, a Catholic--but these facts arise gradually and naturally through the book, and never become its focus. We learn also that he is a refugee from academic English departments with their "hopeless mess of awkward words: Deconstructionism, Post-Modernism, New Historicism," every bit as meaningless and hard to define as the terms that encumber his Chinese students--Historical Materialism or Socialism with Chinese characteristics. Both for Hessler and for his students, the literature they study is an escape from such constraints, helped by the enthusiasm they bring to it. "Nobody groaned when I assigned Beowulf--as far as they were concerned, it was just a good monster story."

While in China, Hessler also finds the time to travel, near and far. He camps in the green hills above Fuling, rides a ship upriver to Chongqing, visits Yan'an, sacred site of the revolution, where Mao made his headquarters during the war against Japan. He travels as far as Xinjiang, a western province on edge because of the tensions between the Chinese and its Uighur inhabitants, and then back down to Chengdu, capital of Sichuan, a fifty-hour train ride with no place to sit down, trying to take his mind off the discomfort with memories of hikes through the green and blue valleys of the Valaisan Alps. On the road Hessler enjoys a traveler's freedom, unaccountable for what he says and does; meeting people, and talking to them about anything. When they tell him of the freedoms they now enjoy, he understands those in middle age are shadowed by the darkness of Mao's great famine and Cultural Revolution. For some, like the eighty-three-year-old priest of Fuling's Catholic church, the torments go back even farther, to 1949, the year of the Communist victory that Father Li, with no irony, refers to (like all other Chinese) as "Liberation."

Hessler--and Adam Meier, his fellow volunteer--are never allowed to forget that they are the only foreigners in Fuling. Besides the friendliness and generosity they find all around them can come trouble--insults shouted, rocks thrown. In one such encounter, Hessler loses his temper. Though the crowd takes his side, he is later deeply ashamed: "I had been educated at Princeton and Oxford, and yet for some reason I felt the need to face off with a Sichuanese shoeshine man until the locals said he had no culture." When he and Meier are photographing the town shortly before they leave, a crowd turns into a mob, and the Americans have to force their way to safety. Watching the tape later, they can't explain it: "All it showed was a blunt useless truth about life on the streets of Fuling: after two years we were still waiguoren [foreigners], both in the way we acted and in the way people saw us."

This kind of honesty is one of the book's strongest points, for with it goes an enormous sense of respect for his students, and for the people of Fuling. Never is Hessler tempted to make fun of them, even when explaining what happens when they encounter Shakespeare with Chinese Characteristics. There are no nudges of the elbow, no sly little ironic jokes either at their expense or at his own. He listens. He learns. And he writes beautifully.

Nicholas Clifford's study of travel writing about China, A Truthful Impression of the Country, will be published this summer by the University of Michigan Press.