A Bend in the Yellow River (Justin Hill, 1998)

ISBN 0-7538-0114-0

In this book, the newly educated Hill sets out with the hilarious over-confidence of callow youth ...

‘I had reached that time in life when the career begins to loom larger than the exams.... I was faced with a list comprising Accounting, Teaching, Law or Management Consultancy.’ – p. 17

(Great idea: let’s ask some kid straight out of school how to run the firm. Yes, that’s going to happen. My italics.)

... to undertake a teaching role with VSO in rural China. However, the unintentional humour of the author’s naiveté is about it for laughs: this is a serious book. Ignore the idiotic jacket notes (‘a story of hilarious cultural misunderstandings’) – they’re only setting the book up for something it is not. God knows why jacket-note-writers insist upon doing it.

I think Hill must have kept a diary while he was in China – from 1993 to about 1995, it appears – and the book has been culled from that. There are passages which begin "This morning" or "Last night...." (I guess there is nothing wrong with that although one might prefer the author to be honest about it, and the benchmark for this kind of writing is very high, being set by the likes of Bryson and Theroux.) But he has obviously fleshed it out with the benefit of hindsight because some parts have the ring of a set piece:

‘An American friend, new to China, once told me that she couldn’t get into the country. Couldn’t get behind the Happyland façade they presented to outsiders. The Mary Poppins land where Our Chinese People are kind, polite and beautiful.

‘That certainly was a problem for me, living in China, especially when so much time was spent with students. Although they were over eighteen years old, their lives were ruled by Confucian principles: they believed that in return for their service and humility, their masters would perform their role correctly. This ancient principle still underlies the Communist Party’s ideology.

‘... At times I felt there was no real depth to the Chinese society I knew. No substance. Everyone seemed to have the same opinion on the Past, Present and Future – views that were either naive or untrue. There was no talk of any scandal and no dissent about the government or society. The education system did not equip people with inquisitive minds, so they were taught to obey instructions without asking why. Sex seemed non-existant ....’ – pp. 73 to 74

The China that Hill portrays is rather sad; his characters without much hope:

‘I asked one girl if she would become a teacher. No, she said.

‘What will you be, then?’

‘I don’t know. My father is trying to find me a job. He is going around his friends at the moment, giving them presents. But he has little guanxi, he is a lecturer. I think I will become a teacher,’ she moaned.

‘That a twenty-two-year-old girl should have no say in her future career, which would be decided by which of her father’s friends would accept gifts in return for a job, couldn’t be right, I thought. But it was something which she accepted as quite normal. When I asked her what she considered a good job she replied, ‘One where I have to do nothing.’’ – p. 91

Although I suspect the relatively wealthy, western-influenced south-east of China is not like this, the value of a book like A Bend in the Yellow River is to provide such insights.

One minor detail annoyed me however. I don’t know where Hill picked up his pinyin – in China, I suppose – but the book includes consistent misspellings: huangying instead of huanying, Dung instead of Deng, and so on. However, on the whole, the book is well-written and, particularly towards the end, I was glued to it.

Recommendation: Recommended.

Look and Feel: My edition is the usual matt-finish paperback.

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