Hessler at Abydos where you can clearly see the narrow Nile Valley and the abrupt change to desert.
Excavating at Abydos
Beautiful two daughters in from of the apartment entry.
Looking up the elevator shaft with the spider web iron work.
Dive into this engrossing book of creative non-fiction about Egypt, mostly since the overthrow of Mubarak. The focus is on the Arab Spring, beginning in 2010, through 2016. Hessler, his Chinese wife and identical twin toddler daughters, arrived in Cairo in 2011. On the strength of his three previous books about his experiences in China, he travels with an idea, but no contract for this book. He had just received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship that enabled the venture.
In a unique way, the Hesslers immerses themselves into Egyptian culture. He and his wife study Egyptian Arabic, the street colloquial spoken and written in Egypt. It differs significantly from al-fusha, Classical Arabic, which is the bridging language among the 26 or 27 colloquial versions used through the Arab world. They hire a unique tutor who uses words and situations from their immediate experiences to teach. Thus, the weekly vocabulary he shares with us is a springboard for what is happening around Cairo.
Portraits of the people who live and work with the Hesslers, for them, and around them populate the book. The garbage man and his family are front and center representatives of the role reserved for Coptic Christians and the illiterate lower classes. An Egyptian reporter becomes a fast friend. He is a homosexual in a country that still executes men and women who are caught in this “sin”. The site manager at The Buried, the oldest of Egyptian ancient burial sites and located in Upper Egypt at Abydos, exemplifies how ingenuity wins over bureaucratic stupidity and rapacious looters. Chinese retailers come to Egypt with nothing and succeed selling sexy lingerie in a country where most women are covered from head to toe in public.
Hessler’s picture of Egypt the country is not flattering. Egyptians lack the basic skills of organization. Their sense of time does not work with the Western world. Theirs seems influenced by the eternal time of their history rather than impetus of the present. Education is a muddle; better schools are taught in English, French, German—there are no significant schools based in the Egyptian language and culture. Yet, with Hessler, you will cheer for the small successes—which like everything else in Egypt can easily be buried by the immense desert sands that line the ten-mile wide oasis of the Nile River that is this country.
Highly recommended for all readers of history, the Middle East muddle, and travel books.
When you read this book, you learn that the Hesslers live in a Cairo apartment building adorned with ironwork spiderwebs. There are no photos in the book, but Peter Hessler was kind enough to send me some. He and his family now live back in China.