Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside by Quincy Carroll
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In East Asia, among both expats and locals, there is a popular belief that English-language teachers occupy the bottom rung of expats as foreign misfits living it up without much purpose. That stereotype—belied to some extent by Peter Hessler and his debut book River Town which details his two idyllic years teaching in a town on the Yangtze—is very much at the core of this debut novel from Quincy Carroll, a former teacher in China himself.
The two main characters in Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside fit both the misfit and Peter Hessler models and they deal with the stereotype in contrasting ways. However, rather than a buzzing metropolis like Shanghai or a bucolic country paradise, this novel is set in Ningyuan, a rural town in the central Chinese province of Hunan.
Thomas Guillard is a cynical, jaded alcoholic new to town, who has been drifting around China teaching without trying to learn the local language, the sort who gives ESL (“English as a Second Language”) expat teachers a bad name. Daniel is a young, idealistic volunteer in his second year in Ningyuan who truly thinks he is doing something meaningful. Not surprisingly, the two clash and the story takes on a darker turn until reaching a somewhat unsatisfying conclusion. Besides the deep difference in perspectives, there is also the deeper question of purpose for expats, especially in China.
Daniel tries to make the most of his life, learning Chinese, befriending locals, dabbling with carpentry and going off on weekend motorcycle joyrides to the surrounding mountains. Guillard accepts the purposeless of his life, never making an effort to pick up Chinese norms nor even bothering to hide his racism and unleashing condescension at every opportunity.
It comes as no surprise when Guillard’s boorishness grates Daniel, whose idealism in turn gets at Guillard’s nerves. “Let me ask you a question. Do you think we’re even making a difference here?” taunts Guillard during an argument with Daniel about the effect of their teaching on their students over a pool game.
The simmering tension between Guillard and Daniel results in a cruelly blunt debate that cuts away at Daniel’s idealism. This clash of perspectives is not just only about expat English teachers, but expats in general, because in real life across China, Guillards and Daniels exist. While many expats identify more with the latter’s good intentions, the truth is self-interest can exist in different forms and it is something we should be aware of. As Guillard says about Daniel, “he thinks that just because he’s in China, he thinks he’s doing something special with his life.”
There are significant elements of Chinese culture like Chinese New Year’s family dinners and the inane drinking at banquets, but they are laudably not presented as an exotic backdrop. Both the Western and the Chinese characters possess different traits that prevent them from being overly sympathetic. For instance, Bella is the most studious and determined local student but her overly friendly nature comes across as tedious to the expat teachers, even Daniel.
Guillard’s cynicism and callousness however make him an absolute caricature of the worst expat stereotypes. There is no backstory for Guillard to offer any clues about what made him become the way he is. The result is that he is too one-dimensional to feel any empathy for.
Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside is a poignant, elegant debut that superbly explores cynicism and idealism but doesn’t fall into either.