Jordan Schneider (4:35)

Which one of you two was. Was more into it, who had to drag the other along? What were the other. What were the other options on the. On the table?

Peter Hessler (4:42)

Yeah.

Jordan Schneider (4:43)

Was it a joint decision?

Peter Hessler (4:45)

The other option was Damascus, to be honest. You know, and originally, I mean, that was really kind of what we were thinking. You know, we had some friends who had lived there and People were really enthusiastic about, oh, it's kind of a cool place and a good place, you know, because to study Arabic, there's certain places where it's better to do it. And Cairo is one of those places. And, you know, Damascus was also seen as one of those places. So that was sort of. We're actually kind of leaning toward Damascus. Of course, by the time the Arab Spring began, very quickly that was off the table. Not so much because of violence initially. Actually, Syria was not so violent, but it was just that you couldn't get in there as a foreign. As an American journalist. So. So pretty soon it was clear that our option was either Egypt or possibly Jordan, but Jordan's not. Is not really so interesting. So, yeah, you know, but in terms of the dynamic between us, I mean, it was very equal. It wasn't. There wasn't one of us that was pushing and one of us that was resisting, you know, I mean, you know, it's kind of crazy when we look back on it, we can't believe it because, I mean, we moved there with two 17 month olds to Egypt, you know, during the first year of the Arab Spring. And neither of us had actually ever been to Egypt before or the Middle east, you know, so it was really sort of insane. We just bought a plane ticket and carried as much stuff as we could and came over there with these two babies.

Jordan Schneider (6:02)

So you're making me feel like a total loser because I graduated college in 2013 and in May had a job lined up at AUC to work at a magazine there, and Cairo Affairs, I think, and I was all excited. And then that summer was when CeCe came back and took power and was.

Peter Hessler (6:24)

Shutting down, shouting everyone in the streets, coup and the massacre. Yeah, that was a rough time.

Jordan Schneider (6:29)

My parents were very subtle about it, but they would send me more and more articles. And then at some point, I sort of pulled a plug myself. But you guys stuck through it and made it another three, four years.

Peter Hessler (6:43)

Yeah, you know, I mean, I don't know if we would have moved in there if it had been right in the wake of that massacre. I mean, when we moved in in 2011, there had been the initial revolution in February. We moved in in October of that year, and things had been relatively quiet. It was unclear that it was going to be as violent as it turned out to be, you know, so maybe if we had known what we were getting into, we wouldn't have done it. But, you know, it was a real challenge. And this was an ongoing conversation. I mean, that summer you're talking about in 2013. You know, we were there during the coup. You know, we had. I'd always thought I'd move my family out for something like that, but the way these things kind of develop, you know, it kind of sneaks up on you. And by the time you can see that it's going to happen, it's sort of too late to get your family out, you know, so we ended up, I mean, I describe in the book there's that more the morning of the day that we know we're. We know there's going to be a coup. We know the, the president is going to be removed that day by the army. Just everybody knows at this point, but you don't know how it's going to, how it's going to come down. And, you know, our nanny came to care for the kids and she's a Coptic Christian, so she's very anti Muslim Brotherhood. And she had, you know, her fingernails painted with Egyptian flags. And then she had the girls, you know, my daughters who were. How old are they? 2013. They were three years old. She had them like making little Egyptian flags to sort of celebrate this coup that hasn't even happened, you know, that Lord knows how much violence it's going to. And, you know, of course I should be stopping this, but I'm. We're so sort of stressed out, Leslie and I, trying to figure out what are we going to do if things go south, you know, so we're having these conversations and just sort of letting Antioch and the girls, you know, celebrate this, you know, the removal of the president. And the conversation we ended up having is sort of like, well, you know, I'm going out to report on this stuff. During the revolution, at various times there have been cell phone coverage cut off. What do we do if you don't hear from me, if, you know, if things get violent in the area? You know, I mean, basically the best we could decide is there is an interior hallway in the apartment. You close all the windows and doors and, and you just go there and get close to the floor, you know, you know, which is the conversation A lot of Egyptians have, I mean, sort of to go through that experience. You realize that, you know, there are lots of people in the world who live with significant instability and they tend to respond to it remarkably calmly. And, you know, things tend to be okay, basically. I mean, it's, you know, and on that particular day, there wasn't actually tons of violence. I made it back fine that evening. But later there was a lot, you.

Jordan Schneider (9:09)

Know, and, you know, you had Americans, the sexual assault of the journalists. You had some young students get killed.

Peter Hessler (9:17)

Yeah, there were. I think there were seven journalists were killed during the years, were there? They were mostly Egyptians. You know, it was. I mean, I broke a couple bones in my foot at one of these protests where, you know, they just started kind of shooting indiscriminately and everybody ran like crazy, and, you know, you're falling over things, and I somehow, you know, misstepped and broke my foot. There was a lot. Yeah, there were a lot of this, you know, and they. And by the end, I mean, that was definitely in 2016 when we moved out. That was one of the reasons we felt like, you know, we were pushing our luck and that the crackdown was so intense at that point. And they had just killed this graduate student, Julio Ruggini, who had been doing research there, who was killed for. Nobody really knows why. All those things were very sobering.

Jordan Schneider (10:02)

So, speaking of sobering, today is June 5, 2019, 30 years and a day after Tiananmen Square. I'm curious if this isn't something you necessarily addressed in the book, but any kind of reflections of how your experience in Egypt maybe frames or recontextualizes what happened in Beijing 30 years ago?

Peter Hessler (10:22)

Yeah, you know, I thought about it a lot, actually. You know, because you were watching these events, the one where I broke my foot, actually, you know, this was in 2014. This was on the anniversary of the original, you know, Tahrir uprising, January 25th. And. And every year, to mark the anniversary, there'd be some kind of demonstration or meeting. And that year, the government put it down very violently. And so I was out on a square. This wasn't Tahrir, because you couldn't even go to Tahrir at that point with this kind of protest. But there was a sort of a small protest at another nearby square, and the police just started shooting indiscriminately after about five minutes of totally peaceful demonstrating by, you know, not a large crowd of people and, you know, not. There was no warning given. There was no clear the square. You have five minutes. There weren't even clear warning shots. I mean, people were getting. Getting. Getting shot. It's something like 60 people died in Cairo that day. And after fleeing, I finally kind of took shelter in a neighboring. I just met some guys who let me hang out in their garden until the police had finished rounding everybody up. And. And, you know, they were. They were very frustrating. And why does this keep happening? And they were asking me about. Because When I told them I'd lived in China, they were asking me, and I just, you know, I told them. I was like, you know, in China, at least, they, like, they would give people a warning. I mean, in Tiananmen, they did not. Right. I mean, this was part of the tragedy of Tiananmen. The awful thing was the terrible police work and the, you know, if you are going to. To, you know, to decide that you're going to declare martial law and clear the squirrel you've got, you should negotiate with people, you should give them a chance to leave. You should provide safe exits and places. They didn't do that. But, you know, after that, the Chinese did handle these things very differently, you know, and they did train police and crowd control, which is, you know, a very, you know, this is not something to give them a lot of credit for because, of course, there was a terrible crackdown. But in Egypt, you sort of saw how much worse it could be if they keep doing this. You know, if they just keep, you know, because we did this for years and years in Cairo, you know, there would be just these large body counts, and it was totally unnecessary and really tragic. So, you know, I thought about that. Just sort of the lack of professionalism, the lack of organization, the lack of system in Egypt, you know, is really damaging. And you could see the way that it hurt people. You know, I think it just damages the society to have these rituals of public violence again and again. I mean, we saw in China this happened in 1918, and people talk about how people have forgotten that, but, you know, people in Beijing remember it, and when I was living in Beijing, people would bring it up periodically, and it had certainly traumatized them, it had disturbed them. You know, it's a terrible thing to have happen in your capital. And in Cairo, we were doing this again and again, and, you know, it was very frustrating and very dispiriting to experience that. I think the other thing that I often thought about is how hard it is to have a revolution and thinking about other ways in which, you know, the Tiananmen movement could have played out. You know, what would have happened if the students had to some degree, won and if there had been, you know, you know, some leaders or group of leaders who had decided that they needed a change, you know, it may very well have gone. Had ended up what happened in Egypt, which is that it's the classic pattern where, you know, some arm of the military uses the students to take power, and then you end up with a military regime. I mean, that is, you're still very many steps away from change. You know, when you have all these people on the street, you're calling for the overthrow of a leader. Even if that leader is overthrown, as he was in the case of Hosni Mubarak. You've got a long way to go. And that was another thing that happened in Egypt that was very sobering is to sort of watch how hard this is. And when you don't have institutions prepared, you know, if you have no, you know, no political groups, you don't have real parties. So who takes over, you know, other than the military, what do you have? In Egypt they even had, you know, groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and there were some small parties that had been allowed to, you know, to form under Mubarak. But it wasn't enough, you know, so it makes, you know, made me very sober also about how hard it would be to have this kind of, you know, ground up change in a place like China, you know, where you don't have this sort of civil society, you don't have other political, alternative political organizations. If you do happen to overthrow the government, you know, who steps in.

Jordan Schneider (14:45)

Yeah, it's a really interesting thing to think about because, you know, even if, say the Communist Party gets overthrown because there's no other structures, this is what people and this is whoever comes next is going to ape. Whatever they saw, whatever they saw before. And I think, you know, you saw this a little bit in 1989 where like, you know, you have all these organizations and there's all this infighting within the students because this is what they've grown up with. And this is the, this is the model that they've seen.

Peter Hessler (15:14)

Exactly. You know, and it's the tragedy of it, the tragedy of an undemocratic society where you are not preparing people for self governance. And so it becomes circular because they are not prepared for self governance. They nearly want nor can enact self governance, you know, and so it's really hard to step out of that. And this is why most revolutions in the end are coups, you know, which is what we have in Egypt. I mean, I think, you know, I use the word revolution in my book, but I do question it repeatedly. And really, in the end, what happened in Egypt is more like a series of coups rather than a true revolution. There's not many revolutions in history. They usually turn out to be something else. And the one in Tiananmen Square, if it had followed through and if say, Deng Xiaoping had stepped down, the odds are the military would have Come in. You know, so you really. You know, it's something that's very important to think about is, you know, how do you prepare our society for real change? It's an incredibly difficult proposition.

Jordan Schneider (16:09)

Maybe stepping back a little bit and talking about a little more in general terms, about how this China frame of reference influenced you. We just spoke about the idea of these two revolutions you not necessarily saw in parallel, but kind of saw through the lens, as opposed to maybe an American showing up and thinking, oh, this is 1776, and look what Jeffersonian Democrats we have here. But, you know, did you feel this. Like, how did you feel this frame play out, maybe in comparison to yourself and other. Other foreigners living in Egypt or just. Or just more generally?

Peter Hessler (16:49)

Yeah. I mean, this was another reason that we made this decision to go to an entirely new place as we felt like we wanted another. Another point of contact, another frame of reference in the developing world. You know, our entire experience, basically. I mean, both of us had traveled a fair amount, Leslie and me, but we. The only place in the developing world that we had really lived and lived intense and spoke the language was China. And, you know, there is a risk of that becoming your entire view of the world. And you sort of realize, I mean, China is a pretty unusual place. And especially from 1996 to 2007, the years I was there, I wasn't sure that this, you know, this is probably not the representative experience of people who live in the developing world. And so I wanted to see something else. And, you know, so, you know, but I found it incredibly useful because, you know, the problem with the Middle east in some ways is that you always see it as an American. There's a huge amount of baggage there. You know, baggage that goes back to the, you know, colonial period of Western powers in the 19th century, but also baggage that goes back to the Iraq war in our more recent history. Israel, Palestine, all these things are very prominent in your mind and in your consciousness when you're there. But, you know, it's very different for the Chinese and coming there from China, you know, I am certainly an American. That's my deepest patterns of thought come from where I grew up. But I was in China long enough and intensely enough that it does really influence my, you know, my. My perspective. And there are many things that I see sort of through a Chinese lens, and Leslie's the same way. And so we were always talking about how this reminded us of China or how strikingly different and amazingly different this was. So for us, it kind of gave a different perspective on it. And I felt like it balanced the Western ideas to some degree. And, you know, I really found that to be incredibly valuable. And I expect now when I go back to China, I'll also see it differently because of, you know, what I experienced in Egypt.

Jordan Schneider (18:43)

You mentioned earlier in the conversation about Egyptians, when they heard that you spent time in China, they would ask you about it. I'm curious, like, what was the general reaction of just that story? Like, what were the common questions you got?

Peter Hessler (18:56)

Yeah, I mean, the Egyptians really liked China, at least during the period when we were there. It's different from other parts of Africa. There's many parts of Africa where I think Chinese presence has built a real resentment. Egypt is quite different, partly because it hasn't been the site of the kind of resource extraction that the Chinese are doing in other parts of Egypt. And the Egyptians were very positive about China. It was actually a really good identity. I think it was very good for Leslie in a lot of ways. I mean, she had a much easier experience than most female Western journalists, partly because she's not like a blond, white person who tends to attract the most negative attention and harassment on the streets of Cairo, but also because the Egyptians, like the Chinese, I mean, they saw the Chinese as. As, you know, people who had their act together, who had figured out how to develop. They also saw it somewhat as an alternative to, you know, to. To America and to the West. They saw it as another, you know, ancient civilization with a great history, but one that was, you know, making waves in the world today.

Jordan Schneider (19:57)

And they only 5,000, not 7,000. I mean, come on, what are they.

Peter Hessler (20:01)

Yeah, I mean, this always bothered the Chinese officials when they went there. I mean, I mean, there were, you know, some of these trips that Chinese officials had made to Egypt, you know, made them want to, like, you know, expand their historical presence in the, you know, museums and so on, because they felt like, you know, Egypt had had this greater history. So. Yeah, so it was a good identity, you know. And, I mean, I would often tell people, because, you know, being an American, there was not always a positive. And sometimes if people were sort of reacting to me in a certain way, I would mention, oh, I lived in China, or my wife is Chinese. Which kind of pissed Leslie off, because she's not Chinese. Right. She's American. You know, she's like, I'm not Chinese. But I. You know, I was like, look, I'm just trying to survive here, so. Because that kind of made people happy about you being there. If you had that other. That other thing Going, so, yeah, it was, it was interesting. They, and they, and they responded quite positively to the Chinese themselves. There were some Chinese in Egypt and, you know, Egyptians tend to be positive toward them.

Jordan Schneider (20:57)

So another thing you ended up doing is running into Chinese nationals and again, their reaction to you as a fluent.

Peter Hessler (21:05)

Mandarin speaker, you know, there wasn't my goal. And so when actually when I showed up there, I had knew, I knew that there were certain areas, you know, parts like there were a lot of Chinese students, for example, at university, mini Hui study, you know, Arabic there. But I kind of deliberately didn't explore this initially because again, you know, the point of this experience was to step away from China a bit. And so for the first two, three years, really, I had very little interaction with Chinese and I didn't go to the Chinese development zone that was near the Suez Canal. And in the end, it sort of happened randomly. I mean, I was, you know, actually, I mean, I was in. A. Part of this was after the year that you mentioned in 2013, when there had been all of those massacres and the coup in Cairo, there was also a lot of violence in other parts of the country. And I went to part of southern China that had seen a lot of violence and where a museum had been looted and a lot of people had been killed. And so I was, you know, talking to the people there about what had happened. And I visit this museum where, I mean, every artifact had been taken out. This place was just empty and gutted. Just a terrible scene that the poor ticket taker had been shot and killed and, you know, just, just awful things that happened here. And I was talking to people about what had happened and of course they were all blaming on the Americans and the Qataris. You know, they said Qatar in America had, you know, sent agents into town to do this. It wasn't the locals who did it. It was, you know, age and so on. And we're having these conversations which are very common. Conspiracy theories, of course, are really, really fundamental in the Middle east and in Cairo at that time and in Egypt. And again, this is a really remote place. They never see foreigners. And this is at a point when I, my Arabic is good enough to have these conversations. And I'm there alone. I drove there alone in my car and I'm talking to people in front of a market and they're telling me all this stuff. Yeah, you know, the Qataris and the Americans, they sent these agents here and so on and so forth. And then some guy just says, sort of randomly in the back of the Group. He's like, you know, there's a Chinese guy in the. In the market. And the word for China, actually sina, is very similar to Sinai, which is also sina. And so at first I was like, is he. Did you say China, or did you say Sinai? And he's like, no, no, China. There's a Chinese guy in the market. And he hadn't. They had no idea. Anything to do with China, of course. And I'm just American guy there speaking Arabic. I told them I was a journalist, came in from Cairo. This is my car. And I was like, really? Can you take me to him? And so he said, sure, sure. So a whole bunch of these guys take me through this market, which is, like, in these kind of outdoor markets they have in sort of poor parts of Egypt, which, like a warren of little shops and people selling really cheap clothing and cheap houseware and, you know, things like this. And we come to the very back of this place, and sure enough, there's this little Chinese guy, you know, in the back of this market, sitting in a stall by himself selling women's lingerie. And I was just like, you know, of course I started talking to him in Chinese and just like, you know, what the hell are you doing here? How did you get here? You know, and, you know, being Chinese, you know, Chinese are just like. They're kind of calm people, right? I mean, they don't get freaked out. And it's like, so speaking Chinese to this dude. And you got to figure somebody who ends up in southern Egypt alone selling women's lingerie in the middle of a revolution has got to, you know, he's got to have particularly low blood pressure. Yeah, he just took it all in stride, you know, I start talking to him in Chinese. He's like, you know, go with this. Sure. You know, and he's answering my questions as if this is a natural event for him as well, you know. And I'm like, what are you doing here? And he's like, well, he's a regular.

Jordan Schneider (24:38)

On the talk circuit.

Peter Hessler (24:39)

Yeah, yeah. You know. And I said, well, how'd you get here? He's like, well, my. My cousin was working in Minya, which is a town that's downstream, also in Upper Egypt in the south. And I was like, well, how did he get there? He's like, well, he knew somebody else who was selling stuff. It's like, so, what's your cousin selling? So he's selling the same thing as me, women's underwear. And. And then I started to realize, talking to him that there. That he knew lots of these people who were selling this product. And so after that, I started searching for these guys, and this was the right time to start to explore the Chinese in Egypt, because I had been in Egypt long enough that I, you know, I'd established other points of investigation. And this, of course, was just really interesting to me. What are these guys doing here? How did they get here? You know, what does this mean? And so I started, you know, sort of traveling around the south, finding Chinese people, all of whom were selling lingerie was the only thing they were selling. And there's basically no foreigners in these towns. And I mean, you know, and they had minimal Arabic. I mean, this guy was in this place where, as I mentioned, they looted the museum across the street from where he was. They'd burned down a government building across the street. They burned down a Coptic church. I think there were eight people had died in that. In that incident. And he. And this is, you know, months later. And he had only the vague. He had arrived after that, shortly after it, but he had only the vaguest idea that something had happened. I was like, do you know what happened across the street from you? He's like, oh, I heard there were some problems. And, you know, they took the attack the museum. But he didn't know that this many people had died. I mean, they were really sort of blissfully unaware of the situation that they were walking into.

Jordan Schneider (26:07)

So a little bit of background about the Chinese in lingerie.

Peter Hessler (26:11)

Yeah, I mean, this was what I was trying to figure out. You know, how did you get here? What are you doing? How did you figure this out? And, you know, it kind of connects to a couple of things. One is that in Egypt, the marriage tradition is incredibly complicated. Negotiations for marriage, you know, are really intense. They. They collapse. Often it's this. You know, families in general in Egypt are really intense. I mean, we think of China. There's another point of comparison of China. We think of China, this place where these families are really tight. And you have a lot of, you know, often, you know, complicated dynamics within families. I mean, it seems simple compared to Egypt. I mean, we go to Egypt, we're like, wow. We used to think China, you know, was sort of messy with family stuff. But, I mean, Egypt is totally, you know, it's another dimension. And so these negotiations for marriage involve a lot of really contractually laid out things, like the husband's got to get in the apartment, he's got to get certain, you know, big appliances. And meanwhile, the prospective bride has to prepare household Appliances, he has to get dishware, you know, and cooking utensils. All this is laid out in contracts. And she also has to acquire a certain amount of clothing kind of as her dowry. And part of this is lingerie, and it's huge amounts of this. They buy just crazy amounts of this stuff to show that they're ready to get married. And again, this is a place where women, especially in the south, they will wear, you know, these all. You know, they cover themselves pretty much entirely. And so they have. They have to have, like, kind of a different wardrobe for home, you know, because they wear more functional clothes when they're inside the home, when other strange men can't see them. And they also wear a lot of this really funky lingerie that you look at this stuff and you just laugh and think, is it. Are people really wearing this? But they were. They're buying a lot of it. So it's partly a reaction to this very restrictive, you know, kind of clothing that you have to wear in public. It's partly, you know, part of this marriage tradition. And then the reason the Chinese fit into this is that they're outsiders. You know, they're the ultimate outsiders. Their Arabic is bad. They're totally incurious. Most of these Chinese were from Zhejiang Province. You know, they were the classic Wenzhou ran. You know, the people that just do business, they don't care about anything else. Just. Just, you know, just show me the money. And they weren't connected to local communities, which actually turned out to be an advantage because they weren't gossiping, they weren't talking about what people were buying, and they put the customers sort of at ease. And again, gender had a big part in this because in Upper Egypt, in the south, in these very remote and very conservative areas, women almost never work, and they can't really run a business. So Egyptian woman can't run this business. Which means who's selling lingerie to the locals? It's local men. And does that make the woman comfortable when they buy it? Not really. You know, but if there's a Chinese guy who's doing that, that's something different. And usually they were doing it with their wives. It would be a Chinese man and woman working together in the lingerie shop. And. And this worked well. You know, it functioned very well because the, you know, it put the locals at ease. They liked that these guys were outsiders. The Chinese were totally incurious. They couldn't care less who was buying this stuff, why they were buying it. They weren't asking any questions. And it worked. So it was a really fascinating example of what you expect to be a clash of cultures, because these are two very different cultures. But in this case, it really functioned just perfectly, and they kind of liked each other's differences. You know, the Chinese would sort of say, you know, they'd kind of criticize the Egyptians. You know, they're lazy, they don't work very hard. But they also would talk about the positive things. And they said, you know, if you. There's one thing Chinese said over and over again. You know, if you're in Egypt, if I'm driving my car and I break down on the road, the first person who stops, the first person who passes will stop and help. That would never happen in China. You know, and they all said this, and it was totally true. You know, in Egypt, there is this tradition of helping strangers, of, you know, there's a certain sense of community that people don't have in China. And the Chinese appreciated that. And on the other end, the Egyptians, you know, when they talked about the Chinese, they said that that guy, I mean, him and his wife, they work really hard. You know, they're. And they're very honest, they're very direct, and so they admired them as well. So it was sort of a neat example of a couple clash of cultures that turned out where, you know, people saw the positives in each other rather than the negatives.

Jordan Schneider (30:29)

So another thing you. You do talk about, aside from the. The positive reflections that these. These Chinese in Egypt had on the Egyptians, they also had a few pretty incisive criticisms of, you know, what was holding Egyptian society back. Maybe if you want to talk about the. The kind of factory arc. I thought the contrast between, you know, the women that your wife portrayed in factory girls and the situation that went on in Chinese who created factories in Egypt was a really fascinating contrast.

Peter Hessler (31:00)

Yeah, they would all talk about the gender. You know, I think it's like 23% of Egyptian women work outside the home. It's very low even by the standards of the Middle East. The rates of female employment are low. And, you know, basically, husbands don't let their wives work. And, you know, this was, you know, again, one of the things that. That where the Chinese stood out was that they would work in couples. You know, so the young. The guy I met in that market in Malawi, he was there alone the first time I ran into him, but his. Just because his wife was. Was home for lunch or something. But usually they. They dealt. They ran their shop together. And this was true of all of the Chinese and actually, once I started visiting the Chinese around Egypt and saw these husband wives, it reminded me, well, you know, when I was in Fuling or in Beijing, so many of the little businesses and noodle shops and places where I shall my booze and places that I'd hang out were run by couples. And in Egypt, that basically wasn't done because the man doesn't want his woman out there in public, you know. And so you realize, well, you know, how crippling is this? You know, you've just got a huge number of people who should be working together and it sort of contributes to, you know, to the distance between men and women because they're not really sharing any endeavor the way that they often are in China. That was part of it. You know, it. The, the factory that you mentioned with came out of this lingerie business. One of these couples had been selling lingerie in the south in a place called Asute for a while. And then they just noticed that there was a lot of garbage around that people just threw away plastic bottles. And so the guy had the idea to import.

Jordan Schneider (32:32)

I'll read the quote because I think it's fascinating. Yeah, so they noticed a lot of garbage lying around. But they were, they were not the first people to make this observation, but they were the first to respond by importing a polyethylene teru thuplein bottle production line that was manufactured in Jiangsu province.

Peter Hessler (32:47)

Yeah, I mean, this was amazing because you have to keep in mind this is a couple who. The man has a 5th grade education from rural Zhejiang and his wife actually doesn't even. She never went to school. She's illiterate, you know, Chinese woman. But they figured out how to do this. It was unbelievable. And this was the first plastic bottle recycling plant in all of southern Egypt. I mean, this is a region that has, you know, 30 million people and they're just throwing this stuff in landfills. It's not going anywhere. But once these guys set up their plant, they start recycling this stuff and become hugely successful. I mean, they were clearing off, you know, $100,000 a year from recycling. People were coming from all over to bring bottles there. And it was really fascinating talking to them. And I, you know, in over the course of my research, I met other Chinese who were. Who had factories in the north. One guy said it very, you know, I thought most insightfully because he said, you know, because he had managed factories in China, the kind of places where that Leslie wrote about. And you know, I visit a lot of factories when I was in China. As well. And he said, you know, in China, when the young women go to work in these places, they're trying to escape. You know, they don't really know necessarily what they want, but they want to get out. They want to get out of the village. They want to get away from their families, and that's the first step. And then they get there, and they live in the dormitories, and their ideas start to change, and often then they start to have goals. He's like, in Egypt, it's totally different. He said, the women aren't trying to escape. They just want to make some money, usually for the marriage. And that was actually true. Most of the women that he could hire were young women who were not yet married, who needed money to buy the lingerie and the other things that go into their dowries. The moment they had earned that money, they quit. This was the problem with all of the factories that were being run by Chinese in Egypt was that nobody was making a career out of it. The women were just there temporarily to make the money so that they could get married. The moment they're married, their husband says, you can't work anymore, and they stay at home. So in a way, actually, in China, I think this migration and young women working were, to some degree, a subversive act. I mean, if you read Leslie's book, she describes. She describes these young girls who have become successful going back to their village, and the old men are trying to boss them around and tell them who to marry and give them advice. And the girls are just like, you know, screw you. You know, look at my cell phone. You know, I don't need to listen to you. I'm not gonna listen to you anymore. I'm gonna marry who I want. I'm gonna go back to the factory. I'm gonna go back to Shenzhen or Dongguan or wherever I am, and this is my new life. I don't have to listen to you anymore. And, you know, that was incredibly powerful, you know, moments for these people. And that would not happen in Egypt, because what happens is, you know, their goal is actually not to subvert the social system. It's to enter it, you know, so they make enough money so they can go back, get married, and become part of this, you know, this. This system. And the Chinese were very astute on this because they were observing it on the. On the ground. I mean, they were seeing how their workers interacted with their families in Egypt, you know, and. And, yeah, so, you know, to me, it was part of what was missing in Egypt. And part of what was missing from the revolution, I mean, I feel like this, it's always somewhat arbitrary how, what, what we call revolution. You know, China did not have a revolution in the years that I was there. But in many ways there were revolutionary changes in people's lives and in the ways people interacted, in the ways that families interacted, the, you know, the lifestyles. Egypt, I was there during a revolution supposedly. But, but in terms of how people interacted and particularly how genders interacted, there were no changes at all. There wasn't a social revolution. It was just a political event.

Jordan Schneider (36:29)

So you write that for Egyptians, the family was the deep state, while some of the Chinese observers say that China had a real revolution. And whether you counted at 49 or 67, China went from a society where women bound their feet to women working thousands of miles from home in factories with next to no contact with their old, you know, Xiao Chun. And then they come back and they're totally different people. So maybe teasing out a little more. I remember you had some point in the book about how the physical distance actually ended up making a big difference and to what extent, you know, like different thought patterns could end up changing when folks ended up working.

Peter Hessler (37:12)

Yeah, no, I think geography actually plays a role in this and that. You know, just the sheer size of China and the fact that development early on was so focused in the south, in these special economic zones like Shenzhen, it meant that when people left to work, they, they went far away. You know, so they would go, you know, provinces away and they could only go home once a year. And so the break was really total in many cases. I mean, they would, you know, they, they have to set up a new life. Egypt is a very different kind of country physically. You know, it's all laid out along the river. The transport lines are all along the river, the main highways and so on. It's not that big. More than 2/3 of the Egyptian population lives within a 3 hour drive of Cairo. You know, Cairo is a dominant city in a way that Beijing is not. You've got 17 million in Cairo out of 90 million. It's a large percentage of the population. And many of the other people are within three hours of that city. So it's very easy to go back and forth. So they don't break these connections to the village as easily, you know, and you could sort of see the impact of that. It was easier for families to continue to control the young women. And of course they wouldn't let the young women work, in fact, live in dormitories. You know, that was one thing that the Chinese learned very quickly. They set up a Chinese style kaifati, you know, sort of in east, in northeastern Egypt, near the Swiss Canal. And they did it following the Chinese model, which is that location is everything. Put this thing in the middle of the desert near the canal. You've got access to the highway that runs to Cairo and you've got access to the shipping lines. This is great. Everything's going to work. But they found out, you know, they built dormitories. They found out that they couldn't, you know, Egyptians would not let their young women live in the dormitories. They have to return home at nights, which meant that they had to recruit workers from the city of Suez, which is an hour and a half each way, you know, so you're cutting an end to your workday by bussing these people back and forth. So this sort of, you know, just geography plays a big role. I think geography also plays a big role in terms of the region. You know, look at who China was surrounded by. You know, when you think about 1978, when China starts to come out of this, you know, terrible turmoil and dysfunction of the Mao years, what do they see around them? I mean, they see Taiwan, they see Singapore, they see South Korea, they see Japan. The Chinese were very aware of the fact that they'd screwed up, you know, the fact that something had gone wrong. They also were aware of the models. Where does Shenzhen come from? You know, where's the idea of these export processing zones? South Korea had been doing it, Taiwan had been doing it. This was easy for them to do. So they, they, they saw a path out. Now think about Egypt. You know, what do you have around you? You know, you can look at Iraq, Syria, Israel. Who are your neighbors? Yeah, I mean, Israel's its own thing, and it kind of is. I mean, Israel has had a different level of support and a different level of, you know, the history is so unusual. It isn't really the same dynamic in a lot of ways. You know, so there's no models. You know, they're, you know, and the other thing is you, you don't realize how much, how bad you're all, you know, people in Cairo, always there. Even at the end of these five years I was there, you know, I've been saying, well, we're not Syria. Well, that's true. Right. But at some point you should be comparing yourself to something that's, you know, more positive and sort of, you know, I realized that was a very healthy thing. In China was this sense that. This sudden sense that we've messed up, we're behind, we have to catch up. And the Egyptians really don't have that. You know, they. They're not aware of how much better things could be, and they weren't putting pressure on themselves in the same. Same way. They weren't really owning the situation, you know, and there's a lot of historical reasons for this. There's much more colonial destruction and impact in the Middle east than there was in China, no question. But, you know, when I lived in China, certainly there was a lot of xenophobia and blaming the Americans or British or whatever, but in the end, there was some sense that we have some responsibility for this, whether or not they would say it directly. I think the Chinese realized this, that they had messed up, that the Cultural Revolution and all these moments when they had turned against themselves had damaged them and had put them behind. And implicitly, when you're making that realization, you understand, we can fix this, and we have to be the ones to fix this. We have some responsibility. You know, in Egypt, every fault, every problem is because of somebody else. It's the Americans, it's the Qataris, it's Israel, you know, but it's never us. It's never. We have these social traditions that we need to change. You know, we're not using our resources correctly. We're behind. That's not the realization. It's just that, you know, I mean, I met the governor of that province where they burned all his churches, and, you know, dozens of people were killed. And I said, you know, what happened here? What? You know, why did you guys have all this violence? And the governor. This is like the governor of, you know, of a province in China, he's like, it was Obama. Obama's the one who did this. You know, it's like, yeah, you know, Obama wakes up every day and thinks, what can I do to make Minya worse? You know, that was the perspective. You know, this is all. This is all Obama thinks about all the time, is how to make Minya worse. You know, this is what this guy's telling me, basically. You know, and I didn't have those conversations in Egypt. Of course I couldn't. I mean, in China, of course I couldn't go talk to the governor. You know, they're the head of a province in China. But if I had, and if he had spoken honestly, he wouldn't have blamed all the problems in his province on Obama, you know, and so this is. It's a big issue. And Something I kind of came to appreciate about China was there, what for all of the problems of the way Chinese look at history and the way they look at themselves. There was at some level a sense of ownership and that was empowering. And I felt like Egypt needed to get to that point, but I wasn't. I didn't really see it during the years I was there. You know, hopefully it's in the future.

Jordan Schneider (43:00)

So do you think it takes the levels of, you know, 1960s China disruption to get that change in thinking?

Peter Hessler (43:10)

That's a really good question. That's a really good question. That's one thing that one of the, I mean, the guy who has a fifth grade education, again, I'm going to an expert who's no schooling, but this guy's living on the ground, man. He sold lingerie in southern Egypt. He started this bottle recycling plant out of nothing and created. So I mean, I respect this guy's perspective. And he was one of the ones who would say most strongly gender relations are the big problem here. And he's like, you know, in China, we had a real revolution. People made a decision that they can't go on like this. We had to change everything. And in Egypt, they haven't really decided that yet. And it's sort of true. And you realize that when you have these revolutions, it's incredibly wrenching, it's incredibly painful. Bad things are going to happen. Lots of bad things happen in China. I'm not even sure if we would say it's a net positive. Who knows, you know, and that's an accounting that remains to be seen. But there's no denying that this was a major, major change to the society, shook things up. And nothing like that had happened in Egypt. And Egypt gets supported. I mean, basically the way things work in Egypt is there's a lot of subsidies from the Gulf states or subsidies from the United States. The US gives $1.5 billion in aid, mostly military, but also social aid, to Egypt every year. And all this sort of allows the place to kind of function, continue to function at a very low level, you know, just like basically subsistence, subsistence level. They can, you know, give people subsidized bread, subsidized fuel. And the thing keeps moving along without this sort of wrenching, painful change that I think might be necessary to sort of turn things around, you know, and the revolution really wasn't that it was a step, but it didn't follow through. And so things basically move along in more or less the same way that they always have, you know, and so that that was part of the context, you know. You know, we think of the Middle east as having been a really difficult region and awful things have happened. But you look at modern Egyptian history, they haven't gone through anything like what the Chinese went through in the 20th century and maybe partly as a result they haven't fundamentally changed their society.

Jordan Schneider (45:14)

So I just spent two years at a master's program in China and China Studies and doing it I watched a lot of Iqiyi but didn't necessarily gain too many hearts skills. Had I only known that at the University of San Francisco's new master in Applied Economics, I could have learned something to actually make me super employable. You know, R SQL, machine learning, all that good stuff you actually see on job listings in Silicon Valley and Zhongwang Soon. Not necessarily have you watched all of Juan La Song? So in this program you can study the economics of platforms, auctions and business strategy at the same time as you learn the tools of economics, experimental design and machine learning. Plus for all those non US students out there, this program is designated stem so you can apply for a three year extension on your student visa and keep working in the US after you graduate. To learn more and get an application fee waiver, go to USFCA Edujordan. So you know, if we were, if we're thinking about what the four olds of Egypt would be, religion would certainly, probably be number 1, 2 and 3, 3. The impact of you know, just kind of maybe the role of Islam in society, how it sort of plays into these things and maybe how you know, not having that religious tradition impacted or didn't impact it versus versus China.

Peter Hessler (46:32)

Yeah, I, you know, I mentioned the book at one point that the, you know, this sort of, you know, the Chinese foot binding which was this fetish thing with women that was very sexualized and strange and of course disfiguring is almost an equivalent to the female circumcision, you know, what we would call female general mutilation in Egypt, you know, which 90% of Egyptian women have had this terrible surgery, you know, when they're, when they're children. But when the Chinese decided to get rid of that, there wasn't a religious component to it. You know, you could sort of intellectuals started to campaign against it and you know, it, they were able to, you know, to stop that practice fairly easily because it wasn't tied to a faith. Now the weird thing is, is that this is an Egypt. Yeah, you know this is, but in Egypt, you know, this is something that, and actually the roots of this are not in Islam. And most Muslims around the world do not believe in it. And even the Gulf Arabs who are known for being conservative don't. It's not anywhere in the Quran. It's just. But it has become understood by Egyptians as part of their faith. And actually Egyptian Christians, Coptic Christians also circumcise their girls at a high rate. And so it's harder to change something like that when you believe it's part of the faith. No question. I mean the lack of religion in China, but also just, you know, religion in China was always different. It was always pragmatic, it was always somewhat flexible. People could go to Buddhist temples and they could go to Taoist temples, they could, you know, it was a different model of faith than sort of the Abrahamic religions, you know, the Christianity, Judaism, Islam. You don't move back and forth between these things. They tend to be all or nothing. They, all of them are quite absolute in the way that they get interpreted in the modern incarnations is particularly true of Islam which reacted to colonialism in certain ways by becoming more conservative and more restrictive. And yeah, so you know, that's, it's fundamental to what's going on in Egypt and to why it's hard to enact change because so many things are tied to faith. And even there's a very strong sense too that your fortune is tied to God and to God's decision. And you know, to Leslie and me, Egyptians often seemed quite passive because they would often say, well this is the amount of money that God decided I would have. You know, whereas the Chinese would be like, what can I do to make more? What can I do? And in China it can be exhausting and it can be closed minded and it can, you know, be the kind of greed and you know, that all of us have experienced and that's tiresome. But in Egypt it was the opposite. We often saw people who, that we would think oh my gosh, this guy should be pushing, you know, he should be innovating, he should be thinking about starting a little business or we should take this idea farther. But they were, you know, they would say, well this is what God has decided is appropriate for me, it's a kind of passivity.

Jordan Schneider (49:20)

So another maybe we'll, we'll do a few other four olds. The veil and the impact you saw and how it played out in interpersonal reactions and society at large.

Peter Hessler (49:32)

Yeah, I mean this is one of the things that's a real mystery when you arrive as a foreigner in Egypt. I mean, you know, you have what the Egyptians would call the hi gab, which is. You pronounce that hijab, I guess, in the. In proper Arabic, but in Egypt, it's a hegab. And that's just the head covering, you know, where you cover your hair. That's. That's. You know, most Muslim women in Egypt do that. But then you also have the niqab, which is the full face covering where all you see are the person's eyes. And, you know, this is what very conservative Muslims in Egypt have taken to wearing. It was very rare in the early 20th century, but it's become quite common. And, you know, I had a good friend became good friends with the guy who picked up garbage in my neighborhood, a guy named Saeed, and I became good friends with his family and. And his wife wore the niqab. And. And, you know, I always. This garment is sort of described as a religious garment in the sense that people have come to believe that Islam calls for it. And if they're very conservative, then they wear that. But one thing I realized when I got to know Said and his family well was that it was very negotiable. You know, his wife, Wahiba, would wear this thing when she was out in public in their neighborhood. For example, when she would come to dinner with us, when she got inside, she would immediately take it off. Once she got to know us well, and because she knew that we weren't Egyptians, we weren't going to talk about how she looked or tell the neighbors about her face or that she had done something inappropriate, she would feel comfortable with us and with me, because I wasn't an Egyptian man. And so you realize that this thing is actually negotiable, and it's actually a social. You know, basically a social in, you know, the. The dynamic has more to do with society, really, than it has to do with faith. It's. It's not something she believes God is telling her to do. It's something that her male neighbors are telling her to do. And it's also just incredibly disruptive. I mean, one of the first things Les and I realized is the moment she took that. The first time she took that thing off, it was so much easier to communicate with her. Of course, you know, our Arabic is not fluent, and we're relying a lot on, you know, facial expressions help a lot. You know, when you kind of don't realize that until you've had conversations with somebody whose face is blocked.

Jordan Schneider (51:39)

Sure.

Peter Hessler (51:41)

You know, and so it does have an impact on society. You know, it makes. And of course makes women even stranger and, you know, more otherworldly than they should be.

Jordan Schneider (51:50)

Next coming to classical Arabic.

Peter Hessler (51:52)

Yeah. You know, this is something that also looked different coming from China. You know, one of the issues of going to the Middle east if you study Arabic is that you, you almost. Most courses are structured, so you're studying what's called fusha, which is the classical Arabic, which is based on, you know, sort of an idea of what the Quranic Arabic is. And it's a language that actually isn't spoken anywhere in the Middle east, you know, and actually even linguists and even professors cannot speak this language fluently. They cannot talk contemporaneous, you know, extemporaneously in this language without making grammatical mistakes. It is such a complicated grammar because it was never used as an everyday language. But this remains the language of formal speeches. It's the language of the mosque, and it's a, it's the literary language. So, so virtually everything is still written in, you know, in classical Arabic. And it was really fascinating to think of after Chinese because it's very similar to classical Chinese. And actually many, many civilizations had some version of this. You know, in Greek there was a. People wrote in a classical Arab Greek. Up until actually, until 1970s, Turkey had a, you know, literary language that was not spoken. That was also. They finally reformed. And really the Middle east is probably the only place in the world that still has this situation where they're writing in a language that's not spoken, that has never been a colloquial language. I came to believe that this has a significant impact on the culture, on literacy, on expression, on political expression. This is not a popular idea in Middle Eastern studies. It's seen as very colonial because when Westerners were coming to Egypt in the 19th century, they sometimes pushed for reform of this sort. And, and, and, and people in the Middle east saw this as Western pressure trying to change our traditions. You know, so quite different outcome than the Chinese who of course reformed this in the, the Baihua movement. Yeah.

Jordan Schneider (53:53)

Almost went to all opinion. Right. I mean this is, this is something. Yeah, yeah, right. About this historical China owned.

Peter Hessler (53:59)

Yeah. You know, but in China they even thought about getting rid of the writing system. They didn't do that, but they did, you know, before the communists came to power even, you know, during the early 1900s, they, they stopped writing in classical Chinese and had people write in the colloquial. In every society where this happens, it has a big impact on expression, it has a big impact on literacy. And why would that be surprising? You know, you're obviously going to write, you know, more naturally in the language that you speak, and otherwise you're kind of writing in a. In a foreign language. And it's very awkward, and you have to be highly educated to do that. And, you know, I. I think this kind of thing has a big impact, but it's not really discussed in the Middle East. And I think it's one of the things that probably scholars of the Middle east would be critical of my book for. But to me, you know, this is like, I don't see why Egypt would be any different if every other part of the world has had a, you know, changes once you move to a colloquial form of the written language, why would they be any different? You know? But again, it's all wrapped up in the history of colonialism and the reactions to colonialism, which has traumatized this region to a much higher degree than anything China ever experienced.

Jordan Schneider (55:04)

Yeah, this very illustrative story you have about this. This activist who, once he starts getting, you know, he's like an adult, but once he starts, you know, feeling like he, you know, has something to say, he has to, like, put all this on pause and learn grammar and learn vocab, which is just a friction point to be taken seriously. If you're not someone who's kind of grown up around this really almost archaic language.

Peter Hessler (55:31)

Yeah. And it's, you know, you could see it play out in people. You know, I mean, one quarter of Egyptians are illiterate. And of course, much of the problem is a bad education system that's been underfunded and poorly structured. But I do think that the language itself probably plays some role. I give the example of Saeed, my. My friend who was the garbage man in our neighborhood. He was highly intelligent, but he was illiterate. He'd never gone to school for a day because his family was so poor. He had worked since he was like 6 years old. And when. When I knew him, you know, he was, you know, he couldn't read basically at all. And so his wife would. When they would fight, his wife would send him text messages. Because if he gets a text message on his phone, you know, he just gotten phones that started to use texting. And so he would get this message, and he'd have to go to somebody in the neighborhood to have them read it to him. And they would say, you know, you idiot, you did this. You know, she'd be criticizing him, and it's like it sort of serves two purposes. She could send him a message and she also kind of embarrasses him, you know, and, you know, it was sort of awful to see how, you know, how his illiteracy could be used against him. But one thing that was fascinating is by the time we left in 2016, he had become sort of semi literate. I mean, he could handle these texting functions on his own. And the reason is when people text, they actually do it in colloquial Egyptian, Arabic. They don't do it in fusha. And you know, so there's just an example this. It's not like he's going to class or something, but just because they're writing in the form that he speaks, he can do it. Whereas a couple times he'd enrolled in classes for fossil and he never gotten very far because it was just too intimidating for him. So, you know, it's, it's obvious that this is going to have an impact. It's just like, you know, in China, if somebody is moderately educated, they can at least express their thoughts directly without having to go to classical Chinese the way they would have, you know, 150 years ago.

Jordan Schneider (57:16)

So I guess coming back to the 7,000 versus 5,000 years of history, it almost seems like Egypt gets a, get gets another point this regard.

Peter Hessler (57:24)

Yeah, you know, certainly the history is longer, but one really important thing to think about, two things to think about. First of all, you know, Egypt has, see of the Old Kingdom, the Middle Kingdom and the New Kingdom. You know, this is how the past is divided. And there's dynasties, you know, like the 18th dynasties and the new kingdom and you know, the fourth dynasty builds the pyramids and so on. I mean, all these things have been laid out just like in China. We've got the, you know, the Ming and the Song and the tongue and so on. But one thing that you realize when you start to study Egyptian history is that all of those dynasties and names were not that they didn't call themselves that. This was all sort of named later in the 19th century. And some of it was done under the Greeks, but a lot of it was done in the 19th century by foreigners. So there was first the Greeks who set up this idea of different numbered dynasties. And then the Western foreigners set up this, historians set up this idea of the Old Kingdom, the Middle Kingdom, the New Kingdom. And you realize, well, you know, Egypt, they didn't even write their own history. You know, the history has basically been done by outsiders. And you think about the difference with the Chinese where the dynasties name themselves the most important historiographers in Chinese Tradition have always been Chinese. They are in charge of their past. Egyptians are not. They never have been. You know, almost most, the most important archaeology in the country has traditionally been done by Westerners, and it continues to be done by Westerners. You know, there are many institutions from England and from the US and from Germany, from other countries that have digs in China. And Chinese are, I mean, they have digs in Egypt and the Chinese are now starting to excavate in Egypt. Now imagine that. Can you imagine doing that in China? I mean, you could not go and say, we've got a lot of money, we want to excavate Qin Shi Huang's tomb. I'm from the New York University. You know, that's not going to get you anywhere in China, but you can do that in Egypt. So that's one difference. The other difference is that the last Egyptian to declare himself pharaoh was maybe it was like 138 BC or something like that. So from that time, from basically the first century B.C. all the way to 1952, there was not a single Egyptian ruler of Egypt. You know, you have the Greeks, you have the Romans, Persians came in, you have the Ottomans, you've got, you know, eventually you get to the British, you've got the Arabs. I mean, it's just all just wave after wave that. Yeah, you know, wave after wave of foreigners coming in and running the country one way or another. So think about what that does to a civilization. You know, China would talk about the damage that it suffered under the Opium Wars. I mean, that's incredibly minor compared to what happened in Egypt. You know, imagine if you'd had not a single Chinese person ruling the country from the Han until Mao. And that's basically what you've got in Egypt, you know. And so again, when I talk about the Egyptians not owning the problem and not feeling empowered, obviously this has a big impact. We have to think about the history. You know, it's, that's one reason why I write a lot about history in this book. I think you can't understand the place without it. Which was also true in China, of course.

Jordan Schneider (60:26)

The National Museum on Tiananmen versus the Egyptian National Museum. I feel like you could squeeze out a great essay on that.

Peter Hessler (60:34)

Yeah, no, I, you know, I. These institutions would look very different, you know, after having been in Egypt. I mean, it's just, yeah, the, the Egyptian relationship with their past is a bit more schizophrenic, you know, in the sense that they're certainly proud of their Pharaonic past, but there's a. There's a gap. It's not seen as continuous. They are not writing in the hieroglyphs. The hieroglyphs were forgotten for, you know, two, two thousand years or whatever. Nobody, people couldn't remember how to write, how to read those things. It's not the same as Chinese characters which create this sort of unbroken line in the Chinese imagination. The, the introduction of Islam, the invasion of the Arabs in this, in the 8th century. This is a huge break in the Egyptian past and it creates an entirely new thing. And Egyptians connect themselves much more strongly to the Arabs than they do to the, to the pharaonic Egyptians. And actually, you know, when you go to digs, it's quite amazing because they're excavating these ancient tombs. You cannot excavate any Islamic era grave in Egypt. That would be seen as. Oh, yeah, no, that's. There's. You could and you would never, you know, have tried to have local workers do that. And I talked with, you know, I spent a lot of time. And one of the sites I described is Abydos, which is the first, you know, the first royal necropolis in Egypt and has been used as a necropolis for 5,000 years. And they're always excavating these tombs. And I talked to the foreman who was also from southern Egypt, of course Islamic, and I was like, you know, you guys wouldn't excavate that cemetery over there. You know, it's an Islamic cemetery at the, at the edge of the site. He's like, oh, of course not. Of course not. He's like, but you. This doesn't bother you that you are excavating these guys graves here? And he's like, no, because they're kufa, the kufar, you know, which means infidels, you know. So he's not saying, these are my forefathers, these are my ancestors saying these are infidels. They didn't believe in Islam, and as a result, we can disrupt their bones, you know, so that sort of thing is, you know, is a real difference. There is this break and actually people in that community, when I would talk to them about their roots, so many of the, they kind of had organized themselves into tribes and they saw these tribes as being descendants of the Arabs who came from, you know, from Saudi Arabia and from the Gulf in the 8th century. And I mean, this was a really small number of people who did this when they came in, you know, Egypt was, you know, part of the Byzantine Empire. And it was, you know, it had become very weak. It wasn't very well administered. And it was pretty easy to overthrow those overlords and to replace them. And the Arabs were quite enlightened and they did a better job of running the place. And so the people pretty, you know, pretty easily switched over. But there weren't a large number of Arabs who came in. It wasn't like they came in, in a massive invasion and totally changed the population. But the locals connected themselves with these, with, with these people and they said we're descended from those Arabs, which is completely false. And meanwhile they've got this, you know, this cemetery, you know, this royal necropolis where you would, you would think people would say I'm descendants of these pharaohs and of these great, great, you know, these great figures in ancient Egyptian history. But that wasn't where they looked. So it's very different from the Chinese. And you would see this play out in the museums. You know, you go to the museum on Tiananmen Square, which I actually have not been to, but you know, because this came in since I was, you know, it was redone since I left. But I mean, it's obviously state run, it's state managed, it is a site of state worship to some degree. And the, the message is that, you know, China is and always has been and that the China of the Communist party is connected to the glorious China of the past. And the museum in Cairo was like very chaotic and sort of poorly managed. And you know, there were no inscriptions on most of the artifacts, but it was in some ways just kind of a wonderful place because it was really laid back and quirky. It felt like going to this attic where you have all this amazing stuff that's just been laid out. I used to love going there, you know, it was so much fun. You know, it just felt like, I don't know, it just felt like another world.

Jordan Schneider (64:38)

Coming back to this tribes idea, you have an episode in the book where you talk about a local election which was sort of beside the point, but you ended up getting very invested in the different candidates. You also wrote about a local election in China many, many years ago. Curious if you could compare and contrast a little.

Peter Hessler (64:56)

Yeah, I mean, you know, this again is something that looked quite different after, you know, after looking easier because one thing I remember, you know, I wrote about in country driving the dynamics of a village that was north of Beijing, which when I started going out there in around 2000. Was it 2001? 2002 was pretty remote. It took more, you know, about two and a half hours to get there is the end of a dirt road, you know, so this place, by Chinese standards at the time, was, was somewhat on the peripheries. But one thing that was very striking about that village, and probably any village you'd go to in China, is there was no question who was in charge. You know, the Communist Party was in charge. The. And, and, and who was the highest official in that village? It was a woman who had married in the, the family that had the most, the most, the most people in the village were. Surname. The party secretary. The highest official was not from this family. She had married into this family, but she was an outsider. You know, she had come from another village in the region. And to me, this is very striking, you know, that this person is first of all a woman and second of all an outsider. And she's married to a way. But the way she was married to was not one of the powerful people in that clan. And this sort of reflects the fact that the party has really broken the clan structure. And this would be true in, you know, in many villages you would visit in China. You know, you have no question who's in charge of. Why was she in charge? Well, you got to know her and you'd understand why. She was an incredibly powerful figure. I mean, she just was one of these people who had, you know, just incredible political instincts. She had force of personality. And somehow the party had figured this out. They knew that this woman could do things and they put her in charge. You know, it's not democracy by any means, but somehow this force of nature has risen to the top rather than the local clan figuring things out. Meanwhile, you go to Egypt and I follow the election there and, you know, you've got the, you know, the National Democratic Party had run things under Mubarak, and then you had the Muslim Brotherhood, and then after that, UFC come. But meanwhile, in this village, they've been doing their own thing because they've, you know, they had elections periodically throughout, you know, the last 40 years. And the locals had kind of figured out their own version of parties, basically based on families, and they would sort of fight it out amongst themselves. And nobody in central Cairo was powerful enough to really institute their own vision on places like this. It's a weak, very weakly governed country. And so, you know, this was a really striking contrast. Whereas in China, at the smallest level, you see the party still in charge, in Egypt, at the smallest level, the families were in charge. They were running the show. And what would the, what would the powers do, The NDP or the Muslim Brotherhood or the CC era government they would let them fight it out and then whoever won, they would sort of say, okay, you know, they would kind of co opt them in one way or another, but they didn't bother even trying to break these structures because I knew they couldn't do it, you know. So that's why I say at some point in the book that the family in Egypt is sort of the deep state because it continues to run things at that, you know, at the village level, at the local level, you know, it depends on families, clans, tribes. And you know, in China they had really broken that system to a large degree.

Jordan Schneider (68:14)

So aside from the elections, you also have this little window into the way bureaucracy works in Egypt. And I want to read a quote because it's illustrative and also beautiful of this moment where the illiterate garbage man who's fighting with his literate wife, the wife gets the husband in trouble and he has to go pay some bribes to get it all figured out. So you're in this, you're in this building with him and you write that even the people who were too poor to pay bribes were useful. They became a kind of prop. The way they crowded the hallways, staring hopelessly at the floor, persuaded more prosperous visitors to be free with their money and so said tossed off bill after bill, surrounded by a crowd of people who could afford to spend nothing but time. So before we get into the writing, maybe a bit on, you know, what it was like being in and around a country with that sort of bureaucracy versus what you, you encountered in China.

Peter Hessler (69:04)

Yeah, the Egyptian bureaucracy is enormous. You know, it's been bloated because of kind of make work programs. It's a type of social subsidy. Most people don't do anything in the jobs and there's very little room for advancement, you know, so there's really nowhere to go in it. You're just kind of doing minimal work and you're being paid enough to barely support your family. And that's sort of all it is. But it's. Yeah, it's a totally different thing than China where, you know, you, you also have a bureaucracy that many times can be hidebound and corrupt and so on, but they do get things done. You know, in China they can make decisions and the bureaucracy can enforce those decisions. And you know, you can maneuver that, that huge institution and in Egypt doesn't really happen. They're not really, you know, they can't really change policies basically. And so how do things work? It tends to be really face to face. You know, it's, it's not really systematic. And you know, in China you would figure out, you know, you have to go to this bureau or that bureau and you've got to do this for them. And you know, there's a process to something in Egypt, it really is just meeting the right person in the right way. And I would do this as a journalist. You know, I talked about in many times in the book, if I wanted to meet an official, I'm not going to bother trying to call the guy and trying to set up an appointment. I'm just going to go to his office and stand outside the door because there's already like 20 people standing outside the door. And these are just random local people with random problems. And so sometimes I would sit in these bureaus because they were quite open during certain periods after the revolution. And you could just look at the incredible range of demands that people would have. They would just go there and they'd complain about the electricity in their home and they would complain about some accident they'd have. Just totally random stuff going to a high ranking official and he decides whether he wants to do something about it or not. Which is of course exactly the way it used to work in Pharaonic times. You know, it's really like a Game.

Jordan Schneider (70:52)

Of Thrones scene where like, you know, you just have people rolling up into the throne room and you know, someone's got to deal with them.

Peter Hessler (70:58)

Right. And I would do the same thing as a journalist. So I would just go to these places and you know, maybe the guy would talk to me just like, you know, I mentioned earlier talking to that governor of the, you know, of, of, of Minya. I just showed up, waited along with everybody else and I show up there and once I'm in there then the governor's like really happy to talk to me and he tells me about Obama and how Obama's doing all this stuff and think about how different that is in China. You're never gonna like, you cannot get into with the government building to go talk to the provincial, you know, the head of the province for one, the party secretary. I mean that's totally insane. And if you did for somehow end up in his office, he's not going to tell you anything, you know. But in Egypt you show up there and they would just talk. And you know, because Egyptians love to talk and they're very good humored, they tell jokes and they tell you things they shouldn't tell you, you know, so it in that sense it was easy as a journalist once you could get to people to get them talking. But yeah, huge, huge difference. The function of the bureaucracy. You know, in Egypt, the bureaucracy is there basically to support people. It's basically a form of social. Social support. Whereas in, in China, that bureaucracy is there to enact the, you know, the policies of the Communist Party.

Jordan Schneider (72:06)

So I want to close with a few questions on writing. Would you mind walking through maybe first, how you thought about and edited this particular scene of this portrait of your friend in the. In the hallway, and maybe some more general reflections on what you think you do particularly well, Advice you may have.

Peter Hessler (72:23)

You know, I mean, that scene, I mean, a lot of it depends on the notes that you take, you know, so I'm. By the time I'm observing that and observing, said, going to the government bureaucracy, I've known him for that must have been two or three years into our friendship or relationship. And so I'm. He's very comfortable having me around, which is a big part of it. So I'm. I'm not really intrusive of. I'm just there watching him do his thing. And so that helps a lot. And of course, I'm recording everything in a notebook. You have to have good notes. You can't tell how a scene plays out when you're observing it. You never know which details you're going to want to use. The key thing is just to have as many details as possible. I'm writing everything down. What the guy's wearing, what the people look like, what they're saying, their body posture, everything. And then later when I sit down and write that, I'm figuring out how it works.

Jordan Schneider (73:12)

Are there questions you ask yourself? I feel like, you know, particularly when it comes to note taking. You know, when I first came to China, I felt like Peter Hessler, like everything was new. I was like, noticing all this stuff. I've noticed the longer I've stayed here, but the better my Chinese got. Like, things seem to have become less notable. So are there any, like, tricks or cues you have to sort of keep your eyes peeled and stop things from becoming too familiar that they just don't get noted down anymore?

Peter Hessler (73:37)

Yeah, I don't know. I mean, you know, some of this probably comes my background. My father is a sociologist and he's an intensely observant person. He just, you know, even around our town, he was always, always noticing things that are different or interesting or, you know, commenting on them. And I think I picked up a lot of that from him. Of course, it has become my job. So I'm just. Now I'm just Tuned that way. Like, I just try to be observant all the time. Even when I'm around my home, you know, I notice things in my community that are changing or that. That strike me. And especially when I'm reporting. Like that day with Saeed, you know, I just sort of. All my antenna are out, and I'm. I'm trying to notice whatever is, you know, whatever could be important, you know, and by the. By that point, I mean, I've been writing for almost 20 years, so. So you start to have an instinct for the things that matter and for the things that are good details. You know, writing takes time. It takes a lot of. You know, I remember my. My teacher in college, John McPhee, you know, he would always often say, you know, it takes a long time for a writer to develop and to grow. And this is something people often don't realize. You know, it's very rare to have somebody write anything of value in their 20s. And it's really unusual. I mean, there's a few cases you may have Hemingway and a few people who, you know, John Updike, who write things very young and that. But that's not like the common pattern. It's much more common the other way. I mean, look at John McPhee, my teacher, who always wanted to be a writer and who tried and tried and tried to write for the New Yorker. He finally got his first piece in the magazine when he was 31, and I think his first book, he might have been 33 or 34. You know, when you're 25, that seems pretty old. You know, you have to be patient. You have to let that develop. I mean, I. I wrote Rivertown when I was 29. It was published when I was 31. In retrospect, that seems early, but at the time, it took a long time to get there. I wanted to be a writer since I was 16. You know, it was all I thought about. And I read very carefully from that time and thought a lot about writing. Every book I read, I was thinking about the decisions that a writer would. Was making. I studied writing in college, but even so, it took me, you know, a full more than a decade after college before I was ready to write things that were good. So it takes a lot of patience. You know, you have to have a lot of faith in it. But, you know, in terms of what, you know, you're. You know, when I come up with details or things that are. That are nice pieces of writing, it often just comes from staring at the page a long time or reworking things. I mean, there's a part early in the book where I talk about the, you know, these sort of the way rumors work in the village. And I have this phrase where I talk about the alchemy of rumor where the gossip turns an artifact from bronze to gold or some minor find into something that's earth shattering. And it becomes this rumor that people, that people believe something, you know, really valuable is there under the ground. But that phrase, the alchemy of rumor is not something that comes to me in the field. It's not something that I'm thinking about while I'm watching. And it didn't come to me in the first few drafts. It came to me much later in the process when I'm just working through this thing and suddenly it jumps out at me. Yeah, you know, this gossip is turning these things into. That's alchemy. That's a great word. You know, but it's, you know, so that's usually how it works. It's, it's, it's time in two cents. One sense is that it's something I thought about from when I was pretty young and was focused on for, you know, for a long time. And the other aspect of time is even just sitting there on the page looking at these notes, reworking the scene. Over time, things get better. And you have to have the patience in both regards, the long term patience to stay with the discipline, to have faith in yourself, to have faith in your development. And then you also have the discipline and the patience to spend time with that page and, and with that description and keep trying to make it better.

Jordan Schneider (77:27)

This has been a true pleasure. Peter Hessler, thanks for coming on China Econ Talk.

Peter Hessler (77:33)

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Jordan Schneider (77:45)

China Econ Talk is edited by Jason Macronold and Kaiser Guo and is a proud member of the Sinica Network from Stock Up China. For other great shows on China, check out the Caixin Seneca Business Brief, the Pan Daily Tech Buzz China, the New Voices Podcast, and of course, the Sinica Podcast, now in its ninth year. Until next.

Peter Hessler (78:18)

Time.