What Was Your Day-to-Day Life Like in China?

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"It was a strange combination of both being welcoming and fundamentally very suspicious you know people would be oftentimes I think we would surprise a lot of Americans just how welcoming your average Chinese person will be if you encounter them," he says. "Because of generations of propaganda they had also been trained to remember that anybody who presents themselves as a foreign journalist is obviously a spy, determined on breaking China apart and driving you back into poverty" He writes about his time in China for the New Yorker over 10 years.

Evan Osnos is a staff writer for The New Yorker. His new book is Wildland: The Making of America’s Fury.

“I'm always trying to get inside a subculture. That's the thing that I think has been the most enduring, attractive element for me. Is there a world that has its own manners and vocabulary and internal rhythms and status structure? And who looks down on whom? And why? And who venerates whom? Who's a big deal in these worlds? And if I can get into that, it doesn't even really matter to me that much what the subculture is. I'm fascinated by trying to map that thing out.”

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