Please choose a five-ten page section that interests you and focus your response on it. What's interesting about the section? Why? What can you learn about writing from it?
Starting on page 125, Chapter 12, you read about how the old fisherman has actually no real hope of catching anything. He knows that fishing is no good right now in the winter weather because it's too cold, meaning that the fish don't move as much. But the part that really stuck with me is that he goes fishing, knowing that he most likely won't catch anything. He shares that the main reason he still goes fishing in this weather is because he just wants to play, because he is retired. He enjoys the stillness of it. For four hours the old man sits there knowing full well that he won't catch a thing. When Peter Hessler shares that the old man smiles as he looked over at the green water of the Wu River, I got a sense that the old man just has many memories sitting on that very rock and fishing. I don't think the idea is that he wants to quite catch something, it's that he just wants to be happy and be somewhere where he used to have happy times. It's quite uplifting if you really read a lot into it. I basically just learned that life doesn't always have to be this big extravagant party, you can just sit and do nothing to be happy in a place that makes you happy.
Mackenzie Ogden
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