One reason I thought of Mickey Mouse - Mi Laoshu in Chinese - is that the book continually showcases Hessler's gift for telling tales of cultural difference and mutual misunderstanding in a way that is both humorous and deeply empathetic. Those Mickey-the-Rat posters came to mind for two reasons while reading New Yorker staff writer Peter Hessler's Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West, a wonderful collection of previously published pieces, which are issued here in revised and in some cases updated form, along with an engaging set of introductory comments by the prize-winning author. These images shocked me but local residents seemed to find them unremarkable. When posters went up in Shanghai to accompany a campaign to purge that metropolis of vermin, they showed Mickey Mouse with a spike through his heart. But one thing I learned during my first trip to China a quarter of a century ago was that the distinction between these two kinds of rodents, both typically called laoshu in Chinese, is fuzzier there. Like other Americans, I draw a sharp line, linguistically and symbolically, between mice and rats. The American author Peter Hessler has written movingly on the subject of China's rural population (Eugene Hoshiko/AP)
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