Peter Hessler—Other Rivers: A Chinese Education

More than two decades after teaching English during the early part of China’s economic boom, Peter Hessler returned to Sichuan Province to instruct students from the next generation. At the same time, Hessler and his wife enrolled their twin daughters in a local state-run elementary school, where they were the only Westerners. Over the years, Hessler had kept in close contact with many of the people he had taught in the 1990s. By reconnecting with these individuals—members of China’s “Reform generation,” now in their forties, Hessler gained a unique perspective on China’s incredible transformation.

In Peter Hessler’s hands, China’s education system is the perfect vehicle for examining the country’s past, present, and future, and what we can learn from it, for good and ill. At a time when anti-Chinese rhetoric in America has grown blunt and ugly, Other Rivers is a work of enormous empathy that rejects cheap stereotypes and shows us China from the inside out and the bottom up. As both a window onto China and a mirror onto America, Other Rivers is a classic from a master of the form.

Peter Hessler is a writer of narrative nonfiction, an author of four books, and one of the foremost western nonfiction writers about China today. Originally from Columbia, Missouri, he has spent most of his writing life overseas. In 1996, he joined the Peace Corps, which sent him to Fuling, a small city in southwestern China. For two years, he taught English and American literature at Fuling Teachers College, an experience that eventually became the subject of his first book, River Town (2001), which was followed by two others about China: Oracle Bones (2006), Country Driving (2010) that comprise his “China trilogy,” covering the decade in which he lived in the country, from 1996 until 2007. River Town won the Kiriyama Prize in 2001, and Oracle Bones was a finalist for the National Book Award, in 2006.

Since 2000, Hessler has been a staff writer at the New Yorker, and he is also a contributing writer at National Geographic Magazine. Hessler won a National Magazine Award for “Instant Cities,” a two-year study of a new factory town in China’s Zhejiang province, which was published in National Geographic, in 2007. He was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2011. Each of the books in the “China Trilogy” made the New York Times bestseller list. His latest book is Other Rivers: A Chinese Education. 

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