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"Hessler paints an expansive panorama of China . . . The result is an enthralling take on China's remarkable progress and its downside." --Publishers Weekly (starred)
"Peter Hessler has written a wryly observed, deeply empathetic portrait of modern China, told through the lives of his Chinese students and his own daughters' experiencesat a local school. Hessler avoids sweeping conclusions, trusting that the country's real story emerges from microhistories, everyday conversations and amusing glimpses into daily life. This is journalism at its most humane, and (especially for those of us who aren't Sinologists) a perfect primer on what China is really like." --Pamela Druckerman, author of Bringing Up Bébé One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting
"Fascinating and engrossing. Other Rivers is an extraordinary work of foreign correspondence and memoir, drawn from a quarter century of direct and intimate observation. With deep sympathy, humor and seriousness, Hessler portrays several generations of Chinese lives in the throes of staggering social, political and economic transformations--and how their experience responds to and reflects on our own." --Philip Gourevitch, author of We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families
"The hardest and most important challenge in writing about China is conveying the vivid individuality of the people who make it up. Peter Hessler does this wonderfully again. The students whose stories fill Other Rivers are funny but also super-serious, idealistic but also cynical, hopeful but also resigned--and in all ways memorable. They are China's next generation, and we are fortunate to be able to meet them in this book." --James Fallows, author of China Airborne and other books
"Beyond the headlines of strategic rivalry and military confrontation with China are countless stories of real people trying to live in a complex country . . . [Hessler] tells [students'] stories with empathy and affection . . . shines a valuable light on the reality of life in today's China." --Kirkus
About the Author
Peter Hessler is a staff writer at the New Yorker, where he served as Beijing correspondent from 2000 to 2007, Cairo correspondent from 2011 to 2016, and Chengdu correspondent from 2019 to 2021. He is the author of The Buried; River Town, which won the Kiriyama Book Prize; Oracle Bones, which was a finalist for the National Book Award; Country Driving; and Strange Stones. He won the 2008 National Magazine Award for excellence in reporting, and he was named a MacArthur fellow in 2011.
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Other Rivers: A Chinese Education Hardcover – 9 July 2024
by Peter Hessler (Author)
4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 49 ratings
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An intimate and revelatory account of two generations of students in China's heartland, by an author who has observed the country's tumultuous changes over the past quarter century
More than two decades after teaching English during the early part of China's economic boom, an experience chronicled in his book River Town, 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--while teaching current undergrads, Hessler gained a unique perspective on China's incredible transformation.
In 1996, when Hessler arrived in China, almost all of the people in his classroom were first-generation college students. They typically came from large rural families, and their parents, subsistence farmers, could offer little guidance as their children entered a brand-new world. By 2019, when Hessler arrived at Sichuan University, he found a very different China, as well as a new kind of student--an only child whose schooling was the object of intense focus from a much more ambitious cohort of parents. At Sichuan University, many young people had a sense of irony about the regime but mostly navigated its restrictions with equanimity, embracing the opportunities of China's rise. But the pressures of extreme competition at scale can be grueling, even for much younger children--including Hessler's own daughters, who gave him an intimate view into the experience at their local school.
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 tremendous, essential gift, 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.
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Other Rivers: A Chinese Education
Peter Hessler
4.55
212 ratings39 reviews
An intimate and revelatory eyewitness account of two generations of students in China’s heartland, chronicling a country in the midst of tumultuous change through the prism of its education system
More than twenty years after teaching English to China’s first boom generation at a small college in Sichuan Province, Peter Hessler returned to Sichuan to teach 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 in a student body of about two thousand. Over the years, Hessler had kept in close contact with more than a hundred of his former students, who were now in their forties. By reconnecting with these individuals—members of China’s “Reform generation” —while teaching current undergrads, Hessler was able to gain a unique perspective on China's incredible transformation over the past quarter-century.
In the late 1990s, almost all of Hessler's students were the first member of their extended families to become educated. Their parents were subsistence farmers who could offer little guidance as their children entered a brand-new world. By 2019, when Hessler arrived at Sichuan University, he found a very different China and a new kind of student—an only child whose schooling was the object of intense focus from a much more ambitious and sophisticated cohort of parents. Hessler’s new students have a sense of irony about the regime but mostly navigate its restrictions with equanimity, and embrace the astonishing new opportunities China’s boom affords. But the pressures of this system of extreme “meritocracy” at scale can be gruesome, even for much younger children, including his own daughters, who give him and his wife an intimate view into the experience at their local school.
In Peter Hessler’s hands, China’s education system is the perfect vehicle for examining what’s happened to the country, where it’s going, and what we can learn from it, for good and ill. At a time when anti-Chinese rhetoric in America has grown blunter and uglier, Other Rivers is a tremendous, indeed an essential gift, a work of enormous human empathy that rejects cheap stereotypes and shows us China from the inside out and the bottom up, using as a measuring stick this most universally relatable set of experiences. As both a window onto China and a distant mirror onto America and its own education system, Other Rivers is a classic, a book of tremendous value and compelling human interest.
GenresChinaNonfictionMemoirSocietyHistoryAsiaBiography Memoir
464 pages, Hardcover
First published July 9, 2024
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Peter Hessler is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he served as Beijing correspondent from 2000-2007, and is also a contributing writer for National Geographic. He is the author of River Town, which won the Kiriyama Book Prize, and Oracle Bones, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. He won the 2008 National Magazine Award for excellence in reporting.
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Tnpruett
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July 16, 2024
I infrequently post reviews on Goodreads. Writing reviews cuts into reading time; besides, I seldom feel like I have anything substantive to offer about any given book.
OTHER RIVERS is an exception.
To start: a disclosure. I headed into this book with a great many biases and preconceived notions. I’ve visited many of the locations described within these pages: Chongqing and Chengdu and Wuhan, fourth-tier Sichuan and Fuling (albeit only the city center and only for a few hours); I also know one of the students profiled in the book. I’ve lived in China working a variety of education-related jobs and interacting with Chinese students since 2016, including through the glory months of zero-Covid and (less fortunately) Shanghai’s lockdown and the following intensification of dynamic zero-Covid. I’m involved in Shanghai’s expatriate creative writing scene, where Hessler is oft-cited as *the* foreigner who writes about China the best. I’ve read many of Hessler’s New Yorker essays that form the basis of this book’s content, as well as Fang Fang’s WUHAN DIARY (in English) and more China reporting than is probably healthy for any individual to consume (I had too much free time during lockdown).
Put alternately, I entered this book already knowing many of the stories and facts contained within. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I had a complex reaction to OTHER RIVERS; several days after finishing, I’m still not entirely sure how I feel about this book. I’m quasi-optimistic that the exercise of typing and organizing my thoughts will help me better sort out my inconveniently contradictory feelings about the book. Worst case scenario, maybe this sure-to-be-epic-length review can add something to the fledgling online discourse surrounding Hessler’s latest book on China.
With that out of the way, I liked reading OTHER RIVERS! It was, quite honestly, a joy to spend more time in Hessler’s perspective, especially in the sections revisiting Fuling (a suburb of Chongqing and the setting of his first book, RIVER TOWN). The prose is strong, the story flows smoothly, and the depiction of China feels truthful to the country as I understand it. OTHER RIVERS is highly readable and informative.
But I have some serious reservations.
For the uninitiated, OTHER RIVERS covers Hessler’s 2019-2021 stint teaching writing at Sichuan University in Chengdu. It also covers Hessler’s experiences as a journalist and father in China during the early outbreak of Covid-19. It also serves as an update to the longitudinal sociological work Hessler began with the students he taught in Fuling (a suburb of Chongqing) in the late 1990s as documented in RIVER TOWN. While these three strands occasionally overlap, they mostly remain separate. Other Rivers has a clear beginning and a clear ending, but felt disjointed in its middle sections as it brings in major ideas (Hessler’s family history with China, a visit to Wuhan in summer 2020) that never reappear; the book sometimes felt more like a collection of Hessler’s New Yorker pieces (with extra material about current and former students) than a singular cohesive volume. While nowhere near as disjointed as Hessler’s previous COUNTRY DRIVING, OTHER RIVERS lacks the cohesiveness of RIVER TOWN and ORACLE BONES.
The segments of OTHER RIVERS I responded to the most strongly came from Fuling and the Fuling students. The stories Hessler shares of his former students — from elevator installations to taxi empires, from professional triumphs to personal tragedy — are fascinating and rendered here with genuine empathy. When paired with evocative descriptions of how Fuling has been transformed and rebuilt over the decades, and the government’s attempts at increasing tourism through schemes like a (failed) golf course, and how the former Fuling Teachers College (the primary setting of River Town) has decayed, OTHER RIVERS springs to life. It’s compelling and often funny and often sad; the decades separating Hessler’s teaching past and the book’s present lend these sections a genuine emotional weight.
Unfortunately, I found the sections centered on Hessler’s Sichuan University students less compelling; without the weight of decades, few of the younger students come across as distinct characters beyond a compelling project completed (or attempted) for class. OTHER RIVERS also never addresses one of the biggest changes to Hessler’s position as a teacher between his time in Fuling and his time in Chengdu; that is, his status as one of the better-known nonfiction writers in China (a status that would present huge challenges in getting Chinese students to open up). There are oblique references to how Hessler’s writing goes viral on the Chinese internet, but nothing more than that. Hessler does not discuss whether he adjusted his pedagogical approach to accommodate the generation gap between him and his students. I generally found the moments in OTHER RIVERS grappling with Sichuan University’s administration more insightful than the moments dealing with students (although, then again, I’m biased as I’ve spent the past few years working with young Chinese and encouraging them to share their life stories with me).
(I have less to say on the sections focusing on Hessler’s twins’ enrollment at Chengdu Experimental Primary School; they’re well-written, well-observed, wryly humorous, and very true to the Chinese primary school experience. As a writer, Hessler tends to focus on his surroundings at the expense of revealing his internal life, a trait which holds true in this section.)
OTHER RIVERS spans material that could easily cover two or three full books — a book about Hessler’s experiences on campus at Sichuan University, a book about catching up with Hessler’s previous students, a book about how Hessler navigated life in Chengdu and China more broadly as a writer in the Xi Jinping era. As a single volume, OTHER RIVERS runs broader than deep. Many major stories that have had a profound effect on today’s China are omitted, from youth unemployment (alluded to in the chapter on involution) to the plummet in China’s birth rate starting in 2017 (somewhat alluded to when discussing the vast number of schools China has closed) to the so-called double reduction policy that attempted to reduce competition among students (for a 2024 volume centered on education in China today, I was baffled that the single biggest story in Chinese education in the past few years is not alluded to in the slightest).
((I was curious whether OTHER RIVERS would touch on my idiosyncratic interest in Chinese amusement parks as Fuling boasts the wonderfully bizarre Meixin Village of Wine, but alas.))
My greatest hesitation with Other Rivers comes in its depiction of Covid-19. The book takes a break from Chinese education to include long sections focused on Wuhan and Chengdu’s early response to the virus (as well as a few paragraphs about lower-tier Nanchong); the stable era of the zero-Covid policy is depicted at length in the second half of the book. These sections are exhaustively researched and authoritatively presented; Hessler (and his students) produced excellent and compelling reporting about the pandemic. When reading, I felt the book setting up what happened next — the massive scale of Covid-19 contact tracing and testing and discussed in chapter seven as well as the chapter’s discussion of data privacy and health codes; the book’s early discussions about nutritional access in China and the book’s constant reflection on the political awareness of its characters, the book’s thematic foundations and reporting were clearly presaging a discussion China’s disastrous 2022. Right?
Wrong.
OTHER RIVERS compresses the final phase of zero-Covid, lockdowns, protests, and all, into a few pages of epilogue. Eliding the final phases of zero-Covid feels like an enormous omission, especially for a book finalized in late 2023, especially since Hessler has written about the lockdowns in the New Yorker, and especially as it ties so directly into topics discussed — at length! — earlier in the book; the reporting from the early phases of China’s pandemic is fascinating, but presented with deeply partial context and with no disclaimer of how rapidly and severely the situation shifted (also… Other Rivers discusses the experience of living in the relative security of China while America and other countries struggled with the pandemic; I’d love to see how a writer of Hessler’s ability and insight would describe experiencing the reverse experience less than two years later).
I suppose my feelings on skipping past China’s 2022 depend on what this book is meant to accomplish; several days after finishing, I’m still not sure what type of book OTHER RIVERS is meant to be. Is it primarily a memoir about the author’s experiences with education in China? If so, the book’s conclusion is more powerful as written, cutting from Hessler’s summer 2021 departure from China to his life in Colorado two years later. Then again, OTHER RIVERS is an often frustrating memoir, walking right to the edge of introspection before retreating into observation (such as a meditation on page 184 informed by a conversation with Emily about “the notion of a white male foreigner writing about a remote city in China” that concludes with a few anonymous Goodreads comments but no insight from the author himself) (plus, the book does devote dozens upon dozens of pages to reporting on the pandemic). Is OTHER RIVERS meant to be an accessible guide to interested Americans about China as it exists today? If so, then eliding 2022 is incomprehensible (at least to me). Before reading the book, I had high hopes that I could easily recommend this volume to family interested in understanding China; as the book exists, it’s too painfully incomplete for me to feel comfortable recommending.
(Then again, I lived through Shanghai’s lockdown; then again, I see every day how China has erased the physical and digital infrastructure that allowed zero-Covid to happen; then again, someone needs to write a definitive account of *that* part of China’s modern history and I’m not sure who can write it or when. As I said, I’m biased.)
— — —
I wavered between giving OTHER RIVERS four stars (which feels more faithful to my enjoyment level while reading the book) and three (which better reflects my frustration with the book’s limitations); I might change my rating later (I also wonder whether I'm too close to the book's subject matter to actually provide a rating). While the book didn’t fully click for me, I’m glad it exists (and in a few years, when I have more distance from the pandemic, I hope to revisit this volume); it’s beautifully rendered and, especially in an era where politicians on both sides of the Pacific feel intent on demonizing the other, I’m grateful for a book that goes out of its way to humanize the Chinese and, in its understated yet eloquet way, argue for further cultural exchange and mutual understanding between the United States and People's Republic.
Reading OTHER RIVERS was, in the end, a bittersweet experience; I loved returning to Hessler’s China, but the joy was tinged with my knowledge of the author’s departure from the Middle Kingdom, with the fact that this book will likely never be released in the country where it would resonate the strongest, with the fact that the book’s American release feels so quiet compared to the fearmongering being generated from the ongoing presidential election cycle.
Yes, OTHER RIVERS frustrated me to no end (I wish I could figure out what the book’s primary objectives were). I desperately hope that this isn’t Hessler’s final book about China.
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Geoffrey
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ReadApril 25, 2024
(Note: I received an advanced reader copy of this book courtesy of NetGalley)
In Other Rivers, Peter Hessler reveals a country that has gone through enormous change since his time teaching at a teacher’s college as covered in his first memoir, River Town – not only by focusing in particular through the lens of his daughters’ time in a Chengdu primary school, but also by reaching out and telling the stories of former students from his Peace Corp days long ago. Between this blend of his reporting on his family’s own experiences, the experiences of the men and women that he’s built relationships with, plus an abundance of contextual cultural and historical information, he’s created another entertainingly insightful work that has much to share about the current state of things in China, as is his wont. Fans of his previous works will definitely enjoy his latest publication (or at least so was my personal case). However, first-timers will have nothing to worry about, unless an in-depth and informative glimpse of a read is any cause for anxiety.
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whereisiris
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July 26, 2024
Rather honest observation, and sometimes it can get brutally so.
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Yng Du
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July 16, 2024
The more laughter I had for part I, the more tears I had while reading part II. After all these years, everything has changed while nothing has changed. The political climate becomes the backdrop, in a form of hectoring white noise: always buzzing or humming without telling you when or where it will raise to a high-pitched warning. I have felt every page of this book. And, like all his previous books, I forever appreciate that Peter Hessler has the curiosity, agency, and courage to document everything that has happened in my motherland.
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Anna Chen
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July 24, 2024
I'm exactly the generation that he described in Sichuan University. I nearly got into that department he mentioned cooperated with Pittsburgh University in 2021. I was a few points lower than the point line and I got into my current school which is the Chinese campus of a foreign universities. My mom was also like those students he described in River Town. She was born into a poor family in village, and then went to a normal school and then became a high school math teacher.
This book is just so heavy for me to read, because I relate to all the stories he told. That's my life and my mom's life.
But it also makes me feel uncomfortable. I believe what he told is true and actually happened. But the conclusions he draws is somehow strange. I don't think he is suggesting the right path for China. Maybe I will add more to this review. It's a good book for me to broaden my vocabulary of China.
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Mae
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July 18, 2024
An emotionally exhausting experience to finish book. Peter’s personal experience connected the events from 2019-2021, during which we experienced the traumatic Covid pandemic, the deterioration of US China relationship and the end of the globalization. The only thing he missed was the trump administration. It’s lucky for him not to experience that. What’s more traumatic is the Chinese education part. It reminds me of those intensively while unnecessarily competitive culture, which left me with perfectionism, anxiety and depression to cope with until this age. I do not deny that I had good time before. But compared with the consequences, I’m glad that I escaped that grand psychiatric hospital and now have the ability to reconstruct my life.
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CatReader
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August 17, 2024
In the '90s, American Peter Hessler taught at Fuling Teachers College as part of the Peace Corps; he subsequently wrote a memoir about his experience, 2001's River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze. 2024's Other Rivers is a(nother) follow-up on his earlier memoir (he's published several more nonfiction works on China in the interim), based on his experiences returning to China (now with his Chinese-American wife and their twin daughters) to teach at Sichuan University in Chengdu (after his application to return to Fuling Teachers College was rejected). He taught at Sichuan University for about two years, from 2019-2021, living through the early years of the COVID pandemic before his teaching contract wasn't renewed for what sounded like political reasons (something he ran afoul of several times during this stint) due to his journalistic activities.
I found this book to be fascinating and generally fairly circumspect in light of growing tensions in China-US relations. His contrasts between the Chinese students born in the '70s whom he taught in the '90s, and the Chinese students born in the late '90s who he taught in the late '10s/early '20s was quite interesting (he's admirably stayed in touch with many of his former students and writes about them extensively in his books). I was also interested in his insights into his daughters' experience at a Chinese language school (this reminded me of Chinese-American Lenora Chu's book Little Soldiers: An American Boy, a Chinese School, and the Global Race to Achieve where she enrolls her young son in a Chinese school while her family is on a work assignment in China). The glimpse at living in China during the pandemic was also intriguing.
As always, with a politically fraught topic, I would recommend reading as many different perspectives as possible to inform opinions. Other recommended books espousing a range of viewpoints are below.
Further reading:
Little Soldiers: An American Boy, a Chinese School, and the Global Race to Achieve by Lenora Chu
Red Memory: The Afterlives of China's Cultural Revolution by Tania Branigan
We Have Been Harmonized: Life in China's Surveillance State by Kai Strittmatter
The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir by Karen Cheung
Waiting to Be Arrested at Night: A Uyghur Poet's Memoir of China's Genocide by Tahir Hamut Izgil
AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order by Kai-Fu Lee
The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity by Amy Webb
China's World View: Demystifying China to Prevent Global Conflict by David Daokui Li
My statistics:
Book 178 for 2024
Book 1781 cumulatively
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Hwan Park
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August 16, 2024
Disclaimer: I am one of the two co-translators of the book for its Korean edition and have been a long time fan of the author’s work.
I came across Hessler’s first book River Town in mid 2000s during my 12 year stay in China. The book profoundly changed my perspective towards China and its people, towards the idea of living in a foreign culture. He has published 4 more titles since then and Other Rivers probably is closest to what you would call a River Town sequel. The volume has many other elements, but it is in essence a deeply touching update to the stories unfolded in River Town.
I was a corporate worker in Shanghai in the 2000s, operating in a largely localized business environment. For a Korean citizen who only had limited exposure to anything outside my own culture, it was a challenging life, albeit the long history of cultural proximity between the two countries. China at the time had the air of El Dorado. Looking back now, the rapid growth of the Reform era that had started two decades ago under the auspice of Deng Xiaoping had reached its peak, and the business world was on steroids after China’s recent participation in WTO. To paraphrase Hessler, during the decade “everything seemed possible while nothing was straightforward”. At personal level, it often meant you had to distrust people to get things done. Betrayals and tricks of all sorts were common at the prospect of slightly better opportunities. Rules and regulations were vague at best, in part because it was not possible to keep up with all the changes, in part because the government wanted to retain the right to interpret things the way they want when they want. This inevitably led to rampant corruption as people tried to navigate the bureaucratic labyrinth through favors. The sheer scale of economic growth where people with means could game the system resulted in a massive rich-poor divide.
Foreign expats in those days easily fell into the habit of dehumanizing, or ‘othering’ people around them, because it was difficult to make sense of what was happening from a larger context, or simply because they wanted to keep their sanity in the midst of the daily absurdity. Again, it helped to get things done. I was not an exception to such toxic behavior and it started to take its toll in 5-6 years. In addition to being unhappy, at one point my physical health rapidly deteriorated. After a few months of intensive checkups and soul searching, I read River Town.
In River Town, Hessler’s 2 years in Fuling in the 1990s sounded very different from my experience in Shanghai. It’s not that you don’t encounter absurdities in provincial towns. I spent a few months myself in the Jiangsu province to study Chinese when Hessler was teaching in Fuling, and the negativity foreign students had towards local population there was already visible. Hessler’s fundamental difference was that he tried to understand the people. And he genuinely did so based on his long term relationships with them. As readers of this book would find out, he kept correspondences with over 100 students from his Fuling days, continuing a longitudinal study of the cohort over the span of more than 20 years that is wonderfully unpacked in Other Rivers. The dynamic of teacher-student relationship might have played a role there because you don’t really have to know someone if your interaction with them is transactional. I realized I was so lost in my daily transactions that I neglected to find out where people around me were coming from. If there’s one thing I learned from living outside my own culture, it’s that despite all individual differences, you are inevitably shaped by the collective experience of your previous few generations, and it takes sincere interest and deliberate efforts to learn someone’s context. The more dramatic a social trajectory has been, the more puzzles there are to piece together. And drama was one thing modern China didn’t lack.
It seems Hessler intuitively knew that, and made great efforts to understand the people: by fact checking what he observed, by adding familial context to their behavior, by researching local history, by thinking in their shoes. When literature about China was dominated by China experts who assumed varying degree of superiority from a safe distance, his approach was not just fresh but revelatory. Because it changes your attitude, as it did mine.
In Other Rivers, Hessler puts his 1997 Fuling cohort next to his Sichuan University students in 2019. With the same level of affection and curiosity, he compares the two generations who spent their formative years at different points in the cycle of the Reform era, and concludes that the younger generation under Xi Jinping regime may have to deal with harsher, more unpredictable future.
Another major storyline of the volume involves Hessler’s own daughters. While teaching at Sichuan University, he sent his 3rd grade twins who did not speak any Chinese to a local elementary school in Chengdu (a very good one) for 2 years and dutifully recorded what he observed there as a parent. It gives you a rare glimpse into how Chinese school system at early age impacts children and their family, enabling you to imagine the society in near future when they grow up.
In the second half of the book, all these stories develop in the backdrop of the COVID-19. When there were only handful of US media correspondents left in the country due to US-China conflict, Hessler put on his journalist hat and covered the various aspects of the pandemic. He visited Wuhan and other cities, interviewed key scientists and vocal writers, and met local government officials handling lockdown and quarantine. Add to this his personal experience as a teacher and a parent at schools during the crisis, and you’ll get a very realistic sense of what the pandemic felt like on the ground in Xi’s China. His direct observation, however, is limited to the first 2 phases of the pandemic, when China fumbled miserably by covering up the initial outbreak in Wuhan, quickly followed by a brutally effective control of the situation by the central government. Hessler had to leave China against his will before the 3rd phase, in which another catastrophic “dynamic zero Covid policy” by CCP kicked in to inflict long lasting agony to the population. For this, there were criticisms against Hessler’s insufficient coverage of this phase in his New Yorker articles and subsequently in the book.
Another criticism could be about the cohesiveness of the volume as the elements mentioned above are weaved rather loosely together without an underpinning theme. It did not bother me much since I expected the book to be a memoir, about a period in the author’s life written in a flow state, while still giving a certain sensation at the end, like a mosaic that dawns on you as you slowly zoom out of the picture. In fact, this “show not tell” is something Hessler is known for. I had the pleasure of peeking into how the author might have crafted this at the final stage of the translation when the publisher sent in a revised copy with changes made to the original script that I had already finished translating. While carefully comparing the two versions, I noticed how skillfully he re-arranged the paragraphs, and removed phrases that might be more descriptive than he had intended, in order to create room for the readers to come up with their own feelings.
All in all, this was the most enjoyable book experience for me in years, so much so that I volunteered to translate it for my fellow Korean readers. Along with the US, Korea is perhaps one of the few countries in the world where China has the strongest potential existential impact as a nation. And yet China remains misunderstood by most Americans and Koreans. Other Rivers is a rare observation by a masterful storyteller that paves the way for a better understanding of where contemporary Chinese people are coming from.
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Tony Duan
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July 24, 2024
Yet another great read from Peter Hessler. There's a bit of overlap with his previous books, and his reporting in The New Yorker. But as always it's a part-memoir, part-travelogue, part-ethnography and an outstanding work of narrative nonfiction.
Hessler spent two years in the 1990s serving in the Peace Corps in Fuling, Sichuan. More than twenty years later, he's returned to the region as a professor (though this time at Sichuan University in Chengdu, owing to political reasons). Much of Fuling has become unrecognizable -- high rises have replaced rice fields, high-speed rails have replaced ferries. But the underlying roads and rivers have remained the same. Likewise, his students have become urban, worldly, educated, and cynical. But the political climate remains unchanged, as has the endless grind of capitalism-driven competition.
For this latest two year stint he's brought his family with him -- Leslie and grade-school twins Ariel and Natasha. He sends his children to public school, where he gets a look at the modern Chinese education system. Parents and children feel an immense amount of pressure — "involution" so they call it.
The Reform years lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty via capitalism. This is evident in the lives of his original batch of Fuling students, who were the first of their families to transition from rural to urban. But along with their opportunities, capitalism has brought an immensely competitive environment upon the citizens (for colleges, jobs, partners). Many are left feeling spiritually empty. It’s no wonder, then, that more than half of his modern-day Chengdu students express zero interest in having children.
Hessler’s visit coincided with the unfolding of the COVID pandemic, from 2019 - 2021. He documents his first-hand experience with Chengdu’s lockdown and subsequent re-opening. He even travels to the Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market to report in Wuhan. Much has been written online about the highs and lows of China's response to the pandemic; I won't re-hash those thoughts here.
The reaction of most ordinary citizens to the political situation is that of indifference. It seems to generally be seen as an annoyance to work around (such as the Great Firewall, VPNs for which are widely distributed by the university). Few are willing to take the risk to campaign against the system. Most would rather leave it instead.
Stray observations:
> Within the genre of Reform stories, there are a number of distinct patterns, themes, and moods. One of the moods is irony. Because Cousin Liu’s family background had been considered capitalist, he lost his chance for an advanced education; because he lost his chance for an advanced education, he was forced onto a path that led him to become one of Chongqing’s most celebrated capitalists. As a developer, he constructed gleaming new apartment blocks across a broad swath of southwestern and northern China. Meanwhile, back on the campus where Cousin Liu once worked as a lowly gardener, trees grew wild on the roofs of buildings that had been left to rot.
> After struggling to describe the music, Adam, who had sung in an a cappella group during college, finally recorded a cassette tape for the students. When I mentioned this to Adam, he didn’t recall the songs or even the act of recording the tape. During that first year, there were so many intense interactions that some incidents vanished from our minds. But Richard remembered. In his essay, he wrote: In the spring of 1997, Adam gave us a cassette of American ballads that he had learned to sing as a child…. There is only one singer and one tone—he sings emotionally from beginning to end. I still have this cassette. Every time I listen, I pay more respect to him who is a teacher, and tears inexplicably fill my eyes.
> When she wrote about her work, she rarely fixated on academic success: for her, the most important lessons to impart to children were social and emotional. She was frustrated that her father, who had built a career on achievement and status, failed to understand why his daughter dedicated herself to students from modest backgrounds. In one email, she wrote: I feel sad every time after calling my father. I’m just too ignorant before him. I don’t have enough knowledge to share with him on mathematics, or history, or geography…. I want to share with him my happiness when receiving flowers from my students; when they say, “I like you, Miss Emily”; when one little girl finally raised her hand asking to join in the play after being silent for one and a half years in kindergarten (her former teacher told me so); when one aggressive boy admitted his fault, and tried to be nice to his fellows; when one gloomy boy from a broken family found his safety around me; when the children try to behave when I have a sore throat…. I want to share with my father all these things which I truly value.
> Fang Fang described the profound isolation, but she also wrote about Wuhan with affection. This was part of her appeal: after succeeding as a writer, she had never abandoned her hometown for Beijing or other eastern cities that tended to be favored by creative types. In one quarantine report, she quoted something she had written many years ago for a documentary: The reason I like Wuhan starts with the fact that this is the place I am most familiar with. If you line up all the cities in the world before me, Wuhan is the only place I really know. It is like a crowd of people walking toward you and amid that sea of unfamiliar faces you catch sight of a single face flashing you a smile that you recognize. To me, that face is Wuhan.
> In the 1990s, it would have been easier to imagine faces, because that was the era of rural students who, with little awareness of the outside world, had named themselves with Sino-Dickensian flair. Along with Anry and North, I had taught Youngsea, Silent Hill, and Soddy. There was a girl named Joy, and a boy named Joy. One student called himself Tirana, after the capital of Albania, and another boy—quiet, serious, idealistic—was named Marx. A trio of farm kids from a poor county north of Fuling called themselves Lazy, House, and Yellow. Twenty years later, I wondered if you could track China’s rise through English names. For my online sections of freshman composition, most students had selected old-school white middle-class standards: Agnes, Florence, David, Andy, Charles, Steve, Peter, Brian. Whenever these names popped up on-screen, I couldn’t help but envision kids I had grown up with in Missouri—in 1980, there were three Brians in my fifth-grade class. When was the last time any American named his kid Brian? But nowadays the Chinese were making Brians in Sichuan and Chongqing. I figured that in the next generation, if China started to decline, it would begin with the Caitlyns, the Aidens, the Madisons. I was glad to have a Sisyphos in my nonfiction class.
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Richard Sjoquist
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July 20, 2024
Neither memoir nor field report, Hessler's latest non-fiction book brings his 18 years of intermittent living in China to a conclusion. But in a way, though, even through his years in Egypt and Colorado, his bond with China had never been broken; letters and later emails kept him in regular contact with his former students from Sichuan Province. As one who spent 11 years in China myself, albeit in somewhat different capacities, and who was married to a Chinese national, I naturally have a keen interest in Western media accounts of this nation, particularly those which touch on education. Having read his three previous books (his fourth, actually, if you count "Strange Stones") and pieces in The New Yorker, I had a fair idea what to expect of this volume. For the most part, his current account did not disappoint. I began with its last chapter and epilogue because I wanted to see whether it would elaborate on a previously published article about the denial of his contract renewal at a key university. Unfortunately, it served up little more information; to be fair, I suspect little more information was forthcoming which he could share given the byzantine bureaucracy of Chinese academia. To be fully transparent, I had heard rumors that one of the reasons Hessler was let go was that he had given as much attention to his own writing as to that of his students. But after reading the last chapter, I am now disinclined to promote that view. As avid readers of his writing already know, Hessler is a meticulous notetaker. Indeed, some of what he has always shared in his books on China goes beyond good journalism into the realm of ethnography. As one who completed a multi-year ethnographic study myself, I do not offer that praise gratuitously. Hessler is also very adept at taking disparate information and seamlessly if not always flawlessly blending it into his observations. It should be noted, however, that nearly all of his educational experiences have been confined to Sichuan Province and that he is not a trained academic (though I usually find that quite refreshing). Those looking for a strong narrative structure (e.g., as found in Salzman's "Iron and Silk" and Mahoney's "The Early Arrival of Dreams") will be disappointed (but again, this is not a memoir). And yet it must be said that does provide details on the changing lives of some of his former students with whom he maintained contact.
What sets this most recent work apart from most others (with the notable exception of Pomfret's "Chinese Lessons" and Fong's academic study, "Only Hope") is, in large part, its multigenerational presentation and the keen comparisons that Hessler makes between those born just before the One Child Policy was instituted in 1979 and those born at the turn of the new century. His ongoing, diligent and persistent correspondence with his former college students from the town of Fuling on the Yangtze River (as detailed in "River Town") reaped rewards when he returned to Sichuan and taught creative writing in a special Sino-American program at a university in its capital of Chengdu. As he relates, the latter assignment was more than happy coincidence and the author and his family had an eye on staying there for much longer than he was granted. Hessler delves into his classroom interactions in his latest book much more than his first book, which I was glad to see. He also provides us with a unique insider look at how an extracurricular organization--a student publication-was able to operate. But perhaps an equally valuable contribution in the field of education is the account of his young daughters' experiences in a local primary school (though, admittedly, hardly typical in some important respects). Little has been published in English in the past decade about Chinese students at this level since Tobin et al (2009) follow-up study comparing pre-school now to the late 1980s.
Beyond these important areas of interest, this book also provides personal insights into what it was like to experience the first and second stages of the Chinese government's pandemic response. In these chapters, Hessler is uncharacteristically more critical of Chinese government policy than elsewhere in this volume or, for that matter, his previous works on China. All in all, however, his ability and willingness to link the microcosm of what he observed to the macrocosm of what transpired in a rapidly changing nation over these decades, combined with well-informed historical and cultural references, makes this an essential read for anyone with a serious interest in and concern for contemporary China.
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Velho
5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful Book
Reviewed in the United States on 8 August 2024
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After reading this book, I was left with sharply enhanced curiosity about today's China. I now read every news article about the country. Many other reviews of the book are far better than I am capable of and I urge you to read them. For me, the book occupies a special place in my mind; the author hails from the university town where I live.
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George Colpitts
5.0 out of 5 stars excellent book on China
Reviewed in Canada on 22 July 2024
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Thought provoking book, easy to read. Very illuminating , particularly on Chinese education and life in China. Amazing writer and individual. Math education in China is outstanding, the author's children continued their Chinese math education remotely after they returned to the US!
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Sophia
5.0 out of 5 stars can't stop reading
Reviewed in Canada on 28 July 2024
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I had a hard time stop reading this book.
The flickering light of humanity is precious in this falling apart world.
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Happily Ever After Girl
5.0 out of 5 stars Great read about China
Reviewed in the United States on 22 July 2024
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I’ve been a fan of Peter Hessler’s since River Town. I enjoyed this book so much with the mix of history, current affairs and family. Above all I love his eye for detail and storytelling. I look forward to his next book.
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Dr Richard Sjoquist
4.0 out of 5 stars Rounds Out the Author's Experiences in China as a Journalist and Teacher
Reviewed in the United States on 16 July 2024
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Neither memoir nor field report, Hessler's latest non-fiction book brings his 18 years of intermittent living in China to a conclusion. But in a way, though, even through his years in Egypt and Colorado, his bond with China had never been broken; letters and later emails kept him in regular contact with his former students from Sichuan Province. As one who spent 11 years in China myself, albeit in somewhat different capacities, and who was married to a Chinese national, I naturally have a keen interest in Western media accounts of this nation, particularly those which touch on education. Having read his three previous books (his fourth, actually, if you count "Strange Stones") and pieces in The New Yorker, I had a fair idea what to expect of this volume. For the most part, his current account did not disappoint. I began with its last chapter and epilogue because I wanted to see whether it would elaborate on a previously published article about the denial of his contract renewal at a key university. Unfortunately, it served up little more information; to be fair, I suspect little more information was forthcoming which he could share given the byzantine bureaucracy of Chinese academia. To be fully transparent, I had heard rumors that one of the reasons Hessler was let go was that he had given as much attention to his own writing as to that of his students. But after reading the last chapter, I am now disinclined to promote that view.
As avid readers of his writing already know, Hessler is a meticulous notetaker. Indeed, some of what he has always shared in his books on China goes beyond good journalism into the realm of ethnography. As one who completed a multi-year ethnographic study myself, I do not offer that praise gratuitously. Hessler is also very adept at taking disparate information and seamlessly if not always flawlessly blending it into his observations. It should be noted, however, that nearly all of his educational experiences have been confined to Sichuan Province and that he is not a trained academic (though I usually find that quite refreshing). Those looking for a strong narrative structure (e.g., as found in Salzman's "Iron and Silk" and Mahoney's "The Early Arrival of Dreams") will be disappointed (but again, this is not a memoir). And yet it must be said that he does provide details on the changing lives of some of his former students with whom he maintained contact.
What sets this most recent work apart from most others (with the notable exception of Pomfret's "Chinese Lessons" and Fong's academic study, "Only Hope") is, in large part, its multigenerational presentation and the keen comparisons that Hessler makes between those born just before the One Child Policy was instituted in 1979 and those born at the turn of the new century. His ongoing, diligent and persistent correspondence with his former college students from the town of Fuling on the Yangtze River (as detailed in "River Town") reaped rewards when he returned to Sichuan and taught creative writing in a special Sino-American program at a university in its capital of Chengdu. As he relates, the latter assignment was more than happy coincidence and the author and his family had an eye on staying there for much longer than he was granted. Hessler delves into his classroom interactions in his latest book much more than his first book, which I was glad to see. He also provides us with a unique insider look at how an extracurricular organization--a student publication-was able to operate. But perhaps an equally valuable contribution in the field of education is the account of his young daughters' experiences in a local primary school (though, admittedly, hardly typical in some important respects). Little has been published in English in the past decade about Chinese students at this level since Tobin et al (2009) follow-up study comparing pre-school now to the late 1980s.
Beyond these important areas of interest, this book also provides personal insights into what it was like to experience the first and second stages of the Chinese government's pandemic response. In these chapters, Hessler is uncharacteristically more critical of Chinese government policy than elsewhere in this volume or, for that matter, his previous works on China. All in all, however, his ability and willingness to link the microcosm of what he observed to the macrocosm of what transpired in a rapidly changing nation over these decades, combined with well-informed historical and cultural references, makes this an essential read for anyone with a serious interest in and concern for contemporary China.
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