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Other Rivers: A Chinese Education
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.
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.
464 pages, Hardcover
First published July 9, 2024
359 people are currently reading
3031 people want to read
About the author
Peter Hessler
16 books1,751 followersPeter 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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July 15, 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.
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.
September 5, 2024
Question for anybody who has taught in China.
How the hell does Hessler get his Chinese students to write such great personal essays?
Sure, he handpicked the members of his 2019 Sichuan University 3rd year nonfiction writing class, but his first year engineering students write edgy, original, and insightful stuff too. He also had success nearly 30 years ago in Fuling with the sons and daughters of farmers.
My own experience with Chinese students, both in China and in NZ, is that they avoid writing by saying they have no idea or opinion on any given topic. I've often wracked my brains to come up with something they might go for. If writing a piece is necessary to help them pass, i.e. I tell them this essay is worth 10% of your course work, they will produce something formulaic and likely copied.
Peter Hessler, you are the Übermensch of China ESL teachers. Hence the Hessler effect...do not compare yourself to Hessler! I was happy to leave teaching behind me. I respect those at the chalk-face though.
Enjoying the book so far.
How the hell does Hessler get his Chinese students to write such great personal essays?
Sure, he handpicked the members of his 2019 Sichuan University 3rd year nonfiction writing class, but his first year engineering students write edgy, original, and insightful stuff too. He also had success nearly 30 years ago in Fuling with the sons and daughters of farmers.
My own experience with Chinese students, both in China and in NZ, is that they avoid writing by saying they have no idea or opinion on any given topic. I've often wracked my brains to come up with something they might go for. If writing a piece is necessary to help them pass, i.e. I tell them this essay is worth 10% of your course work, they will produce something formulaic and likely copied.
Peter Hessler, you are the Übermensch of China ESL teachers. Hence the Hessler effect...do not compare yourself to Hessler! I was happy to leave teaching behind me. I respect those at the chalk-face though.
Enjoying the book so far.
December 24, 2024
又一个从豆瓣消失的条目。
中国人民是最好管理的，儒家文化深入骨髓，“懂事”与“听话”是孩子能得到的最高褒奖。耳濡目染下，成长为善于逆来顺受的“天选牛马”。
在国内，有思想又有表达欲的人非常容易抑郁，读着何伟书中摘录的川大学生论文，一边佩服孩子们敏锐的观察和准确的表达，一边又忍不住替他们捏把汗……（就像在魔法世界里说出伏地魔的名字，巫师们下意识地感到不安一样……
曾有西人同学问我，中国人的信仰是什么？何伟这本书里似乎给出了答案“Competition”。
何伟也许是幸存者偏差，在疫情第二阶段来的中国（对此他自己也有所觉察），他对这个国家比我更乐观；然而，当如今留在国内的年轻人发现，即使拼尽全力“内卷”也看不到出路时，信仰崩塌在所难免，下一步，就是新的篇章——“躺平”。
当然，何伟接触到的学生样本存在一定偏差（重点小学和“985”高校），并不具备广泛的代表性，比如川大该学院的学生最后大多选择出国留学。何伟提到的“看不到太多‘躺平’的迹象”，或许在更广大的、留在国内的普通人群中，早已悄然蔓延。
即便如此，因为何伟的投入与热忱，和因此得到的真诚回馈，让书中记录的东西依旧能产生强烈共鸣。魔改古诗直接让我笑出声（少有的轻松时刻）；在国内不曾跟任何人谈论过的话题；专业课坐前三排，政治课永远坐最后一排，就着白噪音做自己的事的，就是我本人。
对何伟本人选择在涪陵和成都生活和工作，沉浸式体验中国教育的做法，十分欣赏，但对他把双胞胎女儿也投入试验场，持保留态度。作为作者和记者，这或许是获得一手观察和创作素材的捷径；但作为父亲，他剥夺了孩子们的选择权，让她们经历本可以避免的规训（用尺子画数学符���，用分数控制行为等）这是完全没问题的么？
中国人民是最好管理的，儒家文化深入骨髓，“懂事”与“听话”是孩子能得到的最高褒奖。耳濡目染下，成长为善于逆来顺受的“天选牛马”。
在国内，有思想又有表达欲的人非常容易抑郁，读着何伟书中摘录的川大学生论文，一边佩服孩子们敏锐的观察和准确的表达，一边又忍不住替他们捏把汗……（就像在魔法世界里说出伏地魔的名字，巫师们下意识地感到不安一样……
曾有西人同学问我，中国人的信仰是什么？何伟这本书里似乎给出了答案“Competition”。
何伟也许是幸存者偏差，在疫情第二阶段来的中国（对此他自己也有所觉察），他对这个国家比我更乐观；然而，当如今留在国内的年轻人发现，即使拼尽全力“内卷”也看不到出路时，信仰崩塌在所难免，下一步，就是新的篇章——“躺平”。
当然，何伟接触到的学生样本存在一定偏差（重点小学和“985”高校），并不具备广泛的代表性，比如川大该学院的学生最后大多选择出国留学。何伟提到的“看不到太多‘躺平’的迹象”，或许在更广大的、留在国内的普通人群中，早已悄然蔓延。
即便如此，因为何伟的投入与热忱，和因此得到的真诚回馈，让书中记录的东西依旧能产生强烈共鸣。魔改古诗直接让我笑出声（少有的轻松时刻）；在国内不曾跟任何人谈论过的话题；专业课坐前三排，政治课永远坐最后一排，就着白噪音做自己的事的，就是我本人。
对何伟本人选择在涪陵和成都生活和工作，沉浸式体验中国教育的做法，十分欣赏，但对他把双胞胎女儿也投入试验场，持保留态度。作为作者和记者，这或许是获得一手观察和创作素材的捷径；但作为父亲，他剥夺了孩子们的选择权，让她们经历本可以避免的规训（用尺子画数学符���，用分数控制行为等）这是完全没问题的么？
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.
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.
February 6, 2025
In the Summer of 2019, Peter Hessler took a teaching job at Sichuan University in Chengdu, China. He enrolled his twin daughters at a local public elementary school. A few months later, Covid-19 happened. Other Rivers documents Peter Hessler and his family’s stay in China between 2019 and 2021. In the book, Hessler also gives updates of the students he taught 25 years ago. Other Rivers relives the first two years of the pandemic, but there are a lot more in it. I recommend the book to anyone who is interested in China from the 1990s onwards.
I’ve been following Peter Hessler’s writing since River Town. He strikes me as having genuine interests in Chinese people and the land, and a patient listener with an open mind, not one of those novelty-seeking foreigners or those who look for confirmation of their biases. My friends inside and outside China love him. However, in an article in the New Yorker some years ago, he seemed to be too accommodating to the regime. The article smelt self-censorship. The Covid dispatches smelt the same smell. Reading Other Rivers, I realize he did self-censor while writing inside China but now because he has left China, he can freely express himself again.
The author asks: “How could a country experience so much social and economical change, but the politics remain stagnant?”
I have no answer.
The young women of China give me hope.
For 40 years, the world has been watching China combine authoritarian and censorship with economic success, freedom of movement (compared to China’s past) and improved education. However, I do not believe the contradictory combination will last. Fear has always been a dictator's powerful weapon. Perhaps Hessler does not know that using “Jubao” (letting people tell on each other) as a means of control has a long history in China and was not invented by CCP. History has told us over and over that making citizens fear each other serves authoritarian regimes well, until it doesn’t.
I’ve been following Peter Hessler’s writing since River Town. He strikes me as having genuine interests in Chinese people and the land, and a patient listener with an open mind, not one of those novelty-seeking foreigners or those who look for confirmation of their biases. My friends inside and outside China love him. However, in an article in the New Yorker some years ago, he seemed to be too accommodating to the regime. The article smelt self-censorship. The Covid dispatches smelt the same smell. Reading Other Rivers, I realize he did self-censor while writing inside China but now because he has left China, he can freely express himself again.
The author asks: “How could a country experience so much social and economical change, but the politics remain stagnant?”
I have no answer.
The young women of China give me hope.
For 40 years, the world has been watching China combine authoritarian and censorship with economic success, freedom of movement (compared to China’s past) and improved education. However, I do not believe the contradictory combination will last. Fear has always been a dictator's powerful weapon. Perhaps Hessler does not know that using “Jubao” (letting people tell on each other) as a means of control has a long history in China and was not invented by CCP. History has told us over and over that making citizens fear each other serves authoritarian regimes well, until it doesn’t.
Read
April 24, 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.
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.
September 23, 2024
Having loved Hessler’s three prior China books, as well as his Egypt book, I was excited to read this one. And it proved interesting and a worthwhile read, though not quite as gripping as the previous.
Hessler, of course, lived in China for years in the 90s and 00s. This book focuses on the period from 2019-2021, when he moved back (this time to Chengdu) to teach English at Sichuan University. There’s a lot of fascinating material about how China has changed, contrasting the generation attending college in the 90s (who came of age just as China was reforming and opening to the outside world), with college students today. He is still in touch with many of his former students from the 90s, and some of the most interesting sections follow how their lives turned out. His current students tend to be quite savvy about both technology (routinely using VPNs to circumvent the great firewall) and politics, though cynical about possibilities for change—and the highly competitive economy and educational system consumes most of their attention. At the same time, China has in many ways become more restrictive under Xi Jinping, whose name most students avoid even saying! There’s also some material about Hessler’s daughters’ experience in the local elementary school, which seems to work out fairly well (no bullying and they don’t buy the political propaganda, but the competitive atmosphere is harder to resist). However, young Chinese kids from urban, comfortably-off families tend to be even more overscheduled and oversupervised than American kids, limiting social connection.
Because COVID-19 hit partway through Hessler’s time in Chengdu, there’s also quite a bit of reportage on the first 18 months of the pandemic in China. Definitely interesting stuff, with strict lockdowns early on resulting in almost no infections outside of Wuhan (which was completely sealed off for over 2 months), and leading to what at the time seemed to be a very early recovery. Honestly, for me it’s too early to want to read about COVID, but this was still interesting to see, and I was especially intrigued by Hessler’s investigation of the cause of the outbreak. In a mirror image of American conspiracy theories, many Chinese think the virus was American sabotage, while no one in Wuhan seemed to suspect a lab leak (Hessler also finds the idea that this could’ve been kept quiet highly unlikely, given the usual proclivities of Chinese scientists). He was able to visit the former market where it began, though the seafood and livestock sections had all been closed.
At any rate, overall this is an interesting and well-written book. The publishers did Hessler dirty with that lackluster cover and marketing, though, and another round of editing might have sharpened the content a bit more too; I didn’t quite feel I was getting the same depth for the length as with Hessler’s prior books. But it is still worth a read for those interested in learning more about life in China today, or the country’s response in the early part of the pandemic.
Hessler, of course, lived in China for years in the 90s and 00s. This book focuses on the period from 2019-2021, when he moved back (this time to Chengdu) to teach English at Sichuan University. There’s a lot of fascinating material about how China has changed, contrasting the generation attending college in the 90s (who came of age just as China was reforming and opening to the outside world), with college students today. He is still in touch with many of his former students from the 90s, and some of the most interesting sections follow how their lives turned out. His current students tend to be quite savvy about both technology (routinely using VPNs to circumvent the great firewall) and politics, though cynical about possibilities for change—and the highly competitive economy and educational system consumes most of their attention. At the same time, China has in many ways become more restrictive under Xi Jinping, whose name most students avoid even saying! There’s also some material about Hessler’s daughters’ experience in the local elementary school, which seems to work out fairly well (no bullying and they don’t buy the political propaganda, but the competitive atmosphere is harder to resist). However, young Chinese kids from urban, comfortably-off families tend to be even more overscheduled and oversupervised than American kids, limiting social connection.
Because COVID-19 hit partway through Hessler’s time in Chengdu, there’s also quite a bit of reportage on the first 18 months of the pandemic in China. Definitely interesting stuff, with strict lockdowns early on resulting in almost no infections outside of Wuhan (which was completely sealed off for over 2 months), and leading to what at the time seemed to be a very early recovery. Honestly, for me it’s too early to want to read about COVID, but this was still interesting to see, and I was especially intrigued by Hessler’s investigation of the cause of the outbreak. In a mirror image of American conspiracy theories, many Chinese think the virus was American sabotage, while no one in Wuhan seemed to suspect a lab leak (Hessler also finds the idea that this could’ve been kept quiet highly unlikely, given the usual proclivities of Chinese scientists). He was able to visit the former market where it began, though the seafood and livestock sections had all been closed.
At any rate, overall this is an interesting and well-written book. The publishers did Hessler dirty with that lackluster cover and marketing, though, and another round of editing might have sharpened the content a bit more too; I didn’t quite feel I was getting the same depth for the length as with Hessler’s prior books. But it is still worth a read for those interested in learning more about life in China today, or the country’s response in the early part of the pandemic.
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.
July 27, 2025
4,5, prachtig boek
September 10, 2024
Hessler's latest book is based on his reporting and essays published in the New Yorker 2019-2021. He taught several English and Journalism classes at Sichuan University. His twin daughters were enrolled in a local school, to learn Mandarin and to experience elite elementary education there. They were about 9 years old then. Hessler also reported on events in China during and after the COVID pandemic, which originated in Wuhan around the start of 2020. His New Yorker articles are available online at https://www.newyorker.com/contributor...
The book includes considerably more stuff than the original articles, is more polished, and carries the story into the Hessler family's return to SW Colorado, where they live now. It's a very good book and I recommend it. Easily a 4-star read for me. Hessler is a great writer. He's been reporting on China since 1996, when he was a Peace Corps volunteer at a teacher's college in Fuling. His classic book River Town (2001) was based on that job. It's a near-great book. My 4.5 star review is here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Hessler has been keeping up with some of his Fuling students ever since, and you will find some of their continuing stories in the new book. And he's keeping in touch with some of his Sichuan students as well. Not to mention all the other stuff (Egypt!) he's been up to. Hessler's name on a book or article makes it a must-read for me. I'm a full-on Hessler fanboy.
The book includes considerably more stuff than the original articles, is more polished, and carries the story into the Hessler family's return to SW Colorado, where they live now. It's a very good book and I recommend it. Easily a 4-star read for me. Hessler is a great writer. He's been reporting on China since 1996, when he was a Peace Corps volunteer at a teacher's college in Fuling. His classic book River Town (2001) was based on that job. It's a near-great book. My 4.5 star review is here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Hessler has been keeping up with some of his Fuling students ever since, and you will find some of their continuing stories in the new book. And he's keeping in touch with some of his Sichuan students as well. Not to mention all the other stuff (Egypt!) he's been up to. Hessler's name on a book or article makes it a must-read for me. I'm a full-on Hessler fanboy.
July 26, 2024
Rather honest observation, and sometimes it can get brutally so.
November 4, 2024
Fascinating look at modern Chinese society and psychology in its current era of hyper-competitiveness and political surveillance.
Also was startled to realize that the author quoted my Goodreads review of his previous book “River Town” LMAO.
Especially enjoyed reading this in Chengdu where the author lived
Also was startled to realize that the author quoted my Goodreads review of his previous book “River Town” LMAO.
Especially enjoyed reading this in Chengdu where the author lived
November 21, 2024
I discovered Other Rivers: A Chinese Education via an intriguing Guardian long read by the author. Hessler previously published a 2001 book (which I haven't read yet), River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze, in which he recounted teaching at a college in China during the late 1990s. Other Rivers: A Chinese Education is essentially a sequel, as he returned to China in 2019 to teach again. In the intervening two decades, he kept in touch with his original students and recorded their experiences of social, economic, and political change. Thus Other Rivers: A Chinese Education combines longitudinal qualitative research and personal memoir, supported by many quotes from both student cohorts. I found it a fascinating insight into Sichuan over the decades, as viewed both by an American teacher and via student perspectives.
Upon returning to Sichuan in 2019, Hessler enrolled his primary-school-age daughters in a local school. They rapidly learned Mandarin via total immersion, being the only overseas students there. The Guardian long read focused on this part, but there is much more to this substantial book. Notably, it includes the first detailed account I've read of the 2020 lockdowns from someone living in China at the time. Once restrictions had been eased, Hessler went to Wuhan to visit the wet market where COVID-19 seemingly emerged and bought a pair of sunglasses there. He comes off as an adept interviewer, who presents the words of his students and others with deft commentary. (I was amused that he also quoted from a goodreads review of River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze; he must be one of the authors that reads them.)
A major theme is the intense pressure that the Chinese education system places upon students. It sounds extremely tough and stressful in comparison with my school experiences in the UK, although exam pressure has probably got heavier here as well over the past two decades. Differing economic expectations between generations likewise struck me, fueled the amazing speed of China's industrialisation and urbanisation. Other Rivers: A Chinese Education provides valuable and subtle insights. Qualitative research may not have the generalisability that quantitative studies aim at, but it can get into depth and detail that broad views do not show. I doubt Hessler's students are entirely representative of Sichuan or China in general, but their insights are no less interesting for that. Likewise, Hessler's experience of being an overseas teacher. His eventual departure after the university found it politically uncomfortable to renew his contract is narrated just as thoughtfully as the rest of the book. Overall I found Other Rivers: A Chinese Education a compelling and insightful read.
Upon returning to Sichuan in 2019, Hessler enrolled his primary-school-age daughters in a local school. They rapidly learned Mandarin via total immersion, being the only overseas students there. The Guardian long read focused on this part, but there is much more to this substantial book. Notably, it includes the first detailed account I've read of the 2020 lockdowns from someone living in China at the time. Once restrictions had been eased, Hessler went to Wuhan to visit the wet market where COVID-19 seemingly emerged and bought a pair of sunglasses there. He comes off as an adept interviewer, who presents the words of his students and others with deft commentary. (I was amused that he also quoted from a goodreads review of River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze; he must be one of the authors that reads them.)
A major theme is the intense pressure that the Chinese education system places upon students. It sounds extremely tough and stressful in comparison with my school experiences in the UK, although exam pressure has probably got heavier here as well over the past two decades. Differing economic expectations between generations likewise struck me, fueled the amazing speed of China's industrialisation and urbanisation. Other Rivers: A Chinese Education provides valuable and subtle insights. Qualitative research may not have the generalisability that quantitative studies aim at, but it can get into depth and detail that broad views do not show. I doubt Hessler's students are entirely representative of Sichuan or China in general, but their insights are no less interesting for that. Likewise, Hessler's experience of being an overseas teacher. His eventual departure after the university found it politically uncomfortable to renew his contract is narrated just as thoughtfully as the rest of the book. Overall I found Other Rivers: A Chinese Education a compelling and insightful read.
July 18, 2024
This book clearly aims at catering to the taste of the western readers. The meticulous description of the slogans (or propaganda,as the author say. This is actually a cultural habit. You will see many Chinese families have writings hanging on the wall as a reminder of what kind of people they wish to be ), the obsessive mention of the Chinese political leaders,etc.
Like many western journalists, the author is trying to establish an attitude that “I like the Chinese people. It’s the Chinese political system that I condemn”. I wonder why,after spending so many years in China, after seeing all the progress China has made, after seeing with his own eyes that the Chinese people are much better off, the author still believes that the Chinese government, Xi to be specific, is only obsessed with consolidating his power. It never occurred to the author that, in addition to power consolidation, Xi is also trying extremely hard to improve people’s lives and to build China into a powerful country. And Xi is actually doing a pretty good job in these two aspects.
There’s another thing I hope the author can notice: when a person complains to you how they dislike the political system, or hate the educational system, it is likely that they are also catering to you. There are elements of exaggeration as people always do when making a complaint. It’s not like Chinese youngsters are victims of Chinese political system or educational system. In fact, providing quality tertiary education at an insanely low price is the best thing any country can do to its people.
As a teacher in the 985 university in China, much as I dislike the political study in the campus, and much as I appreciate the free, democratic atmosphere in the American campus, when I look at the tuition fees,I would always turn a favorable eye to China. There are problems in China, but knowing that these university graduates will become the mainstay of the society is a sure relief.
Like many western journalists, the author is trying to establish an attitude that “I like the Chinese people. It’s the Chinese political system that I condemn”. I wonder why,after spending so many years in China, after seeing all the progress China has made, after seeing with his own eyes that the Chinese people are much better off, the author still believes that the Chinese government, Xi to be specific, is only obsessed with consolidating his power. It never occurred to the author that, in addition to power consolidation, Xi is also trying extremely hard to improve people’s lives and to build China into a powerful country. And Xi is actually doing a pretty good job in these two aspects.
There’s another thing I hope the author can notice: when a person complains to you how they dislike the political system, or hate the educational system, it is likely that they are also catering to you. There are elements of exaggeration as people always do when making a complaint. It’s not like Chinese youngsters are victims of Chinese political system or educational system. In fact, providing quality tertiary education at an insanely low price is the best thing any country can do to its people.
As a teacher in the 985 university in China, much as I dislike the political study in the campus, and much as I appreciate the free, democratic atmosphere in the American campus, when I look at the tuition fees,I would always turn a favorable eye to China. There are problems in China, but knowing that these university graduates will become the mainstay of the society is a sure relief.
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.
August 16, 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
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
November 12, 2024
Full review forthcoming at Peace Corps Worldwide (a site for Returned Peace Corps Volunteers). In the meantime, let me say how much I enjoyed this book and all of Hessler's previous China books. I've also spent a fair amount of time in China in my professional life (not nearly as much as he has, not even close), and I admire his great insights into the culture. If you have any interest at all in China, I highly recommend this book.
March 25, 2025
Nothing has changed. Everything has changed.
That seemed to be the mantra for China. Almost 25 years after his stint as peace corps volunteer landed him a teaching job in Fuling, Hessler tried to land another teaching job in Fuling but fate (and bureaucracy) landed him in Sichuan University instead. There Hessler taught a new generation of students who were very different from his Fuling students. And yet many aspects of life (especially politics), stayed the same. Thus, nothing has changed, everything has changed.
I enjoyed reading about Hessler's twin experience, being the only foreigners in a Chinese public school. The part about the intense involvement of parents in their often only child's education and the grim determination of Chinese children struggling to excel among their peers was very interesting and I would have loved to read more about the pressure of education in China.
The part about the old Fuling cohort was nostalgic and bittersweet. Many had continue to become teachers and since education was highly valued in China, they enjoyed a level of prestige and respect in society. Some had became successful in life and yet they continued to identify themselves as low middle income class. This seemed to be part of their generation's mentality.
In one story, Hessler mentioned about an old factory, it had become more successful and expanded, and the owner had become richer, but his health suffered because the many business banquets that he had to attend invariably involved a lot of drinking and smoking. The workers also weren't happy because after the factory expanded, the owner installed more machines and many workers were laid off because of that. Somehow I felt like everybody would have been happier if the old factory had stay the same.
In another story, an historical ridge was submerged due to the construction of Three Gorges Dam. There used to be a single cadre manning the ridge, where various poets and literati had left their writings, dating back to the Tang dynasty, 1200 years ago. Now, there was an underwater museum, and visitors had to use elevator to reach the ridge in the bottom of the riverbed. But the same cadre was still there, manning the same ridge where thousand of years of history could be seen at a glance. Nothing has changed, everything has changed.
That seemed to be the mantra for China. Almost 25 years after his stint as peace corps volunteer landed him a teaching job in Fuling, Hessler tried to land another teaching job in Fuling but fate (and bureaucracy) landed him in Sichuan University instead. There Hessler taught a new generation of students who were very different from his Fuling students. And yet many aspects of life (especially politics), stayed the same. Thus, nothing has changed, everything has changed.
I enjoyed reading about Hessler's twin experience, being the only foreigners in a Chinese public school. The part about the intense involvement of parents in their often only child's education and the grim determination of Chinese children struggling to excel among their peers was very interesting and I would have loved to read more about the pressure of education in China.
The part about the old Fuling cohort was nostalgic and bittersweet. Many had continue to become teachers and since education was highly valued in China, they enjoyed a level of prestige and respect in society. Some had became successful in life and yet they continued to identify themselves as low middle income class. This seemed to be part of their generation's mentality.
In one story, Hessler mentioned about an old factory, it had become more successful and expanded, and the owner had become richer, but his health suffered because the many business banquets that he had to attend invariably involved a lot of drinking and smoking. The workers also weren't happy because after the factory expanded, the owner installed more machines and many workers were laid off because of that. Somehow I felt like everybody would have been happier if the old factory had stay the same.
In another story, an historical ridge was submerged due to the construction of Three Gorges Dam. There used to be a single cadre manning the ridge, where various poets and literati had left their writings, dating back to the Tang dynasty, 1200 years ago. Now, there was an underwater museum, and visitors had to use elevator to reach the ridge in the bottom of the riverbed. But the same cadre was still there, manning the same ridge where thousand of years of history could be seen at a glance. Nothing has changed, everything has changed.
September 24, 2024
Nothing has changed, yet everything has changed. A good read on China's retrograde under Xi Jinping's dominance.
Several points in the book really resonate with me
1. Fear of Naming Xi Jinping
Chinese students avoid mentioning Xi Jinping by name, even if when they are living in the United States. As Hessler explains through the words of a student, the name carries an overwhelming association with power and punishment. It's true. Within China's Great Firewall, posts with anything that sounds remotely similar to "Xi Jinping" (e.g., 细颈瓶 Xi Jingping aka a flask used in chemistry) get swiftly censored or deleted. Posting such content often comes with temporary or permanent account bans. In some cases, a local police might give you a call, and you might be requested to have a "tea-drinking" session in the local station where your phone and social media accounts are examined and you are required to sign a document agreeing to "behave" yourself online. In the not-so-rare cases that you post becomes slightly virial (shared more than 500 times), you face the real risk criminal charge. Even outside of China, the existence of secret Chinese police stations in various Western countries has made criticizing Xi Jinping an increasingly risky endeavor.
2. Taiwan
Discussing Taiwan is another minefield for overseas Chinese. It's a deeply sensitive topic to most Chinese, but in a different way to the topic of Xi Jinping. While many Chinese tend to avoid sensitive discussions, the mere mention of Taiwan’s independent status often sparks impassioned reactions. Those who would otherwise remain silent are quick to assert, “Taiwan is not a country; it’s part of China,” reflecting the deeply ingrained narrative.
3. Reluctance to Have Children
Having gone through the system myself, the thought of my child enduring the same logical struggles I faced at a young age haunts me. It’s unsettling to imagine them grappling with the same contradictions and confusion that shaped my early years.
Several points in the book really resonate with me
1. Fear of Naming Xi Jinping
Chinese students avoid mentioning Xi Jinping by name, even if when they are living in the United States. As Hessler explains through the words of a student, the name carries an overwhelming association with power and punishment. It's true. Within China's Great Firewall, posts with anything that sounds remotely similar to "Xi Jinping" (e.g., 细颈瓶 Xi Jingping aka a flask used in chemistry) get swiftly censored or deleted. Posting such content often comes with temporary or permanent account bans. In some cases, a local police might give you a call, and you might be requested to have a "tea-drinking" session in the local station where your phone and social media accounts are examined and you are required to sign a document agreeing to "behave" yourself online. In the not-so-rare cases that you post becomes slightly virial (shared more than 500 times), you face the real risk criminal charge. Even outside of China, the existence of secret Chinese police stations in various Western countries has made criticizing Xi Jinping an increasingly risky endeavor.
2. Taiwan
Discussing Taiwan is another minefield for overseas Chinese. It's a deeply sensitive topic to most Chinese, but in a different way to the topic of Xi Jinping. While many Chinese tend to avoid sensitive discussions, the mere mention of Taiwan’s independent status often sparks impassioned reactions. Those who would otherwise remain silent are quick to assert, “Taiwan is not a country; it’s part of China,” reflecting the deeply ingrained narrative.
3. Reluctance to Have Children
Having gone through the system myself, the thought of my child enduring the same logical struggles I faced at a young age haunts me. It’s unsettling to imagine them grappling with the same contradictions and confusion that shaped my early years.
February 11, 2025
I really enjoyed this one. Like his other books, it’s thought provoking and well written.
The subjects covered are wide ranging, although sometimes it was hard to see the connections between them - I often wondered if I’d missed a page. His experiences enable him to write about recent and current China history, which I enjoyed reading about. Anyone who has tried to learn to read and write Chinese characters should be amazed and impressed by his daughter’s ability to go from zero to hero in less than one school year!
His perspectives are interesting, and I liked hearing from some of his more thoughtful students, especially Emily and Serena. Varied insights are able to explain so many contradictions in China today, and how people can hold mutually exclusive viewpoints:
“For most of my students, the greatest fear wasn’t surveillance cameras, or revised history, or any of the other instruments that are typically associated with state control. The students feared one another—they worried about all the other talented young people who were also striving for grades and jobs. When competition becomes as powerful as faith, it also functions, in Marxist terms, as an opium of the people. Most young Chinese I knew were too numbed and too distracted by the struggle for success to think hard about the big picture.”
The subjects covered are wide ranging, although sometimes it was hard to see the connections between them - I often wondered if I’d missed a page. His experiences enable him to write about recent and current China history, which I enjoyed reading about. Anyone who has tried to learn to read and write Chinese characters should be amazed and impressed by his daughter’s ability to go from zero to hero in less than one school year!
His perspectives are interesting, and I liked hearing from some of his more thoughtful students, especially Emily and Serena. Varied insights are able to explain so many contradictions in China today, and how people can hold mutually exclusive viewpoints:
“For most of my students, the greatest fear wasn’t surveillance cameras, or revised history, or any of the other instruments that are typically associated with state control. The students feared one another—they worried about all the other talented young people who were also striving for grades and jobs. When competition becomes as powerful as faith, it also functions, in Marxist terms, as an opium of the people. Most young Chinese I knew were too numbed and too distracted by the struggle for success to think hard about the big picture.”
August 28, 2024
I enjoyed Hessler’s new book, but I didn’t like it as much as I have his previous books.
March 6, 2025
Peter Hessler’s twenty-five years of encountering China were bookended by two college teaching experiences. As he unplugged from Chengdu in 2021, leaving behind the river of his China time, he couldn’t help but resonate with what the Chinese often say, “everything has changed; nothing has changed.” On the banks of the Yangtze River, he walked side by side with the generation that was tossed into the currents of China’s Reform and Open up, directed by the Sichuan-born Deng Xiaoping and his successors, flowing with high hopes and high risks in the booming economy. A quarter of a century later, the economy stagnates and the future no longer has as much prosperity in store as before, while politics becomes more alienating under the watch of He (Xi)-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named. Bureaucrats are as nervous and panicked as ever in front of the slightest sign of unsanctioned contact with foreign speech and behavior, frozen in the great fear of falling out of the slim path of orthodox thinking into the vast ocean of the incomprehensible, the unknown, and the unauthorized.
In 1996, Hessler joined the Peace Corps to teach in a college in Fuling, a small place in the southwestern province of Sichuan looking over the roaring Yangtze River. River Town surfaced from the torrents of the early Reform era in which uncertainties of individual fates were thrown up in the air as fast as rural lifestyle retreated into oblivion. In 2019, Hessler returned with a year-long contract to teach in the Sichuan University-Pittsburgh Institute (SCUPI), headed by a Taiwanese American, Minking Chyu. This time, he wasn’t a volunteer with no family obligations. His wife, Leslie Chang, and twins, Natasha and Ariel, moved into an apartment in a high-rise building with him.
Hessler watched three generations of Chinese education unfurl in front of him, and also pulled him into the changing tides of its political economy. As a teacher, he couldn’t help comparing his students’ college life twenty-five years apart, conducting annual surveys and curiously observing their aspirations and dilemmas. Meanwhile, his twins’ enrollment in Chengdu Experimental added a third sample of Chinese education. The social and economic classes of the three cohorts of students climbed a sharp slope. The Fuling students were the first rural generation to hunt a way out of poverty; the Sichuan University students mostly came from middle-class families but to their parents, neither the Maoist political struggle nor poverty and hunger was yet a distant memory; Chengdu Experimental posed as an elite grade school founded in the early twentieth century in the blossoming influence of the American educational philosopher John Dewey. Different mixtures of hope, skepticism, and deprivation run through these generations not unlike the Yangtze River rushing through southwestern China, powering the Three Gorges Dam, flooding the riverside towns, displacing the villagers, submerging histories, and leaving uprooted memories wander aimlessly on the banks.
Unlike most China observers from the outside, Peter Hessler is patient and unassuming. He patiently endured the contradictions and navigated the inconsistencies of academic and bureaucratic policies regarding foreign faculty, the middle-level administrators’ fears of both their Party superiors and their students, and the perpetual anticipation of the unexpected, on the street, in the classroom, in assignments, and online. He stood short of understanding everything just like the locals everywhere do, not pretending that he could interpret better than anyone else simply because he was an outsider. Yet, he also almost never misread the larger picture not because he was an outsider, but because he lived there, walked the street, talked to real people, paid attention to the details of how things worked, and connected the dots.
Commenting on the rapid building of a teacher foundation nationwide in the 1990s, Hessler noted: “Back then, nobody spoke of algorithms, but clearly there had been some kind of large-scale calculation. By identifying bright rural kids and providing them with training that was both narrowed and accelerated, the government produced primary-school teachers who were fully licensed by the age of eighteen.” It is neither mystification nor grand claim.
At times, Hessler would meticulously contextualize the most common terminologies that could only be done by someone who not only spent time in, but carefully thought through, two worlds and two temporalities conditioned in different historical landmarks. One would easily fall for the universality of the concept of “generation,” but Hessler sensed its different manifestations in differing national narratives and the momentum of temporal progression. The defeat of George W.H. Bush as a member of the Greatest Generation by Bill Clinton, a Boomer, cannot be mapped onto the Chinese leadership’s age cohort. “The country’s direction can be shaped by individual leaders—those godlike figures—but they aren’t representatives of a specific era or age cohort. The gods are of the Party, and the Party is outside of time.” Like an experienced traditional Chinese physician, Hessler measured the pulse of both countries, sensing the whole cosmo-body across scales and not stumbling over a regional pathology.
From 1996 to 2021, China baffled the world with the combination of liberated economic growth and unbudging political grip post-Tiananmen. This seeming contradiction quite ironically revealed the compatibility—rather than the incompatibility that is commonly believed—between economic liberalism built on sufficiently educated masses and authoritarian control, if one is willing to look into the history of colonialism and neoliberalism. It also revealed some internal logic of surviving in fantastical dystopias, exercised compellingly by the youth population that Hessler had two chances to read closely with a literary incisiveness. “The system’s schizophrenic qualities—increased educational and economic opportunities on one hand, narrowing political space on the other—produced young people who were themselves a study in contradictions: the George Orwell fan who dreams of Chinese tech, the Gabriel García Márquez magical realist who hopes to work in automotive engineering.”
Hessler’s own status as a faculty member, not a journalist, also stepped on the thin ice of relative political tolerance. Unsurprisingly, he was an easy target of nationalist trolls. What would simply be an activity of genuine curiosity, such as observing the covid campus where a little robot rolled to student dorms with food delivery, could easily trigger the alarm of espionage. Yet, blanketing as surveillance and censorship could be, as well as a growing number of student informants of class contents, bureaucracy was too rigid to properly respond to situations of nuanced tensions, such as curiosity and learning beyond the written and unwritten guidebooks. Hessler realized that “within the bureaucracy, I was somewhere between different silos, and there was always a chance that nobody would do anything.” “If there is no guide, there is no road” is the motto of institutional conduct that has persisted, until amnesia saves everybody from the trouble of remembering.
Since the guidebooks for censorship and punishment are vague and tacit, rather than formal, it’s never clear what an institution remembers and what it chooses to turn a blind eye to, forget, and forgive, when it comes to student disobedience. College students’ disobedience exists but hardly mounts to political resistance, a trouble too costly to be practical. In their assignments for Hessler’s nonfiction class, Sichuan University students skirted the borderline of the university’s bureaucratic prohibitions to visit the “outlaws”, the invisible populations, and the shadows of the city and countryside where journalism becomes a sensitive activity: gay bars and bathrooms, “a cosmetic surgeon who was doing facelifts at a large clinic,” a warehouse for Taobao subsidiary, or the American Airlines Gym that had nothing to do with American Airlines. On the locked down campus where students could only swipe in and not out, the ones hungry for off-campus food and strolling found the the spots that the university’s security camera couldn’t reach and gave a physical rendering of “climbing over the wall,” an originally digital activity to get over the Great Firewall with Virtual Private Network (VPN) to access foreign server and websites. Neither wet paint nor a human guard could stop the reversed evolution of the digital age. The university eventually gave in, but the students’ battle with the wall remained loyal to the “private” terrain, and never an organized collective event. Yet, as has been proved time and again, a bit of disorganization yields the best chance to survive the harsh attention of the authorities.
Hessler saw first-hand the creativity of Chinese citizens surviving the pandemic, from the “idle chatter, intergenerational passive-aggression, and low-grade rumor-mongering and conspiracy-theorizing” of the four-generations-under-one-roof quarantine life streamed live in the virtual classroom populated with faceless names with a “Sino-Dickensian flair,” to the flourishing sports businesses on Amazon in the US with brand names sounding like etymological puzzles and under-market-rate prices. Watching domestic Chinese businesses cautiously coming back to life from intolerably strict isolation in fall 2020, Hessler read the street, the city, the country, and the people with more empathy than most foreign observers: “Even some of the Kafkaesque moments were part of what made China human.”
Hamlet may have spoken in Hessler’s voice: time felt out of joint. “That spring, there were two types of time: the slow, predictable progression of the academic term, and the rapid explosion of the virus into the world.” Hessler’s twins avoided a prolonged period of remote schooling as their American peers did. Their Chinese peers, born in the late 2000s, are no longer the single-child generations. The Chinese nation needs more people as the population plummets. But their parents’ situations in life, career, assets, and prospects can’t be more different, Of the great dispersion of the Reform that passes down from one generation to the next, from those who went to college in the 1990s to those in the 2020s, Hessler took a good glimpse in the reproduction stories: “All one-child families are alike, but every two-child family has the second child in its own way.” The warmth of a writer, a human being, trails after this observation. That’s Peter Hessler.
What Hessler related in Other Rivers would have been our own alternative reality, had my partner accepted the offer from Minking Chyu to teach at SCUPI in the spring of 2020, where we were stuck in Los Angeles. Hessler sat on the search committee. This near realization—or maybe narrow escape, depending on your perspective—would only attest to Hessler’s wisdom that “When people traveled across the Pacific in hopes of combining the two traditions, they almost never came away with what they had expected.” A few months after the SCUPI interview, we moved across the country, the opposite direction from China, and landed in Burlington, Vermont. Our new job brought us to John Dewey’s birthplace. His old house is one block away from our campus. For two scholars of educational philosophy, this felt like a call. The international education part of our job brings students from Vermont to Asia to practice the Deweyan experiential learning. While the China program sunsetted at the beginning of the pandemic, there is still hope that it will rise above the horizon again, though the wait can be a little long now. We never know what is in the next chapter of the US-China relation, but there are still things to do, and relationships to make, sometimes in a strategically disorganized way.
“During my sunnier moments,” Hessler wrote, “I thought of this as the last bulwark of U.S.–China friendship. The Peace Corps was gone; the Fulbright program had ended; the consulate was closed; most American journalists had been expelled; there were essentially no more functioning exchange programs in China. But at least some Chinese artists were painting dead Americans and their dead dogs”—referring to the emerging business of acrylic portraits. Don’t people always find a way to connect, for entrepreneurial or personal reasons, when the systems grind to a halt? The disobedience of the national narrative and temporality is not so much a politically performative one as an economic one, including the economy of family, the need to live on. Coming to terms with contradictions and paradoxes is the way to live on. Peter Hessler’s family’s departure from China was precisely that, no matter how much political drama journalists the west tried to attach to it. The twins climbed the store roofs on the Uncompahgre Plateau in Colorado without dropping the battle with Chinese math problems.
In 1996, Hessler joined the Peace Corps to teach in a college in Fuling, a small place in the southwestern province of Sichuan looking over the roaring Yangtze River. River Town surfaced from the torrents of the early Reform era in which uncertainties of individual fates were thrown up in the air as fast as rural lifestyle retreated into oblivion. In 2019, Hessler returned with a year-long contract to teach in the Sichuan University-Pittsburgh Institute (SCUPI), headed by a Taiwanese American, Minking Chyu. This time, he wasn’t a volunteer with no family obligations. His wife, Leslie Chang, and twins, Natasha and Ariel, moved into an apartment in a high-rise building with him.
Hessler watched three generations of Chinese education unfurl in front of him, and also pulled him into the changing tides of its political economy. As a teacher, he couldn’t help comparing his students’ college life twenty-five years apart, conducting annual surveys and curiously observing their aspirations and dilemmas. Meanwhile, his twins’ enrollment in Chengdu Experimental added a third sample of Chinese education. The social and economic classes of the three cohorts of students climbed a sharp slope. The Fuling students were the first rural generation to hunt a way out of poverty; the Sichuan University students mostly came from middle-class families but to their parents, neither the Maoist political struggle nor poverty and hunger was yet a distant memory; Chengdu Experimental posed as an elite grade school founded in the early twentieth century in the blossoming influence of the American educational philosopher John Dewey. Different mixtures of hope, skepticism, and deprivation run through these generations not unlike the Yangtze River rushing through southwestern China, powering the Three Gorges Dam, flooding the riverside towns, displacing the villagers, submerging histories, and leaving uprooted memories wander aimlessly on the banks.
Unlike most China observers from the outside, Peter Hessler is patient and unassuming. He patiently endured the contradictions and navigated the inconsistencies of academic and bureaucratic policies regarding foreign faculty, the middle-level administrators’ fears of both their Party superiors and their students, and the perpetual anticipation of the unexpected, on the street, in the classroom, in assignments, and online. He stood short of understanding everything just like the locals everywhere do, not pretending that he could interpret better than anyone else simply because he was an outsider. Yet, he also almost never misread the larger picture not because he was an outsider, but because he lived there, walked the street, talked to real people, paid attention to the details of how things worked, and connected the dots.
Commenting on the rapid building of a teacher foundation nationwide in the 1990s, Hessler noted: “Back then, nobody spoke of algorithms, but clearly there had been some kind of large-scale calculation. By identifying bright rural kids and providing them with training that was both narrowed and accelerated, the government produced primary-school teachers who were fully licensed by the age of eighteen.” It is neither mystification nor grand claim.
At times, Hessler would meticulously contextualize the most common terminologies that could only be done by someone who not only spent time in, but carefully thought through, two worlds and two temporalities conditioned in different historical landmarks. One would easily fall for the universality of the concept of “generation,” but Hessler sensed its different manifestations in differing national narratives and the momentum of temporal progression. The defeat of George W.H. Bush as a member of the Greatest Generation by Bill Clinton, a Boomer, cannot be mapped onto the Chinese leadership’s age cohort. “The country’s direction can be shaped by individual leaders—those godlike figures—but they aren’t representatives of a specific era or age cohort. The gods are of the Party, and the Party is outside of time.” Like an experienced traditional Chinese physician, Hessler measured the pulse of both countries, sensing the whole cosmo-body across scales and not stumbling over a regional pathology.
From 1996 to 2021, China baffled the world with the combination of liberated economic growth and unbudging political grip post-Tiananmen. This seeming contradiction quite ironically revealed the compatibility—rather than the incompatibility that is commonly believed—between economic liberalism built on sufficiently educated masses and authoritarian control, if one is willing to look into the history of colonialism and neoliberalism. It also revealed some internal logic of surviving in fantastical dystopias, exercised compellingly by the youth population that Hessler had two chances to read closely with a literary incisiveness. “The system’s schizophrenic qualities—increased educational and economic opportunities on one hand, narrowing political space on the other—produced young people who were themselves a study in contradictions: the George Orwell fan who dreams of Chinese tech, the Gabriel García Márquez magical realist who hopes to work in automotive engineering.”
Hessler’s own status as a faculty member, not a journalist, also stepped on the thin ice of relative political tolerance. Unsurprisingly, he was an easy target of nationalist trolls. What would simply be an activity of genuine curiosity, such as observing the covid campus where a little robot rolled to student dorms with food delivery, could easily trigger the alarm of espionage. Yet, blanketing as surveillance and censorship could be, as well as a growing number of student informants of class contents, bureaucracy was too rigid to properly respond to situations of nuanced tensions, such as curiosity and learning beyond the written and unwritten guidebooks. Hessler realized that “within the bureaucracy, I was somewhere between different silos, and there was always a chance that nobody would do anything.” “If there is no guide, there is no road” is the motto of institutional conduct that has persisted, until amnesia saves everybody from the trouble of remembering.
Since the guidebooks for censorship and punishment are vague and tacit, rather than formal, it’s never clear what an institution remembers and what it chooses to turn a blind eye to, forget, and forgive, when it comes to student disobedience. College students’ disobedience exists but hardly mounts to political resistance, a trouble too costly to be practical. In their assignments for Hessler’s nonfiction class, Sichuan University students skirted the borderline of the university’s bureaucratic prohibitions to visit the “outlaws”, the invisible populations, and the shadows of the city and countryside where journalism becomes a sensitive activity: gay bars and bathrooms, “a cosmetic surgeon who was doing facelifts at a large clinic,” a warehouse for Taobao subsidiary, or the American Airlines Gym that had nothing to do with American Airlines. On the locked down campus where students could only swipe in and not out, the ones hungry for off-campus food and strolling found the the spots that the university’s security camera couldn’t reach and gave a physical rendering of “climbing over the wall,” an originally digital activity to get over the Great Firewall with Virtual Private Network (VPN) to access foreign server and websites. Neither wet paint nor a human guard could stop the reversed evolution of the digital age. The university eventually gave in, but the students’ battle with the wall remained loyal to the “private” terrain, and never an organized collective event. Yet, as has been proved time and again, a bit of disorganization yields the best chance to survive the harsh attention of the authorities.
Hessler saw first-hand the creativity of Chinese citizens surviving the pandemic, from the “idle chatter, intergenerational passive-aggression, and low-grade rumor-mongering and conspiracy-theorizing” of the four-generations-under-one-roof quarantine life streamed live in the virtual classroom populated with faceless names with a “Sino-Dickensian flair,” to the flourishing sports businesses on Amazon in the US with brand names sounding like etymological puzzles and under-market-rate prices. Watching domestic Chinese businesses cautiously coming back to life from intolerably strict isolation in fall 2020, Hessler read the street, the city, the country, and the people with more empathy than most foreign observers: “Even some of the Kafkaesque moments were part of what made China human.”
Hamlet may have spoken in Hessler’s voice: time felt out of joint. “That spring, there were two types of time: the slow, predictable progression of the academic term, and the rapid explosion of the virus into the world.” Hessler’s twins avoided a prolonged period of remote schooling as their American peers did. Their Chinese peers, born in the late 2000s, are no longer the single-child generations. The Chinese nation needs more people as the population plummets. But their parents’ situations in life, career, assets, and prospects can’t be more different, Of the great dispersion of the Reform that passes down from one generation to the next, from those who went to college in the 1990s to those in the 2020s, Hessler took a good glimpse in the reproduction stories: “All one-child families are alike, but every two-child family has the second child in its own way.” The warmth of a writer, a human being, trails after this observation. That’s Peter Hessler.
What Hessler related in Other Rivers would have been our own alternative reality, had my partner accepted the offer from Minking Chyu to teach at SCUPI in the spring of 2020, where we were stuck in Los Angeles. Hessler sat on the search committee. This near realization—or maybe narrow escape, depending on your perspective—would only attest to Hessler’s wisdom that “When people traveled across the Pacific in hopes of combining the two traditions, they almost never came away with what they had expected.” A few months after the SCUPI interview, we moved across the country, the opposite direction from China, and landed in Burlington, Vermont. Our new job brought us to John Dewey’s birthplace. His old house is one block away from our campus. For two scholars of educational philosophy, this felt like a call. The international education part of our job brings students from Vermont to Asia to practice the Deweyan experiential learning. While the China program sunsetted at the beginning of the pandemic, there is still hope that it will rise above the horizon again, though the wait can be a little long now. We never know what is in the next chapter of the US-China relation, but there are still things to do, and relationships to make, sometimes in a strategically disorganized way.
“During my sunnier moments,” Hessler wrote, “I thought of this as the last bulwark of U.S.–China friendship. The Peace Corps was gone; the Fulbright program had ended; the consulate was closed; most American journalists had been expelled; there were essentially no more functioning exchange programs in China. But at least some Chinese artists were painting dead Americans and their dead dogs”—referring to the emerging business of acrylic portraits. Don’t people always find a way to connect, for entrepreneurial or personal reasons, when the systems grind to a halt? The disobedience of the national narrative and temporality is not so much a politically performative one as an economic one, including the economy of family, the need to live on. Coming to terms with contradictions and paradoxes is the way to live on. Peter Hessler’s family’s departure from China was precisely that, no matter how much political drama journalists the west tried to attach to it. The twins climbed the store roofs on the Uncompahgre Plateau in Colorado without dropping the battle with Chinese math problems.
August 2, 2025
This book aligns pretty well with my experience of China, and what I've heard.
By a journalist, one of the few, or maybe the last American journalist in China. He raised his kids there!
Refreshing given the current American discourse on China which is generally very flat and adversarial. This obviously is not very oriented towards geopolitical-strategy.
Hessler tells his & host students' stories and observations in China during COVID lockdowns, noting what's changed since volunteering in the Peace Corps back in the 90s.
It makes me wonder about if my parents had stayed in China, and where we could have ended up. Maybe like any of his students.
Focuses a lot on education because Hessler is a professor & his girls are in school. And lots of the essays by his students, which are cool perspectives to have.
Really very Chinese moral-of-the-story types of stories where people have very different fates because of timing, that seem unlucky or lucky but with time their fates swap. Like the tale of the man who brings home some wild horses!
Also, I loved learning about the white ridge in Fuling with 1200 years of inscriptions in it, from poets through the years, and how a dam will likely destroy the 300,000 characters on it in 10 years. Probably my favorite part, as a poet.
By a journalist, one of the few, or maybe the last American journalist in China. He raised his kids there!
Refreshing given the current American discourse on China which is generally very flat and adversarial. This obviously is not very oriented towards geopolitical-strategy.
Hessler tells his & host students' stories and observations in China during COVID lockdowns, noting what's changed since volunteering in the Peace Corps back in the 90s.
It makes me wonder about if my parents had stayed in China, and where we could have ended up. Maybe like any of his students.
Focuses a lot on education because Hessler is a professor & his girls are in school. And lots of the essays by his students, which are cool perspectives to have.
Really very Chinese moral-of-the-story types of stories where people have very different fates because of timing, that seem unlucky or lucky but with time their fates swap. Like the tale of the man who brings home some wild horses!
Also, I loved learning about the white ridge in Fuling with 1200 years of inscriptions in it, from poets through the years, and how a dam will likely destroy the 300,000 characters on it in 10 years. Probably my favorite part, as a poet.
September 4, 2024
Very honest and fluent description of his two-year stay in Sichuang. Particularly interesting in the Covid period since I totally missed it.
Promising the Generation Xi since they have more ability to think independently; while pessimistic the general direction of China’s future.
Promising the Generation Xi since they have more ability to think independently; while pessimistic the general direction of China’s future.
January 24, 2025
I started this book while in China and had been thinking about themes of education (both for my parents reform generation and in context of my younger nieces / nephews) already — loved the historical analysis of the book to clarify so many of those weird quirks
May 5, 2025
A powerful and insightful book. I listened to Other Rivers with my American partner, and as a Malaysian Chinese, I found its depiction of Chinese culture, values, and upbringing both authentic and deeply resonant. It served not only as a personal mirror but also as an accessible cultural bridge—offering my partner a nuanced understanding of the complexities and subtleties of Chinese family dynamics and education. A compelling narrative that sparks meaningful cross-cultural dialogue.
August 30, 2025
As a Singaporean Chinese who 1) grew up reading Chinese fiction & 2) heavily engaged with Chinese social media since young & 3) spent the first phase of Covid lockdowns in China & 4) is suffering from a flu right now, there were many points of interest in this book, and Hessler’s writing kept me reading. I found that he could be patronising at times but he really did have a good understanding of the inner workings of the country, from the micro (like people expecting fast responses on WeChat) to the macro. Enjoyable read!
November 5, 2024
When I learned that Hapercollins decided to publish FangFang's Wuhan Diary, I was a book buyer working for a Chinese distributor who imports English books in their original language and sells them in China. My role was to choose newly published books to be imported. At that time, Harpercollins and all publishers distributed by Harpercollins were under my responsibility in my previous company. Not long after I saw the FangFang news online, I got another news from inside : All Harpercollins titles were banned for import, without official explanation, but we were told that this was linked to FangFang. The news was too much of a disaster for someone like me who just entered this domain, plus, part of my salary is based on book sales...
This made me think of a term in ancient China : lianzuo (can be translated as "collective punishment"), that if one person committed a crime, other people who are connected with this person will be punished as well... Imagine, if one day Penguin Books bought the rights for FangFang Diary, Hessler's book can not be imported anymore as well because of this punishment… Oh right, Mr Hessler is actually already on that banned import list as a writer.
Other Rivers is Hessler’s personal family history, but it records our time as well. I am not strictly the generation described in the book, but it resonates with me and I felt deeply connected with this book. Before he started teaching at SCUPI, I tried to apply to be one of the students as well. I traveled to Sichuan to seek the chance, but I was not enrolled. Finally, someone I knew in Sichuan University told me the room number of his class and I've audited his class once.
Later, like so many other individuals during the third phase of the pandemic, I finally decided to “Rùn”. Everything was quiet, I didn’t notify anyone except my parents and very close friends, I quitted my job the day my visa got granted, I did 14 covid test in a row to keep my QR Code green, as requested by the custom check.
To me, an ordinary Chinese person, this is my definition of the generation of censorship. I just want to live a normal life without much attention, to express myself normally on the internet without replacing “sensitive words” by some strange symbols or pin yin, to avoid being watched. His students are quite courageous to do these reports. Even if I am overseas, I still don’t feel at ease yet to participate in leaderless protest events, because I am worried about my family in China and the potential collective punishment if I were identified in the events…
My parent’s generation moved from rural places to cities, my generation are more likely to be the “rùn” generation.
This made me think of a term in ancient China : lianzuo (can be translated as "collective punishment"), that if one person committed a crime, other people who are connected with this person will be punished as well... Imagine, if one day Penguin Books bought the rights for FangFang Diary, Hessler's book can not be imported anymore as well because of this punishment… Oh right, Mr Hessler is actually already on that banned import list as a writer.
Other Rivers is Hessler’s personal family history, but it records our time as well. I am not strictly the generation described in the book, but it resonates with me and I felt deeply connected with this book. Before he started teaching at SCUPI, I tried to apply to be one of the students as well. I traveled to Sichuan to seek the chance, but I was not enrolled. Finally, someone I knew in Sichuan University told me the room number of his class and I've audited his class once.
Later, like so many other individuals during the third phase of the pandemic, I finally decided to “Rùn”. Everything was quiet, I didn’t notify anyone except my parents and very close friends, I quitted my job the day my visa got granted, I did 14 covid test in a row to keep my QR Code green, as requested by the custom check.
To me, an ordinary Chinese person, this is my definition of the generation of censorship. I just want to live a normal life without much attention, to express myself normally on the internet without replacing “sensitive words” by some strange symbols or pin yin, to avoid being watched. His students are quite courageous to do these reports. Even if I am overseas, I still don’t feel at ease yet to participate in leaderless protest events, because I am worried about my family in China and the potential collective punishment if I were identified in the events…
My parent’s generation moved from rural places to cities, my generation are more likely to be the “rùn” generation.
October 5, 2024
The consulate never got the chance to put the banner out in their Chengdu backyard, but Peter Hessler tried again in Colorado with "Other Rivers."
This book took me longer than expected to finish because I dropped it a few times halfway through, as it felt less 'packed' than "Rivertown." Then I realized that maybe it's because so were the experiences and realities during the pandemic years. Hessler was constantly anchoring back to the Rivertown years, and so was I.
"Rivertown" felt more packed because, though the lives of the people still go on even today, it's a complete life story. You move to a foreign place, you adapt and become attached to it. And finally, everyone sings 'Auld Lang Syne' and you say a proper goodbye. Everything was more predictable in the Fuling years, both the good and bad.
But just as Ho Wei wrote,
As someone who is roughly the same age as his new generation of students, much of this book registers and resonates. I was also staying home in Chengdu during the pandemic and regularly took my walks along the same Fu River.
In 2022, I wrote these in my journal:
Almost another three years have passed since then. It’s said that one can never step into the same river twice because no river runs backward. That is true, and there are always other rivers. Yet, it’s good to know that there were also other people, at the same time, stepping in the same river.
Sidenote: If anyone is curious about the other story behind the controversial closure of the consulate, there is also an interview (in Chinese) with 庄祖宜, the wife of Jim Mullinax, the last U.S. Consul General in the Chengdu Consulate, on YouTube.
This book took me longer than expected to finish because I dropped it a few times halfway through, as it felt less 'packed' than "Rivertown." Then I realized that maybe it's because so were the experiences and realities during the pandemic years. Hessler was constantly anchoring back to the Rivertown years, and so was I.
"Rivertown" felt more packed because, though the lives of the people still go on even today, it's a complete life story. You move to a foreign place, you adapt and become attached to it. And finally, everyone sings 'Auld Lang Syne' and you say a proper goodbye. Everything was more predictable in the Fuling years, both the good and bad.
But just as Ho Wei wrote,
"Thirty years later, the problem runs deeper: something fundamental about the system needs to change. I still have great faith in the young, but I sense that their future will be more complicated."
As someone who is roughly the same age as his new generation of students, much of this book registers and resonates. I was also staying home in Chengdu during the pandemic and regularly took my walks along the same Fu River.
In 2022, I wrote these in my journal:
疫情下的第三个春天，草木生长，物是人非。脑中浮起 Joan Didion 的那段描述 "The mood... in those years was one of mild but chronic “depression'"
Three years into the pandemic, and spring yet comes again. Woods are blooming, but people are not the same. The words of Joan Didion echo in my head: “The mood… in those years was one of mild but chronic ‘depression.’”
Almost another three years have passed since then. It’s said that one can never step into the same river twice because no river runs backward. That is true, and there are always other rivers. Yet, it’s good to know that there were also other people, at the same time, stepping in the same river.
Sidenote: If anyone is curious about the other story behind the controversial closure of the consulate, there is also an interview (in Chinese) with 庄祖宜, the wife of Jim Mullinax, the last U.S. Consul General in the Chengdu Consulate, on YouTube.
November 24, 2024
【2024已读41】以前看过两本何伟的中译作品，这还是头一回读他的英文原作。400多页所囊括的内容由于过于切近而令人不得不时时反思、叹息和警醒，却也因作者的西方视角而自带一种间离效果。所叙内容则让我想起《英国病人》的结尾，主人公之一的棕皮肤年轻人回到故乡之后对于饭桌上所有人同样的棕色手臂自如移动的感慨。只不过在此书中，发出类似于“尘归尘，土归土”感叹的是来自西方世界的何伟本人。从写作的角度看，我特别欣赏他在书中体现出来的多年观察和思考的持续性、汇集并串连繁复材料的能力，以及一颗细腻且温和的心灵。
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