When Peter Hessler, the celebrated chronicler of Chinese society, arrived at Sichuan University in the autumn of 2019, he was expecting to take a break from writing. Hessler made his name as a journalist documenting the lives of everyday people during China’s boom years in the early 2000s. But he first got to know the country as a Peace Corps volunteer in rural Sichuan in the mid-1990s – an experience that formed the basis of his first book, River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze, a bestseller that introduced a generation of readers to a rapidly changing China. Nearly a quarter of a century on, he had planned to focus his energies on teaching.
But events were about to blow him off course. Ninety-five days after Hessler’s first lecture in Chengdu, a cluster of patients with pneumonia-like symptoms appeared in Wuhan, the capital of nearby Hubei province. Forty-seven days after that, Chengdu went into lockdown. Within two months, more than a dozen reporters working for US outlets had been expelled from China. Though not technically a correspondent, Hessler found himself one of the only western writers able to describe what life was like on the ground during one of the most extraordinary periods in China’s recent history.
The result is Other Rivers: A Chinese Education, a blend of memoir and reportage that chronicles China’s Covid years, often via its young people. We meet Hessler’s curious, ambitious and frequently jaded university students, who stand in contrast to the “young and naive” cohort he recalls from the 1990s. Members of generation Xi, Hessler discovers, “could be brutally honest about themselves, and they entertained few illusions about the Chinese system … They knew how things worked; they understood the system’s flaws and also its benefits.”
A case in point is Common Sense, an independent student newspaper based at Sichuan University, which for years published anonymous articles on sensitive topics. Few journalism majors contributed to the publication for fear it might harm their prospects in China’s state-controlled media. Their caution was justified: Common Sense was forced to close after investigating the case of a medical student who died following a long shift in a hospital overrun with coronavirus, after zero-Covid policies were abandoned in late 2022.
Hessler’s compassionate depictions of this conflict between a Communist party seeking to expand its control and an increasingly educated and inquisitive generation have won his writing a band of devotees both inside and outside the country. When he sold his car after being effectively expelled in 2021, it caused a minor social media storm, with users lamenting his departure as the end of an era in which China was open to US perspectives.
This book is in many ways a homage to that now disappeared era of Sino-American engagement. It takes in the end of the Peace Corps programme in March 2020, after hawkish senators argued that China was an adversary and not an appropriate destination for American volunteers. Hessler was also in Chengdu for the closure of the US consulate in July 2020, a tit-for-tat measure that followed the order to close the Chinese consulate in Houston days earlier.
Other Rivers implicitly makes the case against both countries turning inwards. When Hessler and his wife, the writer Leslie Chang, arrived in Chengdu, they enrolled their nine-year-old twin daughters in a local Chinese school, despite them barely speaking a word of Mandarin. He documents with an anthropologist’s eye the idiosyncrasies of the Chinese education system, which, despite the hyper-competitive atmosphere, is kept going by teachers whose dedication and compassion holds lessons for western classrooms. And he is full of warmth about the pupils, parents and teachers who, at a time of rising suspicion of foreigners, welcomed his family into their curious, often misunderstood world.
• Other Rivers: A Chinese Education by Peter Hessler is published by Atlantic (£25). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
