Other Rivers

'Memorable... One of [China's] most astute and sensitive foreign observers' Financial Times

'Compassionate... full of warmth' Guardian



More than twenty years after teaching English to China's first boom generation at a small college in Sichuan Province, Peter Hessler returned to teach the next generation. At the same time, Hessler's twin daughters became the only Westerners in a student body of about two thousand in their local primary school. Through reconnecting with his previous students now in their forties - members of China's "Reform generation" - and teaching his current undergraduates, Hessler is able to tell an intimately unique story about China's incredible transformation over the past quarter-century.



In the late 1990s, almost all of Hessler's students were the first of their families to enrol in higher education, sons and daughters of 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 a first-hand view of raising a child in China.



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. At a time when relations between the UK and China fracture, 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 our own education system, Other Rivers is a classic, a book of tremendous value and compelling human interest.



Peter Hessler is a staff writer at the New Yorker, where he served as Beijing correspondent from 2000-2007 and Cairo correspondent from 2011-2016. He is also a contributing writer for National Geographic. He is the author of River Town, which won the Kiriyama Book Prize, Oracle Bones, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, Country Driving, and Strange Stones. He won the 2008 National Magazine Award for excellence in reporting, and he was named a MacArthur fellow in 2011.



Memorable... Over more than 400 pages, what emerges is a portrait of a country contoured but not defined by politics and economics... [Hessler is] an author and journalist who has long been one of its most astute and sensitive foreign observers.



Compassionate... [Hessler] documents with an anthropologist's eye the idiosyncrasies of the Chinese education system... 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.



Hessler paints an expansive panorama of China...The result is an enthralling take on China's remarkable progress and its downside.



Peter Hessler has written a wryly observed, deeply empathetic portrait of modern China, told through the lives of his Chinese students and his own daughters' experiences at a local school. Hessler avoids sweeping conclusions, trusting that the country's real story emerges from microhistories, everyday conversations and amusing glimpses into daily life. This is journalism at its most humane, and a perfect primer on what China is really like.



Fascinating and engrossing. Other Rivers is an extraordinary work of foreign correspondence and memoir, drawn from a quarter century of direct and intimate observation. With deep sympathy, humor and seriousness, Hessler portrays several generations of Chinese lives in the throes of staggering social, political and economic transformations - and how their experience responds to and reflects on our own.



The hardest and most important challenge in writing about China is conveying the vivid individuality of the people who make it up. Peter Hessler does this wonderfully again. The students whose stories fill Other Rivers are funny but also super-serious, idealistic but also cynical, hopeful but also resigned - and in all ways memorable. They are China's next generation, and we are fortunate to be able to meet them in this book.



Beyond the headlines of strategic rivalry and military confrontation with China are countless stories of real people trying to live in a complex country.... [Hessler] tells [students'] stories with empathy and affection [and] shines a valuable light on the reality of life in today's China.



In intimate, finely drawn portraits of his students, he [Hessler] captures the ambitions and fears animating a new generation of young people as they navigate the political and cultural landscape of the education system in China and abroad.



Fascinating... Hessler is a master storyteller. He conveys the humanity and humour of everyday life in China, all the while embedding the stories he tells in the wider social and political ecosystem. The secret of his success is accessible writing informed by extensive experience of living in some of China's less well-known regions. Hessler has deep sympathy and curiosity about the lives of the people he encounters and his own views lie largely in the background.