Other Rivers: A Chinese Education

By Peter Hessler | PCV in China 1996–98, Penguin Press, 2024

I have been an admirer of Peter Hessler’s work since reading his first book, River Town, about his Peace Corps service at a Chinese university in the 1990s. I was particularly drawn to that book because of my own Peace Corps work in a Korean university and professional ties to China. Hessler wrote eloquently about his Peace Corps experience in a way that I think any returned Volunteer could relate to. 

Other Rivers: A Chinese Education, Hessler’s latest book about China, is just as interesting and satisfying as the three other books about the country he wrote as a journalist in Beijing. Here he recounts his return to teaching in 2019, this time at Sichuan University in Chengdu, while taking a break from writing. 

He discovers that a great deal has changed since he was a Peace Corps Volunteer more than 20 years earlier: his students are not as poor, they have different worldviews and ambitions, and the rise of Xi Jinping has created a different, more repressive atmosphere that inhibits expression but also inspires creative methods of resistance. The stories that both cohorts of students tell now put a human face on both the country’s progress and its political upheavals. 

Hessler’s time in Sichuan also coincides with the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic, requiring his twin daughters, who spoke no Mandarin and were newly enrolled in a Chengdu public elementary school, to adjust to a new environment in a particularly challenging situation. 

In many ways, Other Rivers is an update to Hessler’s first book, one that not only reports on China’s education system but also, tapping into Hessler’s talents as a journalist, provides an updated, up-close study of contemporary China. The country has made great strides since Hessler first arrived, but it has also suffered from deepening repression. 

Hessler learns that lesson first-hand, with a bittersweet ending that is worth the read.