Other Rivers: A Chinese Education by Peter Hessler
“Peter Hessler loves China as much as I do. His book, River Town, about his experiences in the Peace Corps in China has always been one of my favorites. It helps that he also loves the same part of China that I do and lives in Ridgeway!”
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. 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.
As relations between the US and China worsen by the day, it's never been more important to have a more humane and nuanced view. For long stretches, during COVID, China was sealed off from other reporters and Hessler was the only well-known Western journalist on the ground anywhere in the country. Like Pamela Druckerman's BRINGING UP BÉBÉ, Other Rivers shows us contemporary China through its systems of parenting and education, and we can't help comparing ourselves to what we see.
