Other Rivers
A Chinese Education
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected 29 Aug 2024
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- $16.99
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- Pre-Order
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this probing memoir, New Yorker correspondent Hessler (Strange Stones) recaps his experience teaching English composition at China's Sichuan University from 2019 to 2021 and compares it to his sojourn at a teachers' college in Fuling in the 1990s. Hessler finds that his Fuling students—farmers' children who pulled themselves out of rural poverty—now, in middle age, sometimes feel a pang of spiritual hollowness amid their material success. His young Sichuan University students, on the other hand, are worldly urbanites who have a jaundiced view of economic success as a dehumanizing rat race, epitomized by the maniacal cramming required for exams. They also chafe against China's all-encompassing surveillance state: Hessler and his students are monitored by omnipresent security cameras, have their movements controlled by face-scanning checkpoints, and risk censorship for political expression. (Hessler's teaching appointment was not renewed, likely due to an interview he did with a controversial Chinese writer.) Hessler paints an expansive panorama of China, from poignant descriptions of the depopulation of the Fuling countryside brought about by China's rapid industrialization to the grim worldview promulgated at his daughters' school ("If one guiding principle of Chinese primary education was ‘Don't be a sucker,' another seemed to be: ‘Fear everything outside the classroom' "). The result is an enthralling take on China's remarkable progress and its downside.