Peter Hessler’s Other Rivers is a good book prevented, through no fault of its author, from being a great one. As the title suggests, the work is a sequel to River Town, Hessler’s 2001 account of his experiences as a 27-year-old Peace Corps volunteer teaching English in a small Chinese city, Fuling, in the mid-1990s that made his name as an author. Originally, it seems, the plan was to follow the lives of his students from the first book and compare them to the lives of his new students after he returned to China to teach again in 2019, this time at Sichuan University in Chengdu.
But the original plan for the follow-up was interrupted. As Hessler notes, “I figured that after two or three years I would transition back to writing full-time. But all those plans were upended by the pandemic and the conflict between the U.S. and China.” Other Rivers thus seems a truncated version of the book first intended, intercut with an account of the pandemic and of the politics surrounding Hessler’s departure in 2021.
For young Westerners in China, River Town was an iconic text. It was a vision of how to be a writer: humane, informed, dipping into the lives of others. And it took the habitual but often disparaged work of young Westerners—teaching English—and exalted it into a noble profession. In the 2000s, a fun parlor game at the Bookworm, a popular literary spot in Beijing, was to sit down next to a random white guy in his 20s and ask, “So how is your book about being a young American in China going?” A cluster of books resulted, none of them as successful—artistically or commercially—as River Town.
There were critics; as a British writer complained of foreign memoirists in China to me once, “None of them fuck.” What he meant, he explained, was that the writers of such books came across as detached observers, without any of the personal entanglements or grubby desires that actually typify much of expat life.
That’s unfair to Hessler, who often discusses his own feelings and involvements in the text, even if he spares his romantic life. Yet the book also represents a very American ideal of how to be in China: acting as informal ambassador from the rest of the world to what these Americans believed was a people eager to escape the chains of the past. It’s been a pattern since the 19th century, from the missionary vision of Chinese souls crying out for salvation to the 1990s belief that the internet would inevitably bring Western-style freedom and modernity.
Hessler traces some of those legacies in his own history of the Peace Corps’ relationship with China in both River books—a history that mirrors his own engagement with China. Once denounced as a tool of U.S. imperialism, the Peace Corps was eventually allowed to enter the country in 1993, its name tactfully rendered as the U.S.-China Friendship Volunteers. But the program has been shuttered since 2020 as a result of political pressure from Republican senators.
Hessler lived up to the Peace Corps’ vision of acting as a bridge between cultures. His writing wasn’t just idealized by young Americans, but by many Chinese. They saw books by Ho Wei (Hessler’s Chinese name), including his excellent follow-up collections of reporting in China for the New Yorker, as a model for writing about their own country, and as part of the bridge to a better future. (At a recent book event for Other Rivers in New York, younger expat Chinese intellectuals made up a large percentage of the audience.) Over time, Hessler notes, “more copies [of my books] were sold in China than in the United States.” His wife, fellow writer Leslie T. Chang, authored another of the iconic books of the 2000s, Factory Girls, paralleling Hessler’s examination of student life with tales of migrant laborers who headed from the village to the big city.
After some time in the United States and Egypt, the family was drawn back to China, where Hessler took up a teaching job at a Sichuan University-Pittsburgh Institute program, and the first third of the book recounts his experiences meeting his new students and following his old ones. This is wonderful, moving material. Rivers are a freighted metaphor in China, where the patterns of “hydraulic despotism” have sometimes been blamed for recurring authoritarianism—as in the scathing 1988 documentary River Elegy, screened by state media in one of the last flares of the reform movement before the Tiananmen Square massacre and the crackdown that followed. Hessler’s Other Rivers are the winding streams of his students’ lives, flowing into the backwaters and inlets of Chinese life.
Some of the former students he tracks down have taken the classic pattern of Chinese success of the 1990s and 2000s, leaving the government-assigned jobs they graduated into and becoming successful entrepreneurs, running everything from restaurants to elevator installation firms. But many of Hessler’s former students became teachers themselves, and their struggles with the political burdens of education in China end up mirroring his own.
River Town was not an apolitical book—one of the best sections details how his growing comprehension of Chinese leads to the realization of just how ubiquitous Chinese Communist Party slogans are in the city—but discussion of politics was muted compared to the personal accounts of his and his students’ lives. In Xi Jinping’s China, however, both Hessler and his students, present and former, find politics inescapable. As he notes, “For a teacher or a parent in China, the most inspiring moments can also be the ones that make you look over your shoulder.”
Save for one student, referred to by her English name Serena, his ties with the new students never feel as developed. The gap between his original class, almost all from poorer rural backgrounds, and today’s more prosperous, urban students is touched on, but not deeply explored—although he does note how much bigger they are. That prosperity itself creates very different relationships between the students in his class and the West that Hessler represents. But the three decades in age difference between him and his students also makes for a different dynamic than with his 1990s students, who were close to being his peers.
The hopes and fears of a 55-year-old writer are very different from those of a 27-year-old; Hessler and Chang’s children start going to Chinese school, and they fear the impact on the children’s education if politics were to suddenly force the family out of the country. For Hessler’s former students, the physical woes of aging can’t be separated from politics, such as the “coercive drinking” vital to maintaining relationships in China: “I have to take medicine two or three times a day, and stop drinking beer or wine,” one former student writes him in 2003, “When I have meals with my colleagues and leaders, they always ask me to drink, otherwise they think I’m a bad-mannered man. But I don’t want to tell them the truth, I am afraid they will [exclude me]. Some of them are not friendly.”
Even before COVID-19, politics sharply intrude into Hessler’s life as a teacher, after he fears being reported for commenting on a student’s essay on national sovereignty and drawing the ire of online nationalists. In 2020, politics becomes inescapable, and the book shifts into an account of living through the pandemic. This is interesting enough, but it’s also well-trod ground at this point. Hessler’s departure from the country in 2021, after his contract wasn’t renewed, deprives us of the richer possibility of seeing both the years of COVID-19 success in China and the painful turn toward pandemic failure in 2022.
There’s a return to briefly focusing on his new students toward the end of the book, which he tries to turn into a wider consideration of China’s younger generation, whom he sees as less nationalistic than they’ve been painted by Western commentators. This argument didn’t convince me, partially because he doesn’t consider just how unrepresentative students signing up for a writing course with a renowned foreign teacher at a program jointly run with an American university might be.
Hessler clearly carries some bitterness from being forced out, and blames in part the attention he got from Western commentators after he wrote a 2020 essay for the New Yorker on the pandemic in China that critics, most prominently Australian sinologist Geremie Barmé, saw as sycophantic and self-censored. He seems very angry at Barmé for drawing attention to the ambiguities of his position at the time, when he was writing about China without the required journalist (“J”) visa.
I should note that while I’ve never met either Hessler or Barmé, virtually everyone else I know in China studies is friends with one or both of them; the smallness of the world of China watchers is part of why these affairs can feel very personal. While Barmé’s highlighting of Hessler’s “unaccredited journalism” was a very dubious choice, it was also an accurate statement. Writing without a J visa was always technically against the rules, but it used to be extremely common, and the authorities didn’t really care. But today it is a genuinely risky practice, a fact that Hessler doesn’t quite seem to have grasped when he returned to China.
In an uncharacteristically ill-tempered recent piece for ChinaFile that expands on material in the book, Hessler made a comparison between “feral sinologists” like his own younger self and “sideline sinologists” criticizing from afar, arguing that the second simply didn’t understand the challenges of the first.
It was a poor argument, not least because those in the latter group have generally ended up unable to return to China not by choice but precisely because of their deep involvement with China, including victims of the Chinese party-state. Their skin in the game is often as deep as—and sometimes deeper than—anyone’s on the ground.
Working in China, meanwhile, comes with its own series of troubles and compromises, conscious or otherwise. As Hessler experienced, the relative liberalism of the 1990s and early 2000s is long gone. The ambitions and dilemmas of his students remain as powerfully moving as ever, but giving voice to them has become ever more curtailed by a party that wants to write only one story about China. There’s no room for feral sinologists in Xi Jinping’s China. Politics keep getting in the way, as they got in the way of this book. For now, Hessler has chosen a very Chinese solution to the problem of an intrusive state: retreating to the far mountains to teach the Dao. Or, in his case, the American version: coaching track in Colorado.
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