He writes that there was an unpolished quality to the students that I had never seen before. He continues:

With a delicacy that reveals his deep respect for their struggles, Hessler records and comments on their journals. During his first summer break, he traveled alone to Yunan in Northern Shaanxi Province and into Xinjiang Province along the old Silk Road, living in hotels supposedly off limits to foreigners.īut as a writer, Hessler is most effective when discussing his students. Most afternoons, he would walk into the city and spend a couple of hours at his favorite noodles restaurant talking to the local people. Instead of sticking closely to his college compound during the school months and taking government-sponsored tours during his vacation, Hessler spent his afternoons walking around the city, away from students and instructors who would naturally want to speak English. Part of his success is a tribute to his intelligence, but a good part is a tribute to his Yankee stubbornness. Hessler overcame these as much as anyone could possible hope to in such as short period. Add to these handicaps the Communist Partys warnings to Chinese not to be too friendly with foreigners, and it is surprising that any outsider can really understand China. In addition, a foreigner must struggle with one of the more difficult languages in the world just to speak to someone outside of academia.

A foreigner must contend with Chinas centuries-old isolationism and distrust of weiguoren, or outsiders. One becomes aware, in mysterious, transcendental ways, of the timeless current of human affairs. Near the end of his tour, he celebrated his twenty-ninth birthday he writes: in some ways I felt much older.Ĭhina will do that to a person.

It is, in fact, one of the best books ever written about the Peace Corps experience.įrom late August 1996 to the summer of 1998, Hessler taught English, mostly literature, at Fuling Teachers College in Fuling, a small city (200,000 people) near the confluence of the Yangtze and Wu Rivers in Sichuan Province. But in his “travel/memoir” River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze, Peter Hessler has delivered a tour de force. To write coherently about this experience is possibly even more difficult than understanding this complicated and ancient culture. T O EXPERIENCE CHINA GENUINELY is to undergo a profound personal change in awareness about the human story.

River Town by Peter Hessler