Sunday, August 18, 2024 | 9:00 AM EDT
In 1996, when Peter Hessler first went to China to teach, almost all of his students were first-generation college students. Most came from large rural families, and their parents, subsistence farmers, could offer little guidance as their children entered a new world. By 2019, when Mr. Hessler arrived at Sichuan University, he found a very different China, as well as a new kind of student – an only child whose schooling was the object of intense focus from a much more ambitious cohort of parents.
China’s education system offers a means of examining the country’s past, present, and future. At a time when anti-Chinese rhetoric in America has grown intense, Other Rivers is a work of empathy that shows us China from the inside out and the bottom up.
In an interview conducted on August 6, 2024, Peter Hessler, in conversation with Lenora Chu, looks at Chinese education as a way to understand both China and the United States.
Speaker
Peter Hessler
Peter Hessler is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he served as Beijing correspondent from 2000 to 2007, Cairo correspondent from 2011 to 2016, and Chengdu correspondent from 2019 to 2021. He is the author of The Buried; River Town, which won the Kiriyama Book Prize; Oracle Bones, which was a finalist for the National Book Award; Country Driving; and Strange Stones. He won the 2008 National Magazine Award for excellence in reporting, and he was named a MacArthur fellow in 2011.
Mr. Hessler attended Princeton University, where he majored in English and creative writing, and then Oxford University, where he studied English language and literature at Mansfield College.
Moderator
Lenora Chu
Lenora Chu is a journalist and author of the award-winning Little Soldiers, a narrative account of China’s education system. She is also a special correspondent for the nonprofit news organization Christian Science Monitor, where she covers Europe and Chinese engagement abroad. Her work illuminates the intersection of culture, education, and global competitiveness — a passion developing in part from growing up with Chinese parents in America.
Ms. Chu holds degrees in engineering and journalism from Stanford and Columbia universities and is a fellow in the NCUSCR Public Intellectuals Program.
