Peter Hessler will discuss his book, Other Rivers: A Chinese Education, which uses his inside view of China’s education system as a way of examining the

country. In 1996, when he arrived in China, almost all of the people in Hessler’s classroom were first-generation college students. They typically came from large rural families, and their parents, subsistence farmers, 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, 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. Hessler also draws

insights from the experience of his own daughters, who gave him an intimate view of their local school in China.

Hessler is an award-winning author and 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 won the 2008 National Magazine Award for excellence in reporting, and he was named a MacArthur fellow in 2011.

Peter Hessler: "Other Rivers: A Chinese Education"