China

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Review of In Manchuria by Michael Meyer (China 1995-97)
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Talking to Michael Meyer (China 1995-97)
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Peter Hessler (China 1996-98) Goes Home
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New York Times:Report Faults Care of Peace Corps Volunteer
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Second Time Around

Review of In Manchuria by Michael Meyer (China 1995-97)

In Manchuria: A Village Called Wasteland and the Transformation of Rural China by Michael Meyer (China 1995-97) Bloomsbury Press, $28.00 365 pages 2015 Reviewed by Arnold Zeitlin (Ghana 1961-63) Foreigners, especially Americans, living for a spell in China, often are overcome with an irresistible urge to explain China and the Chinese to their countrymen, especially Americans, who may ask a question about how much of a threat China is, then nod politely and change the subject to the latest baseball scores. Many of these same foreigners, especially Americans, after their first year of living among the Chinese, enthusiastically conclude, “why they are just like us.” Then, a year later, they conclude, “they are not like us at all.” Among the latest Americans to tell us about the Chinese is Michael Meyer. He is a writer who first went to China in 1995 as a member of the Peace Corps to . . .

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Talking to Michael Meyer (China 1995-97)

Michael Meyer received a Whiting Writers’ Award for nonfiction after publishing his first book, The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed. He has also held a Guggenheim Fellowship.  His stories have appeared in Time, The New York Times, Smithsonian, Sports Illustrated, Slate, the Financial Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and on “This American Life.” In Manchuria: A Village Called Wasteland and the Transformation of Rural China has just been published by Bloomsbury Press. Today, Michael teaches nonfiction writing at the University of Pittsburgh and spends his free semesters in Singapore. I recently interviewed Mike about his career, China, and his books. • Mike, where did you serve as a PCV and when? Peace Corps China 2; 1995-1997. . Q. Now you stayed on in China . . . was this so you could write Last Days? No, post-Corps, I moved to Beijing in 1997 . . .

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Peter Hessler (China 1996-98) Goes Home

In the current issue of The New Yorker (March 9, 2015) there is an absolutely wonderful and long piece by Peter Hessler on his return to China for a book tour last September. It is entitled “Travels With My Censor” and focuses on changing censorship in-country, but this piece really is much more than that. Peter spent a total of 11 years in China, first as a college teacher in Fuling, later as a journalist, and then later still to research and write his three books on China. Today, Peter and his family live in Cairo and he is a staff writer for The New Yorker. His latest book is Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West. His Peace Corps memoir, and first book, is entitled River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze. Read it. The book is one of the best memoirs of the Peace Corps experience to come . . .

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New York Times:Report Faults Care of Peace Corps Volunteer

Report Faults Care of Peace Corps Volunteer By Sheryl Gay Stolberg New York Times NOV. 24, 2014 WASHINGTON – A Peace Corps doctor caring for a gravely ill volunteer in China ignored a fellow physician’s warnings that the volunteer needed intravenous fluids “in 30 minutes or he is going to die,” and altered her notes about his treatment after submitting them to headquarters for review, according to a confidential report by the agency’s independent watchdog. In a detailed examination of the death of Nick Castle, a 23-year-old volunteer who was the subject of an article in The New York Times in July, the Peace Corps inspector general cited “cascading delays and failures in the treatment” of Mr. Castle as a factor in the death, and said the Peace Corps doctor, Jin Gao, had “failed to use prudent judgment.” Dr. Gao resigned in September and could not be reached for comment. . . .

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Second Time Around

by Kathleen Coskran (Ethiopia 1965–67) The following essay was published in September, 2007 at PeaceCorpsWriters.org, and in 2008 received the Moritz Thomsen Award for Best Short Work about the Peace Corps Experience • I JOINED THE PEACE CORPS at 21 because I was restless for adventure and after two years in Ethiopia, discovered that true adventure lies in the relationships and routines of daily life. I was delighted to live in a tiny mud house with the tin roof, thought the sound of roosters in the morning and the whoop of the hyenas at night exotic, learned to prefer fiery food that made me sweat and cry, but the surprise was my students. I fell in love with them — 75 kids in an unlit classroom with mud walls and a tin roof, 75 kids who walked an hour or more to get to school, kids whose parents I never . . .

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