OTHER RIVERS, a Remarkable Panorama of Change in China

A former international correspondent and current staff writer for the New Yorker, Peter Hessler has written an extraordinary new book that is both brilliant reportage and an architectural feat of narrative.

His book brings together a vivid personal account of education in China with perceptive political observations that show us the remarkable social and political change that has taken place in the country in just one generation.

Hessler then worked as a freelance reporter in Beijing, traveling widely across a rapidly changing China, and he produced a series of excellent books, like 2006’s Oracle Bones.

He is married to Leslie Chang, an American journalist who wrote the memorable 2008 book Factory Girls, which followed the lives of two migrant factory workers in China. After an extended stay in Egypt (and more books), Hessler, Chang and their twin daughters returned to China in 2019.

Hessler’s description of his daughters’ class would be enough to daunt most students in Canada, not to mention their teachers and parents. The class consisted of 55 children, all moving through the same material at the same pace.

A typical Grade 3 math problem, for example, asked:

Big Sister and Little Brother want to buy the same book. But Big Sister’s money is 2.4 yuan short, while Little Brother’s money is 3.6 yuan short. Together their money is enough to buy the book. How much does the book cost?

Each course was taught by a specialist, and any pupil scoring less than 90 per cent received most of the specialist’s attention. In that year, the twins’ language teacher told Hessler just four kids needed such attention — down from seven the year before.

Hessler and Chang taught their kids how to read and speak Mandarin using flash cards. The girls learned fast and succeeded; their classmates’ parents rebuked their own kids for not doing as well.

That was just part of the intense pressure parents put on their children to succeed academically. Meanwhile, parents supported each other and their kids through an online WeChat community that kept everyone in the loop.

“On WeChat,” Hessler writes, “Mamas and Babas busily engaged in fee collecting and other administrative duties, and they exchanged thousands of messages about homework, uniforms and virtually every other topic under the sun. But I never saw a parent post advice for Teacher Zhang. There were no suggestions, no complaints, and no criticisms. The school’s message was clear: We are in charge.”

Seismic changes, and lives knocked sideways

When parents visited the school to hear about their children, each sat at their child’s desk and listened attentively to what the teacher had to say. Hessler says he never heard a parent ask a question.

The twins’ classmates marked the third generation Hessler has encountered in China. The first was the “reform generation” of the 1990s, mostly smart rural kids who had passed the dreaded gaokao, the high school leaving exam that determines every student’s future. Their scores had been good enough to qualify them for teacher training, and as teachers they went on to train still more rural and small-town kids to equip them for life as urban workers.

Hessler kept in touch with those students, following their careers. Some who left teaching went into business, often very successfully, and some went overseas for work or further education. They had witnessed — and helped advance — the seismic changes of the last three decades.

His post-secondary students of 2019 and the early 2020s, “generation Xi,” seemed very much citizens of the world. Hessler describes how adept they were at going over the “Great Firewall of China” by using virtual private networks to log in to websites all over the world. But their lives were knocked sideways early in 2020 by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Hessler’s account of the early pandemic is vivid and detailed. A neighbour in his locked-down highrise apartment building had a 100-inch TV delivered, which was almost too big to fit in the elevator. Students trapped in their dorms were ordering takeout and other goods, promptly delivered by robots. Everyone grumbled, then went along with the new restrictions; at least Chengdu’s restrictions were not as bad as Wuhan’s.

But the second response, organizing and sustaining enormous shutdowns in travel and transportation, displayed the effectiveness of China’s bureaucracy. The authorities even revived the old neighbourhood committees, groups that tracked every woman’s menstrual cycle in the days of the one-child family policy from 1980 to 2016. Authorities had those groups working to look after the needs of people who were confined to their apartments for weeks or even longer.

When Chengdu locked down, many of Hessler’s students were stranded at home in other provinces, unable to return for the spring semester. His twin daughters were trapped at home as well, and the solution in both cases was online classes with audio and text, but nothing like Zoom.

Some of Hessler’s students had been marooned at home when the lockdown was declared, but at least they could submit classwork — reports on the local LGBTQ+ community, profiteering pharmacists and how seniors were staying in touch by sending each other voice mails and playing them at top volume. If the education system in China aims to produce what Hessler calls “educated acquiescence” in its graduates, Hessler’s students can still offer educated criticism.

The system also uses its critics: Hessler found George Orwell’s Animal Farm on his first-year students’ reading list, just as my students in Guangzhou 40 years ago were reading Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language” for other teachers while I nervously declined to provide them with even an excerpt from Nineteen Eighty-Four. Hessler concludes that Kafka is a sharper critic of Chinese politics than Orwell ever was.

Eventually, as the shutdowns of the early pandemic eased, classes returned to normal and Hessler was able to travel around China in the summer. He visited the now-abandoned Huanan animal market in Wuhan, and met the renowned Chinese writer Fang Fang, who had published an account of Wuhan in the early days of the pandemic.

At the end of his second year in Chengdu, Hessler was told, to his surprise, that his contract would not be renewed. An anonymous student had criticized him online, which the university had seemed to ignore. But Hessler was also publishing long articles in the New Yorker that were sometimes critical of the government.

Meanwhile, then president Donald Trump had launched a trade war with China. It was not an auspicious time to be an American in the People’s Republic.

One of the striking aspects of Other Rivers is that it compiles Hessler’s articles but revises and reorganizes the material so that it dovetails elegantly into a complex narrative showing small personal details — like the 100-inch TV set — that reveal something much larger, like the technology that can produce such sets and the people who can afford them. The result is that Hessler’s account of two years in his family’s life expands into an enormous panorama of a powerful, complex and rapidly changing society.

Chang returned home to the United States with their two daughters. Hessler stayed behind for a time to return to Fuling, the small city where he first lived as a Peace Corps volunteer decades ago.

Since his first years there in the 1990s, the Three Gorges Dam had been completed and most of Fuling’s residents had been moved to a new site as the Yangtze River rose.

Hessler’s former school had moved too, but he spent some time wandering his old campus, now deserted. The scenes from this visit present a vivid image of what he had witnessed in a quarter century: whole communities moved to new places in an endless process of change.

In Oracle Bones, Hessler had observed that China is an ancient country with no ruins. But his former school is now a ruin. In another quarter century, China’s countless new highrises, like the one he and his family lived in, may be ruins too. Already under-occupied, many will be deserted altogether as generation Xi grows old with few children of its own.

And the quarter century after generation Xi will be as dramatically different from today as today is from the China Hessler first encountered a quarter century ago.