OTHER RIVERS by Peter Hessler (China)

But events were about to blow him off course. Ninety-five days after Hessler’s first lecture in Chengdu, a cluster of patients with pneumonia-like symptoms appeared in Wuhan, the capital of nearby Hubei province. Forty-seven days after that, Chengdu went into lockdown. Within two months, more than a dozen reporters working for US outlets had been expelled from China. Though not technically a correspondent, Hessler found himself one of the only western writers able to describe what life was like on the ground during one of the most extraordinary periods in China’s recent history.

The result is Other Rivers: A Chinese Education, a blend of memoir and reportage that chronicles China’s Covid years, often via its young people. We meet Hessler’s curious, ambitious and frequently jaded university students, who stand in contrast to the “young and naive” cohort he recalls from the 1990s. Members of generation Xi, Hessler discovers, “could be brutally honest about themselves, and they entertained few illusions about the Chinese system … They knew how things worked; they understood the system’s flaws and also its benefits.”

Hessler’s compassionate depictions of this conflict between a Communist party seeking to expand its control and an increasingly educated and inquisitive generation have won his writing a band of devotees both inside and outside the country. When he sold his car after being effectively expelled in 2021, it caused a minor social media storm, with users lamenting his departure as the end of an era in which China was open to US perspectives.

This book is in many ways a homage to that now disappeared era of Sino-American engagement. It takes in the end of the Peace Corps programme in March 2020, after hawkish senators argued that China was an adversary and not an appropriate destination for American volunteers. Hessler was also in Chengdu for the closure of the US consulate in July 2020, a tit-for-tat measure that followed the order to close the Chinese consulate in Houston days earlier.

Other Rivers implicitly makes the case against both countries turning inwards. When Hessler and his wife, the writer Leslie Chang, arrived in Chengdu, they enrolled their nine-year-old twin daughters in a local Chinese school, despite them barely speaking a word of Mandarin. He documents with an anthropologist’s eye the idiosyncrasies of the Chinese education system, which, despite the hyper-competitive atmosphere, is kept going by teachers whose dedication and compassion holds lessons for western classrooms. And he is full of warmth about the pupils, parents and teachers who, at a time of rising suspicion of foreigners, welcomed his family into their curious, often misunderstood world.