In Peter Hessler’s hands, China’s education system is the perfect vehicle for examining the country’s past, present, and future, and what we can learn from it, for good and ill. From 1996 to 1998, Hessler taught in the small city of Fuling as a Peace Corps volunteer, an experience he chronicled in River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze (2001). For over two decades, Hessler maintained ties with his former students, observing how they navigated China’s Reform era. In 2019, he returned to China to teach at Sichuan University and experienced the pandemic’s effects firsthand, chronicled in his latest book, Other Rivers (2024). His new students, mostly urban and middle-class, were vastly different from the rural, often impoverished students he had taught 20 years earlier. Hessler also reconnected with his former students in Fuling. These experiences helped him gain insights into China's remarkable transformation over the last two decades, which he will share in his talk. This talk is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be provided starting at 4:00 p.m. About Peter HesslerPeter Hessler, a staff writer for the New Yorker for over two decades, has written about his experiences in China in River Town (2001), Oracle Bones (2006), Country Driving (2010), Other Rivers (2024) and during the Egyptian Arab Spring in The Buried (2019). Hessler was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2011. He resides in southwestern Colorado with his wife, writer Leslie T. Chang, and their twin daughters. Special ThanksMany thanks to Pomona College Professor Eileen J. Cheng of the Asian Languages and Literatures Department (ALL) for co-organizing this special guest talk with the Asian Library of The Claremont Colleges Library. We also thank our other co-sponsors at Pomona College, which include: ALL, Oldenborg, Asian Studies Program, History Department, Humanities Studio, and the Wig Fund for Teaching Innovation.
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