Other Rivers - A Chinese Education

More than twenty years after teaching English to China''s first boom generation at a small college in Sichuan Province, Peter Hessler returned to teach the next generation. At the same time, Hessler''s twin daughters became the only Westerners in a student body of about two thousand in their local primary school. Through reconnecting with his previous students now in their forties - members of China''s "Reform generation" - and teaching his current undergraduates, Hessler is able to tell an intimately unique story about China''s incredible transformation over the past quarter-century.

In the late 1990s, almost all of Hessler''s students were the first of their families to enrol in higher education, sons and daughters of subsistence farmers who 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 and a new kind of student - an only child whose schooling was the object of in