Why did I love this book?
After China started to open up in the 1980s, there were a spate of books by Westerners about the China that they encountered. None match this evocative portrait of life in a Sichuan Province town on the Yangtzee River. It’s written by a young American Peace Corps volunteer who went on to become a New Yorker writer. It’s a tale of discovery. The students begin to learn about the world outside of China and the writer starts a decades-long romance with Chinese society. Smart, touching, and beautifully written.
7 authors picked River Town as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
When Peter Hessler went to China in the late 1990s, he expected to spend a couple of peaceful years teaching English in the town of Fuling on the Yangtze River. But what he experienced - the natural beauty, cultural tension, and complex process of understanding that takes place when one is thrust into a radically different society - surpassed anything he could have imagined. Hessler observes firsthand how major events such as the death of Deng Xiaoping, the return of Hong Kong to the mainland, and the controversial consturction of the Three Gorges Dam have affected even the people of…