River Town

I love just about anything Peter writes, but this book is special; it’s his first, about his stint as a Peace Corps volunteer in China in the late 1990s, just about the time I moved to Laos. It was a great inspiration to me: the perfect combination of personal memoir and cultural insight.

Bonus: Peter continues to write for the New Yorker magazine about his students from all those years ago and what they are up to today.

I read this book while cruising on the Yangtze River at the time the Three Gorges Dam was being built. It gave me insights into the people residing alongside the Yangtze whose lives were about to be irrevocably altered.

Hessler writes in a way that is compelling and brings the reader along with him as he learns about the Chinese language, people, and customs. He’s since written additional books about China that delve even deeper into the society. But this is the book to read first.

This book presents China in 1996. Hessler, a Peace Corps volunteer, settles into teaching in the picturesque, remote city of Fuling. There, he describes the struggles of making meaningful connections as an outsider.

At the end of the book, he muses that he didn’t build anything or make great changes. Instead, he tried to learn as much as he could about his students, the city and its people. But of course, that is what talented teachers do. They build relationships rather than monuments. They create goodwill rather than make empty political speeches.

A sad coda: in 2020, the U.S. Senate… show more.

Considered by many to be the gold standard of the Peace Corps memoir genre, this volunteer’s account is resplendent in its imagery, witty insights, and down-to-earth prose. The depiction of day-to-day life serving as a schoolteacher in China, interspersed with the challenges of learning a new language and culture, and the occasional plunge into the history of the region (anthropologically, geographically, and politically) round out the narrative to give the reader an immersive cultural experience unlike any other. The narrative’s boots-on-the-ground perspective gives the reader a true insider peek at life in China—at turns baffling, humorous, poignant, and, above all,… show more.

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.

Hessler took up the cause and became a Peace Corps volunteer in China. Through his daily exposure to a very foreign culture, he was able to absorb and make sense of a country that few Westerners ever really get to know or understand. From beginning to end, River Town offers a glimpse into the inscrutable Chinese and their way of life.