From the Reform Generation to Generation Xi: A Teacher Returns to a Chinese Classroom After Twenty Years

For more than twenty years, Peter Hessler has been a staff writer at The New Yorker. He first went to live in China as a Peace Corps volunteer, from 1996 to 1998, an experience that became the subject of his book, River Town. With Hessler’s next two books—Oracle Bones and Country Driving—he completed a trilogy of reported works that spanned a decade in China. In 2011, he moved with his family to Cairo, where he lived for five years. His fifth book, The Buried, described his experiences during the Egyptian Arab Spring.In 2019, Hessler moved back to Sichuan province, where he taught writing at Sichuan University. He also covered the pandemic, reporting from Wuhan and other cities during 2020 and 2021. This experience became the subject of his sixth book Other Rivers. In 2011, Hessler was named a MacArthur Fellow. He currently lives with his wife, the writer Leslie T. Chang, and their twin daughters in southwestern Colorado.