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Other Rivers

A Chinese Education

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Other Rivers

By: Peter Hessler
Narrated by: Peter Hessler
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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 intense focus from a much more ambitious and sophisticated cohort of parents. Hessler's new students have a sense of irony about the regime but mostly navigate its restrictions with equanimity, and embrace the astonishing new opportunities China's boom affords. But the pressures of this system of extreme 'meritocracy' at scale can be gruesome, even for much younger children, including his own daughters, who give him a first-hand view of raising a child in China.

In Peter Hessler's hands, China's education system is the perfect vehicle for examining what's happened to the country, where it's going, and what we can learn from it. At a time when relations between the UK and China fracture, Other Rivers is a tremendous, indeed an essential gift, a work of enormous human empathy that rejects cheap stereotypes and shows us China from the inside out and the bottom up, using as a measuring stick this most universally relatable set of experiences. As both a window onto China and a distant mirror onto our own education system, Other Rivers is a classic, a book of tremendous value and compelling human interest.©2024 Peter Hessler (P)2024 Penguin Random House LLC Asia China Educators Politics & Government Professionals & Academics Travel Writing & Commentary World Student
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Such an interesting book and a unique experience and insight into an society that is difficult for Westerners to imagine. Hessler is an excellent narrator, I would like to hear River Town narrated in his own voice also.

brilliant

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I rarely give a 5 star review, but I was gripped by Peter’s book and I was delighted to find out that he narrated the book himself. It is a fabulous follow up to River Town. I lived near Chongqing at the same time that he was in Fuling and have now returned to China after an absence of around 20 years. It feels like my life has mirrored his and I relate to much of what he says about his students and his broad commentary of China. I may now revisit River Town, and like he himself visit my own Yangtze tributary town when I have the opportunity.

Love Other Rivers & River Town

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An unusual and quite narrowly focused book written by an American academic who was part of a university exchange programme between the US and China. This is his commentary before and through the Covid pandemic. Largely based on his interactions with his students and colleagues, it provides an interesting commentary on the China that we are given by the western Anglo Saxon media verses the day to day realities that the average student encounters living in the country. The very narrow experiences that the author narrates revolve around the immediate university campus(s) where he has worked and lived and certain individuals with whom he has connected over his stay in China. This is interesting and enlightening but the book doesn’t explore much else in depth beyond this.

An American lecturers experiences in China

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