April 15, 2024
An American writer working in China as a teacher navigates a careful path through a complicated, changing culture. Beyond the headlines of strategic rivalry and military confrontation with China are countless stories of real people trying to live in a complex country. In his previous books, especially River Town and Country Driving, Hessler, a veteran staff writer for the New Yorker, recounted his experiences of China, focusing on his work as a university-level instructor. In his latest book, he continues the theme, tracking the huge changes that have taken place in the past three decades. The first part of the book is set in the 1990s, when he taught mostly students from poor families. They often struggled with the university experience but worked to make the most of their opportunities. Hessler left after several years. In the second part of the book, he chronicles his return to China in 2019 to teach journalism and nonfiction at Sichuan University. He found that competition between students was intense and that the educational environment had changed significantly. There were surveillance cameras everywhere and an army of bureaucrats issuing opaque orders. There were rabidly nationalist students called "Little Pinks," who seemed determined to root out any sign of dissent, as well as the ever-present danger of jubao, an anonymous complaint against a teacher that could end their career. Hessler was fired after a few years, effectively expelling him from China, and he was never able to establish why. However, he built solid relationships with a number of students, and he tells their stories with empathy and affection. The text is not an anti-China diatribe; though Hessler is clearly distressed at the country's direction, he offers an informative, respectful story. Writing from personal experience, Hessler shines a valuable light on the reality of life in today's China.
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Starred review from May 20, 2024
In this probing memoir, New Yorker correspondent Hessler (Strange Stones) recaps his experience teaching English composition at China’s Sichuan University from 2019 to 2021 and compares it to his sojourn at a teachers’ college in Fuling in the 1990s. Hessler finds that his Fuling students—farmers’ children who pulled themselves out of rural poverty—now, in middle age, sometimes feel a pang of spiritual hollowness amid their material success. His young Sichuan University students, on the other hand, are worldly urbanites who have a jaundiced view of economic success as a dehumanizing rat race, epitomized by the maniacal cramming required for exams. They also chafe against China’s all-encompassing surveillance state: Hessler and his students are monitored by omnipresent security cameras, have their movements controlled by face-scanning checkpoints, and risk censorship for political expression. (Hessler’s teaching appointment was not renewed, likely due to an interview he did with a controversial Chinese writer.) Hessler paints an expansive panorama of China, from poignant descriptions of the depopulation of the Fuling countryside brought about by China’s rapid industrialization to the grim worldview promulgated at his daughters’ school (“If one guiding principle of Chinese primary education was ‘Don’t be a sucker,’ another seemed to be: ‘Fear everything outside the classroom’ ”). The result is an enthralling take on China’s remarkable progress and its downside.
Starred review from June 1, 2024
Returning to Sichuan Province after a long absence, an American journalism teacher experiences heightened surveillance, pandemic lockdowns, and other challenges in a changing China. In River Town (2001), Hessler described teaching English and learning Chinese in the remote town of Fuling. Back after 20 years, much has changed. Fuling is partially underwater due to the Three Gorges Dam. His students at Chengdu Experimental School are more sophisticated (and taller, thanks to better nutrition), but under ever-greater pressure to get ahead. Political sensitivities remain as bewildering as ever, but now there are cameras everywhere. Sent to a local elementary school, the author's children struggle to learn Mandarin, while their parents struggle to keep up with the school's highly active, if frequently passive-aggressive WeChat group. COVID-19 upends everything, but it also gives Hessler a unique opportunity to observe modern Chinese society under stress. Pulled between the need to maintain his tenuous teaching position and the desire to work a once-in-a-lifetime story, Hessler heads to Wuhan, the pandemic's epicenter. Throughout, Hessler shares the words of his students--variously curious, skeptical, tired, and wise--in what is, at heart, a meditation on teaching and learning from one's students.
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