Transcript: Peter Hessler on his new book "Other Rivers: A Chinese Education"

Below is a complete transcript of a podcast recorded on June 5, 2024. You can listen to the show in the embedded player above, or subscribe to Sinica wherever you get your podcasts. Transcription by the great folks at Cadre Scripts, and checked and formatted by Lili Shupe.

Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we’ll look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends that can help us better understand what’s happening in China’s politics, foreign relations, economics, and society. Join me each week for in-depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China. I’m Kaiser Kuo, coming to you from Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

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“Nothing has changed, everything has changed.” That is the paradoxical mantra that Peter Hessler found himself repeating during the years he spent teaching in China again, more than two decades after his stint teaching in Fuling, in what is now Chongqing, as a Peace Corps volunteer, a stint made famous in his debut book, Rivertown: Two Years on the Yangtze. Pete returned to China, this time to Chengdu, to teach nonfiction writing in the company of his wife, the writer, Leslie Chang, and their twin daughters, Ariel and Natasha. They were there from 2019 through 2021. As he recounts in his latest book, Other Rivers: A Chinese Education, he got to know a whole new crop of students; parented, along with Leslie, his daughters, who were thrown into the deep end of a Chinese primary school, and got on, as it were, swimmingly there; experienced the ups and downs of the COVID pandemic from its outbreak to the lockdown; reconnected with many of his former students from Fuling; endured the tattling of fanatical Little Pinks; reported for the New Yorker from COVID’s ground zero, the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan; he visited an aborted serial failure of a golf course project in Fuling called Rivertown, after his first book; and eventually faced what amounted to an expulsion from China because, it seems to me, of the contemptible pusillanimity of an American administrator.