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.
