Peter Hessler is a writer and journalist from Columbia, Missouri. A regular contributor to The New Yorker and National Geographic Magazine, he is the author of three books documenting Reform China (River Town, Oracle Bones, Country Driving), a book on the Egyptian Revolution (The Buried), and an essay collection (Strange Stones). For his work, Hessler has been named a MacAuthur Fellow and a finalist for the National Book Award.
Hessler’s career began at 27 with a Peace Corps assignment to the teacher’s college of Fuling, a Sichuan river town known for pickled mustard stems and little else. Fuling was not the China of political dogfights and economic miracles; here, cadres played drinking games for magazine editorships, and shop owners gawked at the first foreigner they had ever seen. As Hessler — 何伟 — bumbled through the routines of Fuling life, he captured a remarkable portrait of his students and the locals in River Town.
When we speak, Hessler is at home in Ridgway, Colorado. A lifelong runner, he has just come back from a jog. He is 5’8” and dark-haired. In pictures his hands are perpetually pocketed — the Awkward American — but his eyes betray a thoughtfulness that sees, remembers, writes. When Hessler talks about Fuling, he retains the upbeat lilt but also the forcefulness of a moment that will soon pass. He tells me how his Fuling students used to be a head shorter than him — a lot of the kids were taller at his most recent teaching position in Chengdu; he even had pictures to prove the point — and we share a chuckle.
I had a witty remark prepared since I knew Hessler’s next book would be named Other Rivers: “all your book titles are two words long — why?” Admittedly, I was fishing for a sound bite on dualities in his writing, but I did not ask it. There was no point. Hessler was already telling a story, and all I could do was listen.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
When did you decide to become a writer?
When I was sixteen in sophomore year. I didn’t go to a great high school; it was a big public school in Columbia, Missouri. It had a very mixed population, so I met a lot of different people in my class. They happened to have some really good English teachers when I was there: my tenth grade teacher noticed I had some talent in writing and she encouraged me to seriously think about being a writer. I was a smart kid but I wasn’t necessarily a great student. But once she started talking about it, I started reading stories more and became more serious; that’s when I really started. From that point on, I was really trying to work at it.
Was it always nonfiction?
No, it was originally fiction, and I did a lot of short stories. I did creative writing at Princeton with English and my thesis was a collection of short stories; I didn’t do any journalism or any campus publications. The spring of my junior year I took John McPhee’s class on nonfiction writing. It wasn’t really because I felt I was going to be a nonfiction writer, but it was a good class for me and it was a time where I was developing quickly. He was a very inspiring teacher, and after that class I started writing nonfiction for publications. I still thought I was going to be a fiction writer, even when I joined the Peace Corps, but I was also writing nonfiction all through graduate school. Partway through my time in Fuling, I stopped writing fiction, and near the end I talked to John McPhee about my plans and started to think I should become a foreign correspondent. He wrote me an email and said that I should try writing a book about Fuling — and that’s when I started writing River Town. Pretty much from that point on, I realized that nonfiction was what I was going to do, and I have never written fiction since.
I think it was a better and more comfortable fit for me for a number of reasons. I was able to use humor more — maybe I took fiction too seriously. I also liked reporting and meeting new people and that was another strength I had, being able to meet people, do research, describe real things. I’ve always felt it developed naturally. I think as a young writer it’s worthwhile to do all types of writing. John had always told us he had also seen himself as a fiction writer and did a fiction senior thesis before switching to nonfiction.
You write about your dissatisfaction with academia in River Town. Can you elaborate?
I originally thought I was going to be an English professor. When I went to Oxford for a second B.A., I had thought I would do a PhD after that, but partway through my time I realized that I wasn’t going to go into academia in English. Mainly my disillusionment was the language; I felt it was a kind of code. They’re not trying to necessarily convey things; sometimes they’re just trying to signal what they are and what institutional background, community they belong to. I also thought it was awful to write about literature, beautiful poetry, novels, fiction, but to write about it with really formal stiff prose. To me it just seemed wrong. There are great critics, like Harold Bloom, who are really readable and engaging; of course there were always exceptions. For China, for example, there’s Jonathan Spence. He had originally wanted to be a novelist, and he writes beautifully. To me, writing is fundamental and you should write as well as you can. Academia sometimes doesn’t respect that.
Do you feel that beautiful writing is lacking in journalism, too?
Journalism discourages — and has trouble with — the first-person voice. Journalists want to be objective, but sometimes it’s important to orient the reader to who you are, and you can’t do that without the first-person voice. Especially with my reporting in China and Egypt, I’m a foreigner in those places and people responded differently to me because of how I looked and my background, and I needed to convey that, so I needed the first-person voice.
You’ve also kept your sense of humor in writing over the years. Why?
Humor’s important to me. It’s probably just the way I see the world, but I feel humor makes places like China and Egypt feel more familiar and human, and sometimes if you see a place in a really humorless way it’s almost like a way of othering people, making them more foreign. When Americans look at places in the developing world, we only see people who we should feel sorry for, and people who we should be afraid of.
Your books are categorized as travel writing. Is this accurate?
You can categorize them in many ways. You could call them literary nonfiction, or narrative nonfiction. Nonfiction’s an odd word, as John McPhee would say. I guess you can call it travel writing, but a lot of writing is really a trip, and when I’m living in Fuling for two years, that’s not really a trip. I was never that interested in writing about just being on the surface of a place; I like being able to get deeper.
What draws you to a story?
It’s almost always character or place. It’s almost never issues, which is probably different from a lot of journalism. It tends to start with somebody or some place that interests me, and then I start to look into it and try to get to know the person or place better. Along the way you run into issues that become part of the story. Like, if I write about the students who became entrepreneurs, it tells something about what it was like for that generation that grew up with gaige kaifang [Reform and Opening] and became businessmen. During COVID, I did some stories that were based more on issues like about the lockdowns and what that was like, but generally speaking my projects usually start with character or place. I think that also partly reflects my fiction training, because that’s more how a novelist would think rather than a journalist. I don’t think like a journalist.
I saw that in River Town: there are sections there solely focused on creating a sense of place.
That was something that books about China usually didn’t convey, and partly it was because the earlier generation of foreigners who lived in China were always in big cities — Beijing or Shanghai or Xi’an. My situation was different; I was in a smaller place, and in a smaller place like Fuling, you have a really strong sense of what this place is like. You get a strong sense of landscape in that river valley with the Yangtze and Wu River. It was a really important part of life there, and I really wanted to capture that.
You entered China during a very special age; is that age ending?
When I was there in the 90’s, my timing was fortunate. The country was becoming more open; it was probably the first time you could live in a place like Fuling as a foreigner, and people could actually get to know you and you could get to know their lives. There were these amazing changes in the countryside as people escaped poverty and became middle-class, and that was inspiring to cover and follow. That was what I wrote about, and what my wife wrote about as well. It’s a different time now, a much more political moment, and harder. Having said that, I enjoyed the two years we were in Chengdu, and that’s partly because of the students I taught who I really respected. I found them to be inspiring; they weren’t just destroyed by the system. I have some hope that something better will come.
Are you nostalgic for that era of Fuling?
I couldn’t know how important it was, but I could tell it [the turn of the century] was an important moment. I was only 27 when I went there, but I could tell there was something special about how people talked. You could just see they were coming from the countryside, and they were not going back. They were becoming educated urban people. It was a really powerful feeling. You could see that these lives were being transformed, and I had a sense it was happening all over this country. This doesn’t happen that often, and probably never will again. This experience, this moment needed to be recorded as much as any of us could.
When I wrote River Town, I didn’t have a contract or an agent, but I really wanted to have that record because I wanted to have this moment. I think the Chinese also tend to be nostalgic because things change so fast. Everything in China moves very quickly, so 20 years seem much longer than that. It’s hard to believe. In 1998, when you were in Fuling, if you go to Chongqing it’s going to take eight hours on the boat; now it’s like 34 minutes on the train — those kinds of massive changes. It’s hard sometimes for people to remember what it was like, how remote these places used to feel. Fuling used to feel really really remote, isolated; now you don’t feel that anymore.
Even in Fuling, those big Yangtze boats don’t exist anymore. There’s lots of bridges now, and most people don’t spend time on boats anymore. Even the physicality is different. When I look at old pictures, you would see these guys on streets without their shirts on, really sinewy and skinny, and they looked like laborers, not eating enough and working a lot. People in China don’t look like that now; they look more prosperous. I described this with my students when I talked at Chuanda [Sichuan University]: suddenly all those kids were as big as me; a lot of kids were taller than me. I would show pictures of me in Fuling, and I was a head taller than my old students.
Many of your subjects tend to be migrants who aren’t much more familiar with the place than you are. Can you expand on this?
There’s a socialist named George Simmel who talked about the figure of the stranger. The stranger is somebody who is in the community but not really in the community. He’s an outsider of some sort, but he has a role there. People like that are very interesting because they’re very observant and may notice things locals don’t notice, and people may talk to them in ways they don’t talk to locals. I was always a stranger in China. In some ways that’s a disadvantage — some things I can’t grasp like local dialects — but in other ways I can be more observant and people will sometimes tell me things they won’t tell other people.
Migrants are also like that. The garbageman in Cairo I wrote about: he’s the classic example of a stranger. He’s working in this neighborhood, he knows a lot about the community, but he’s of a different social class, a different educational level, and he has a different perspective. As a writer I gravitate towards these figures, because they help me understand what’s going on. Migrants are often also quite open, because nobody really respects them in a lot of places and don’t want to talk to them. I also just wrote about migration because it was clearly an important thing. You just saw it everywhere, and when I get on those boats, you just see these hoards of people from the countryside trying to go to a city and find a new life, and you could just feel: “this is something important and we need to know more about this.” Leslie [Hessler’s partner] began to write about migrants for similar reasons; it was clearly an important issue to understand.
Was it difficult to learn Chinese?
I was 27 when I moved there, so I was still young enough to be pretty quick with language. The Peace Corps did not have a strong tradition of volunteers learning Chinese to a high level, so the first six months I was a little frustrated. Part of it was that it was so hard being in the city — crowds of people going, waiguoren [foreigner], waiguoren — it was very hard to deal with that. I would try to sit at a park or tea house, read my book or study Chinese, and five people would come and ask questions or start flipping through the book you had there. Initially I was really annoyed, and I tried not to go out.
But I made this shift after six months: I’m trying to learn this language and all these people just want to talk to me. They’re just curious, they’ve been isolated, and they’re not trying to do me harm. After that I made this really important shift where I was like, I’m going to the park, but I no longer expected to sit there by myself and have a peaceful day like I would have in New York City. When I sit at the park, people would come talk to me, and I would learn Chinese. I would bring my book knowing it was a prop, somebody would pick it up and ask me about it, and I could try to see how far I could go with my vocabulary. If I wanted to study, I would do it in my apartment. Once I did that, I got a lot more relaxed, and my language skills picked up quickly. It was natural that they were curious about somebody like me; it was a good thing. I saw it as part of why I was there.
Has learning Chinese impacted your writing in any way?
I don’t know if it impacted my writing directly because my English is so deep in terms of how I write, but it certainly impacts your point of view. Anytime you have another language floating around, it just changes the way you see things. There’s words in my family we just use in Chinese because they mean more. I have twin daughters, and in America when you have twins the first question people usually ask is, “Are they identical?” But in China the first question was usually “Who’s older?” and that’s because of jiejie [big sister] and meimei [little sister], you know, like they have different words for the older and younger sisters, so it’s something they think about. In some ways, the language shapes your perspective and what you prioritize. They want to know which one’s jiejie and which one’s meimei. You notice a lot of little things like that when you have another language.
Was it surprising to learn how popular your books are in China?
I never wrote them thinking they would be read there, actually. I thought that Chinese people probably wouldn’t like them when I was writing them. The Chinese traditionally haven’t liked things that foreigners wrote, and I think it was often because people were insecure about the country — it was kind of a mess. I was writing in a different period, and by the time I had Chinese readers they had more confidence, I think, than previous generations. They could see and appreciate an outsider’s perspective, and they wouldn’t necessarily feel threatened or offended. They wanted to see their world from a different angle. I was really grateful for that actually.
Tell me about your new book, Other Rivers.
It’s about the years I lived in Chengdu from 2019 to 2021, and it’s a followup to River Town in a lot of ways. I always had this plan that 20 years after teaching in Fuling, I would go back and teach again. It’s a generation, so I was curious to see what it felt like to be at a Chinese college again. I also wanted to reconnect with my Fuling students, and I wanted to write about how their lives had changed. I also wanted to put my daughters in a Chinese school and have them have the experience of learning Chinese.
It turned out it wasn’t possible to go back to Fuling for political reasons, so I went to Chengdu, which was still close enough that I could revisit. Those are the main things: what it was like to teach kids who were current college students at Chuanda, what it was like to reconnect with my Fuling students, these two generations. There’s also [a third generation], my daughters’ experience in elementary school, so there’s a lot of education in this. Of course, the other thing that happened was the pandemic that broke out after six months, but that’s only part of the book. The main thing is still about teaching and how things have changed in 20 years.
Did you keep up with former students from this first generation?
The best thing I did was before I left Fuling, I copied all the mailing addresses of my students. There was another fortunate thing when I applied for journalism jobs in the US after River Town and I didn’t get any offers, so I decided to go back to China in spring of 1999 to freelance, which is described in Oracle Bones. That was fortunate because once I was in Beijing, it was easier to stay in touch with students. For years I was writing them letters every semester and sending them to all these addresses; I had a whole system for this. I used to hand-address these letters in Chinese, which was hard to do. Over time it switched over to email so we could communicate more easily. It was a lot easier to stay in touch with those students than Leslie’s migrants because my students turned out to have quite stable lives: they became teachers. I did a survey and the average student had two jobs over the past 25 years. We developed patterns, and now I’m setting up the same thing with my Chuanda students.
Speaking of Oracle Bones, in it you shift between modern China and its deep past. Is China’s past still a useful lens to modern China in 2023?
There’s a lot of stuff that’s still the same. The gaokao [college entrance exam] is similar to the old exam in a lot of ways — the way you have everything so focused on the exam, for instance. My students had a debate on the gaokao; it obviously seems like a flawed system, but most students supported it. The main reason was that they felt like it was fair and couldn’t be cheated. This is a way for people who are poor, who are in far places, to rise. How many of those people rise is another question, but it’s something that people value. Especially in a country like China, where they’ve been writing with the same characters since the Shang Dynasty, you’re going to have cultural elements that survive and are still there. I was struck by how many of my Fuling students, who had become urban middle-class people, still held values that were very similar to what they had grown up with. Deep inside, those people are still nongmin [peasant farmers]; there’s some part that remains connected, even though they’re prosperous, they have nice cars, good careers. Their values are still the values of rural China. So I think it’s always worth looking at the past.
What’s next?
When we left, it was still really hard to enter China as a journalist and have a visa approved, and I think it’s not really a good idea to teach there and write at the same time. I did it during those years because I had no choice and I happened to be there when COVID broke out, and I felt like I should write about it. But I knew it was a risk because I was not supposed to do it as a professor. It put pressure on my institute, on my university, and they wanted me gone because of it. And I think if I go back and work at a university, something similar will happen. Somebody will get upset with what I’m writing and there will be problems. I have a US-based project that I’ll work on after I’m finished with Other Rivers.
Have any of your subjects ever gotten in political trouble after publication?
No. I wrote about a garbageman in Egypt and people were somewhat scandalized by it, but I think it’s mostly nonsense and he didn’t have any trouble. In China, I did talk to people like Fang Fang [a political activist] who was in Wuhan, and there were definitely online attacks on both of us after I published that story, but somebody like her knew what she was getting into, and she decided she wanted to talk to me.
Do you have any advice for young writers?
Especially for writers at Harvard, similar to Princeton, it’s a hard path. For one, it takes a long time for a writer to develop. There are other fields and other creative arts where you develop quickly, you know, musicians. Writers generally don’t do a lot of value in their twenties. There’s exceptions and we get distracted by the exceptions, but really when you’re 23 — and you should try to get better, whatever you can — your best work is probably ahead of you. You have to find a way to build towards that and sustain yourself, and be patient and not get discouraged. There’s going to be a lot of rejection and a lot of frustration on the way.
The other thing is that there’s no set track. You don’t go to law school, you don’t go to medical school. In some ways it’s great, it’s totally free, but it’s also intimidating because you have so many options. I think if sometimes you’ve gone to a really prestigious school, classmates go off on the fast track to wherever they’re going and you feel this pressure. In my own experience the decisions that I made that seemed to be less prestigious turned out to be better for me as a writer. Like when I joined the Peace Corps — I didn’t know kids from Princeton who did that, and certainly nobody who was a Rhodes Scholar that I knew at Oxford would do that. It just wasn’t prestigious. But it turned out to probably be the best decision I made; it taught me so much and helped me grow as a writer. Similarly, when I was applying for jobs in 1999, I couldn’t find journalism jobs, so I went back to Beijing and I took a $500-a-month job at The Wall Street Journal as an assistant and decided to just freelance. In some ways, it was kind of crushing because I wanted a real job, but it turned out to be great because it put me close to good material. So you have to be open to that, you have to be able to take some risks. You have to understand that not everything’s going to feel like the elite world you’re in as a student.
Is it stressful after so long?
No, it would’ve been stressful if I was 29 and had two kids or something, but now that I’ve been doing it for a while and kind of know what I’m doing — I’ve got resources, periods right now where I can support myself — I don’t find it that stressful anymore. But it’s hard when you’re getting started; it’s a very hard field when you’re young.
So do you think writers should have a day job?
It depends, every situation is different. For me it was important that I was going to a place where I was engaged with interesting material and maturing. So the Peace Corps, they taught me Chinese, they taught me about life in a small town in China, but the experience also taught me to grow up, to be mature. I was under a lot of pressure, and I was making a lot of mistakes, and you’re often kind of embarrassed and doing things that aren’t right, and that was really important as a writer. The more mature that you are, your voice as a writer also deepens and gets more confident. You have better judgment. I think sometimes doing something that challenges and engages you as a person — sometimes that’s the best thing.
Hessler’s Other Rivers will be published in 2024.
2025