Peter Hessler

Peter Hessler is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he served as Beijing correspondent from 2000 to 2007, Cairo correspondent from 2011 to 2016, and Chengdu correspondent from 2019 to 2021. He...
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Vincent Ni

Vincent Ni is the Asia Editor at NPR, where he leads a team of Asia-based correspondents whose reporting spans from Afghanistan to Japan, and across all NPR platforms. In the last decade, Ni has...
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On July 17, ChinaFile hosted the launch of Peter Hessler’s Other Rivers: A Chinese Education, a memoir of his two years teaching at Sichuan University in Chengdu from 2019 to 2021. The book explores elementary and college education, China’s handling of the outbreak of COVID-19, the lives of a previous generation of Hessler’s students, and U.S.-China relations, among many other topics. Hessler was in conversation with National Public Radio’s Asia Editor, Vincent Ni.

Viewpoint
07.23.24

Sideline Sinology

Peter Hessler

In August, when I visited Wuhan, I met with a young building-company manager who had worked on the construction sites of various emergency clinics and quarantine facilities during the city’s outbreak. “The pandemic is like a mirror,” the manager...