A Chinese Education: Teaching and Learning from Two Generations of Students

In 1996, Peter Hessler was sent as a Peace Corps volunteer to Fuling, a small city on the Yangtze. Almost all of his students had grown up in rural homes, often in poverty, and usually they were the first members of their extended family to enter higher education.

After teaching for two years, Hessler wrote his first book, “River Town,” and he became The New Yorker’s Beijing correspondent. For more than two decades, he stayed in close touch with his former students, observing how they negotiated China’s Reform era. In 2019, Hessler returned to teach again in the same region, at Sichuan University. In the classroom he met members of the next generation of students, almost all of whom had grown up in urban middle-class homes that had been restricted to a single child. While teaching, Hessler also revisited Fuling and the people he had taught in the 1990s, an experience that helped him gain a new perspective on China’s transformation.

A reception will start at 4 p.m. and the lecture will start at 4:30 p.m.

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