Peter Hessler's China

Peter Hessler came to China without expectations. The first time he thought about China, he said, was when he was on the trans-Siberian train from Moscow to Beijing. He had just finished graduate school at Oxford and decided to go back home to the United States through the east. But even then, in 1994, on that brief trip, he knew he was coming back.

“There was a real sense of energy there. You could sense that a lot of things were happening, that this place was changing. People seemed to be doing things. After that trip, I decided I was interested in returning,” Hessler said.

In 1996, Hessler did return, signing up with the Peace Corps. His assignment was to teach English in a small town called Fuling in Sichuan province.

“Fuling was a city of about 200,000, not a very big city by Chinese standards. It was on the Yangtze River and surrounded by countryside. To go there, most people take a boat from Chongqing. It really was quite a remote area. No American had lived there for 50 years. There was a German man who lived there briefly, but he left about the time that I and the other Peace Corps volunteers arrived.”

Crossing the language barrier

Being a foreigner in such a small place had its interesting moments, especially since Hessler spoke very little Chinese. “In the Peace Corps, you get about two months of language training. That's enough to cover the basics. You can order food, get directions and buy things but you can't really have a conversation.”

“As a foreigner, living in Fuling was very intense. Everywhere that I went in town, people would gather around me. I'd have a crowd of people watching me and talking about me. At the beginning, it was very intimidating to have all these sudden attention. It was initially overwhelming and hard to be in the city. But as time passed, that changed.”

Hessler's experiences in Fuling later found their way onto the pages of River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze, which received the Kiriyama Prize in 2000. “Part of what I wrote about in River Town was how my feelings about that place shifted over time. One reason simply was that I learned to speak Chinese. Once I could communicate with people, once I could understand what they were saying, it became infinitely easier.”

“I also realized that most of the attention was just curiosity and that for the most part, people didn't have bad intentions. They were just curious. They just wanted to know more about me and about other foreigners. That was the transition. And one of the wonderful things about living in a place like Fuling is that if you were patient and if you were determined to learn the language over a period of a couple of years, your relationship to the place could really change.”

An appreciation for education

The Chinese attach strong importance to education, Hessler says. (Image: Radio86)Hessler's experiences in Fuling also gave him a glimpse into education's importance in China. “I taught in a college and my students were English majors. Almost all of them were from families whose parents had not been educated. Many of their parents were illiterate, they couldn't even read. But they still encouraged their children to become educated.”

“Culturally, the Chinese have an incredibly strong tradition of education. This comes from Confucianism. Studying is considered to be the most important thing that a person could do. Traditionally, they looked down on businesspeople even if they were very wealthy because the most prestigious thing you could do was become a scholar. Scholars became government officials. This tradition survives even among people who are not educated,” Hessler explains.

China's growing openness to the rest of the world is also reflected in changing policies about education. “The government,” Hessler points out, “has tried to encourage English education. Now, English is a mandatory subject in China from third grade on and they're trying to make it mandatory from first grade on. That's a huge change. This was a country that from the 1950s to the 70s was really quite closed and xenophobic. I think this reflects their goal to be able to engage with the outside world.”

Hessler notes, however, that investment in education is comparatively lower in China. “If you look at the spending on education per capita, it's still lower than most countries, certainly most developed countries. Most Chinese schools are underfunded and the teachers are underpaid, so it's still very tough from that point of view.”