River Town cover

River Town

by Peter Hessler

Two years in a Chinese river town about to disappear.

For you if

you want to understand China through a small city on a river rather than through its politics or its skyline

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Hessler spent two years as a Peace Corps volunteer teaching English in Fuling, a small city on the Yangtze River in the late 1990s — just as the Three Gorges Dam was about to flood it. He learned Mandarin, cycled the surrounding countryside, taught Shakespeare to students who had never met a foreigner, and paid attention with a precision that most visitors never achieve. The most honest visitor dispatch from inside provincial Chinese daily life ever published — not Beijing, not Shanghai, but the China where most people actually live.

Where This Book Lives

Setting
China • East Asia
Voice
An outside perspective on China

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