《Other Rivers》

《Other Rivers》Peter Hessler 著，Penguin Press 出版，2024 年，共 480 页，ISBN 9780593655337。

An intimate and revelatory eyewitness account of two generations of students in Chinas heartland, chronicling a country in the midst of tumultuous change through the prism of its education system More than twenty years after teaching English to Chinas first boom generation at a small college in Sichuan Province, Peter Hessler returned to Sichuan to teach the next generation. At the same time, Hessler and his wife enrolled their twin daughters in a local state-run elementary school, where they were the only Westerners in a student body of about two thousand. Over the years, Hessler had kept in close contact with more than a hundred of his former students, who were now in their forties. By reconnecting with these individuals&—members of Chinas "Reform generation" &—while teaching current undergrads, Hessler was able to gain a unique perspective on China's incredible transformation over the past quarter-century. In the late 1990s, almost all of Hessler's students were the first member of their extended families to become educated. Their parents were subsistence farmers who could offer little guidance as their children entered a brand-new world. By 2019, when Hessler arrived at Sichuan University, he found a very different China and a new kind of student&—an only child whose schooling was the object of intense focus from a much more ambitious and sophisticated cohort of parents. Hesslers new students have a sense of irony about the regime but mostly navigate its restrictions with equanimity, and embrace the astonishing new opportunities Chinas boom affords. But the pressures of this system of extreme "meritocracy" at scale can be gruesome, even for much younger children, including his own daughters, who give him and his wife an intimate view into the experience at their local school. In Peter Hesslers hands, Chinas education system is the perfect vehicle for examining whats happened to the country, where its going, and what we can learn from it, for good and ill