Deep Reporting from China’s Heartland: a Conversation with Peter Hessler

Dive into China’s heartland with celebrated author and journalist Peter Hessler, who moved back to China in 2019 to teach writing at Sichuan University. Hear his stories about deep reporting from a lesser-known region of China. What was it like for a veteran American journalist to to be teaching and reporting from China’s interior during the pandemic? What is the future of reporting in and on China by foreigners?

Speaker Bio:
For more than twenty years, Peter Hessler has been a staff writer at The New Yorker. He first went to live in China as a Peace Corps volunteer, from 1996 to 1998, an experience that became the subject of his first book, River Town. With his next two books—Oracle Bones and Country Driving—he completed a trilogy that spanned a decade in China. In 2011, he moved with his family to Cairo, where he lived for five years. His fifth book, The Buried, described his experiences during the Egyptian Arab Spring.

In 2019, Hessler moved back to Sichuan province, the region where he had served in the Peace Corps more than two decades earlier. For two years, he taught at Sichuan University, where he also covered the pandemic, reporting in Wuhan and other cities during 2020 and 2021. This experience will be the subject of his next book. In 2011, Hessler was named a MacArthur Fellow. He currently lives in southwestern Colorado.

Sponsored by the Asian Institute, and East Asian Seminar Series.