Peter Hessler

Last updated
Peter Hessler
Born (1969-06-14) June 14, 1969 (age 55)
Pen name何伟 (Hé Wěi) (in China)
OccupationWriter, journalist, runner
LanguageEnglish, Chinese, Egyptian Arabic
Nationality American
Alma mater Princeton University
Mansfield College, Oxford
Notable works
Notable awards MacArthur Fellowship
Kiriyama Prize
Nominated for National Book Award for Nonfiction
Spouse Leslie T. Chang
Children2

Peter Benjamin Hessler [1] (born June 14, 1969) is an American writer and journalist. He is the author of four books about China and has contributed numerous articles to The New Yorker and National Geographic , among other publications. [2] In 2011, Hessler received a MacArthur Fellowship in recognition of his "keenly observed accounts of ordinary people responding to the complexities of life in such rapidly changing societies as Reform Era China." [3]

Contents

Early life and education

Hessler grew up in Columbia, Missouri, and graduated from Hickman High School in 1988. In 1992, he graduated from Princeton University with an A.B. in English after completing a senior thesis titled "Dead Man's Shoes and Other Stories." [4] During his junior year, he studied in John McPhee's writing seminar. [5] After graduating from Princeton, Hessler received a Rhodes Scholarship to study English language and literature at Mansfield College, University of Oxford. [6]

The summer before graduating from Princeton, Hessler worked as a researcher for the Kellogg Foundation in southeastern Missouri. He wrote an extensive ethnography about the small town of Sikeston, which was published in the Society for Applied Anthropology . [7]

Career

Hessler joined the Peace Corps in 1996 and was sent to China for two years to teach English at Fuling Teachers College, in a small city near the Yangtze River in Sichuan, later Chongqing municipality. [lower-alpha 1] [9] [10] He later worked in China as freelance writer for publications such as the Wall Street Journal , the Boston Globe , the South China Morning Post , and National Geographic . [11] Hessler joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2000 and served as foreign correspondent until 2007. [12]

Hessler has written four books on China. River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze (2001) is a Kiriyama Prize-winning book about his experiences in two years as a Peace Corps volunteer teaching English in China. Oracle Bones: A Journey Through Time in China (2006) features a series of parallel episodes featuring his former students, a Uighur dissident who fled to the U.S., and the archaeologist Chen Mengjia who committed suicide during the Cultural Revolution. His third book, Country Driving: A Journey from Farm to Factory (2010), is a record of Hessler's journeys driving a rented car from rural northern Chinese counties to the factory towns of southern China, and the significant economic and industrial growth taking place there. While his stories are about ordinary people's lives in China and not motivated by politics, [6] they nevertheless touch upon political issues or the lives of people who encountered problems during the Cultural Revolution, one example being that of the story of the archaeologist Chen Mengjia and his wife, poet and translator Zhao Luorui. In 2013, he published Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West (2013), which, like his previous works, also covers China's ordinary people and life.

Hessler left China in 2007 and settled in Ridgway, Colorado, [13] where he continued to publish articles in The New Yorker on topics including the Peace Corps in Nepal and small towns in Colorado.

In October 2011, Hessler and his family moved to Cairo, where he covered the Middle East for The New Yorker . [14] In an interview upon being named a MacArthur Fellow in September 2011, he expressed his intention to spend much of the next year learning Arabic. [15] He said he envisioned spending five or six years in the Middle East. [16] While living there, he and his wife both learned Egyptian Arabic. [17] In 2019, he published The Buried: An Archaeology of the Egyptian Revolution, a book detailing his experiences of Egypt during the Arab Spring.

In August 2019, Hessler and his family moved to Chengdu in southwest China. [18] He taught nonfiction writing at Sichuan University - Pittsburgh Institute. [19] [20] [21] During his time in Chengdu, Hessler wrote several pieces for The New Yorker about how China handled the COVID-19 pandemic. Because Sichuan University-Pittsburgh Institute declined to renew his teaching contract, after some of his students reported Hessler's class, he and his family moved back to Colorado at the end of the first semester of 2021. [22] [23]

Since 2024, he coached track at a middle school in his home town in Colorado. [24]

Personal life

Hessler is married to journalist and writer Leslie T. Chang. [25] [26] They have two children, [5] [16] twin daughters Natasha and Ariel, whom Hessler featured in a June 2023 New Yorker article. [27]

Bibliography

Notes

  1. Fuling was initially a part of Sichuan Province, but was moved into the newly-established Chongqing Municipality in 1997. [8]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sichuan</span> Province of China

Sichuan is a province in Southwestern China occupying the Sichuan Basin and Tibetan Plateau between the Jinsha River on the west, the Daba Mountains in the north and the Yungui Plateau to the south. Sichuan's capital city is Chengdu; its population stands at 83 million. Sichuan neighbors Qinghai to the northwest, Gansu to the north, Shaanxi to the northeast, Chongqing to the east, Guizhou to the southeast, Yunnan to the south, and Tibet to the west.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chongqing</span> City in southwest China

Chongqing is a municipality in Southwestern China. Chongqing is one of the four direct-administered municipalities under the Central People's Government, along with Beijing, Shanghai, and Tianjin. It is the only directly administrated municipality located deep inland. The municipality covers a large geographical area roughly the size of Austria, which includes several disjunct urban areas in addition to Chongqing proper. Due to its classification, the municipality of Chongqing is the largest city proper in the world by area, though it does not have the largest urban area.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fuling, Chongqing</span> District in Chongqing, Peoples Republic of China

Fuling District is a district in central Chongqing, China. As the second largest city in Chongqing, the area is known for zha cai, a hot pickled mustard tuber, as well as serving as the location of former U.S. Peace Corps teacher Peter Hessler's best-selling memoir River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sichuan University</span> National public university in Chengdu, Sichuan, China

Sichuan University (SCU) is a public university in Chengdu, Sichuan, China. The university is affiliated with and funded by the Ministry of Education. The university is part of Project 211, Project 985, and the Double First-Class Construction.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sichuan Basin</span> Basin in Sichuan, China

The Sichuan Basin, formerly transliterated as the Szechwan Basin, sometimes called the Red Basin, is a lowland region in southwestern China. It is surrounded by mountains on all sides and is drained by the upper Yangtze River and its tributaries. The basin is anchored by Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, in the west, and the direct-administered municipality of Chongqing in the east. Due to its relative flatness and fertile soils, it is able to support a population of more than 100 million. In addition to being a dominant geographical feature of the region, the Sichuan Basin also constitutes a cultural sphere that is distinguished by its own unique customs, cuisine and dialects. It is famous for its rice cultivation and is often considered the breadbasket of China. In the 21st century its industrial base is expanding with growth in the high-tech, aerospace, and petroleum industries.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Luzhou</span> Prefecture-level city in Sichuan, Peoples Republic of China

Luzhou (simplified Chinese: ; traditional Chinese: 瀘州; pinyin: Lúzhōu; Sichuanese Pinyin: Nu2zou1; Luzhou dialect: ), formerly transliterated as Lu-chou or Luchow, is a prefecture-level city located in the southeast of Sichuan Province, China. It is also known as the "Liquor City" (酒城). It was named Jiangyang (simplified Chinese: 江阳; traditional Chinese: 江陽; pinyin: Jiāngyáng) until the Northern and Southern dynasties. Situated at the confluence of the Tuo River and the Yangtze River, Luzhou has been Sichuan province's largest port in both size and output since Chongqing's separation from Sichuan in 1997. As of the 2020 Chinese census, its population was 4,254,149. Of these, 1,241,273 lived in the built-up (or metro) area made of Jiangyang and Longmatan districts, as Naxi district is not conurbated yet. Luzhou borders Yunnan, Guizhou and Chongqing provinces. As the only geographic junction of the four provinces, it was an important port location in ancient China. After the PRC was founded in 1949, Luzhou became the capital of southern Sichuan province. In 1983, Luzhou was upgraded to prefecture-level city status.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lucy Chao</span> Chinese poet and translator

Lucy Chao or Zhao Luorui was a Chinese poet and translator.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yangtze Normal University</span> University in Chongqing, China

Yangtze Normal University is a full-time, comprehensive university under the administration of the Chongqing Municipal Government of the People's Republic of China. The campus is in Fuling District, at the conjunction of the Yangtze and Wu Rivers, the historic capital of the ancient Ba Tribe. It is the only teachers college in the ecological and economic zone of the Three Gorges Reservoir Area and the minority area in Southeast Chongqing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chen Mengjia</span> Chinese paleographer and archaeologist

Chen Mengjia was a Chinese scholar, poet, paleographer and archaeologist. He was considered the foremost authority on oracle bones and was Professor of Chinese at Tsinghua University in Beijing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chongqing railway station</span> Railway station in Chongqing, China

Chongqing railway station is a railway station of Chengyu Railway, Xiangyu Railway, Chuanqian Railway, Chengyu Passenger Railway, that located in People's Republic of China. It is a transportation hub of Chongqing in China.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chongqing–Lichuan railway</span> Railway line in China

The Chongqing–Lichuan railway, or the Yuli railway is a railway connecting central Chongqing with the Hubei city of Lichuan. The 244 km (152 mi) long railway, connecting Chongqing North railway station with the Lichuan Station on the Yichang–Wanzhou railway, is a section of the Shanghai–Wuhan–Chengdu passenger railway, which extends to Wuhan, Nanjing, and Shanghai.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chongqing–Huaihua railway</span> Railway line in China

Chongqing–Huaihua railway or Yuhuai railway, is a single-track, electrified railroad in southwest China between Chongqing Municipality and Huaihua in Hunan Province. The line is 624.5 km (388 mi) long and was built between 2000 and 2005. Cities and towns along route include Changshou, Fuling, Wulong, Pengshui, Qianjiang, Youyang Tujia and Miao Autonomous County, Xiushan, Songtao in Chongqing Municipality, Tongren in Guizhou Province and Huaihua in Hunan Province.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Christianity in Sichuan</span> History of Christianity in Sichuan province

Christianity is a minority religion in the southwestern Chinese province of Sichuan. The Eastern Lipo, Kadu people and A-Hmao are ethnic groups present in the province.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Shudao</span> System of mountain roads in China

The Shudao, or the Road(s) to Shu, is a system of mountain roads linking the Chinese province of Shaanxi with Sichuan (Shu), built and maintained since the 4th century BC. Technical highlights were the gallery roads, consisting of wooden planks erected on wooden or stone beams slotted into holes cut into the sides of cliffs.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Li Xueqin</span> Chinese historian, archaeologist, and palaeographer (1933–2019)

Li Xueqin was a Chinese historian, archaeologist, and palaeographer. He served as Director of the Institute of History of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Professor of the Institute of Sinology of Tsinghua University, Chairman of the Pre-Qin History Association of China, and participated in the Xia–Shang–Zhou Chronology Project.

<i>River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze</i> 2001 book by Peter Hessler

River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze is a 2001 memoir by Peter Hessler. It documents his Peace Corps teaching assignment at Fuling Teachers College in Fuling, Sichuan/Chongqing, which started in 1996 and lasted for two years.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Baiheliang Underwater Museum</span>

The Baiheliang Underwater Museum or White Crane Ridge Underwater Museum is an underwater museum built around the White Crane Ridge of Fuling District, Chongqing. It is China's first underwater museum.

List of works by or about Peter Hessler, American journalist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chaoshou</span> Spicy sauce over steamed, meat-filled dumplings

Suanla chaoshou is a dish of Sichuan cuisine that consists of a spicy sauce over boiled, meat-filled dumplings. Suanla means "hot and sour," and chaoshou is what these particular large wontons are called in the Chinese province of Sichuan.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fuling Catholic Church</span> Church in City of Chongqing, China

Fuling Catholic Church is a Roman Catholic church located in Fuling District of the city of Chongqing, West China. Founded in 1861, the church has been subjected to the control of the state-sanctioned Catholic Patriotic Association since 1957. In the West, it's best known for the description given by Peter Hessler in his book River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze (2001).

References

  1. "32 U.S. Rhodes Scholars Are Selected to Study in Oxford for 1992". The New York Times. Associated Press. 1991-12-09. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 2019-06-05.
  2. Apostoaie, Ella (2024-07-28). "Peter Hessler on China's Past and Present". The Wire China. Retrieved 2024-07-30.
  3. "MacArthur Fellows Program: Meet the 2011 Fellows Hessler, Peter Doctor of Letters, UMC conferred May 18, 2013". John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Retrieved 20 September 2011.
  4. Hessler, Peter (1992). "Dead Man's Shoes and Other Stories".{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  5. 1 2 "Peter Hessler: Q&A; with winner of MacArthur Foundation genius grant and cool half million - Denver News - the Latest Word". Archived from the original on 2011-09-28. Retrieved 2011-09-21.
  6. 1 2 As stated by Hessler in "Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China's Past and Present", John Murray Publishers, London, 2006.
  7. 2006 National Book Award Finalist, Nonfiction
  8. Demattè, Paola (Summer 2012). "After the Flood: Cultural Heritage and Cultural Politics in Chongqing Municipality and the Three Gorges Areas, China". Future Anterior: Journal of Historic Preservation, History, Theory, and Criticism . 9 (1): 49–64. doi:10.5749/futuante.9.1.0049. - Cited: p. 52.
  9. Hessler, Peter. "The Peace Corps Breaks Ties with China". The New Yorker. Retrieved 2020-06-26.
  10. Hessler, Peter (2001). River Town: two years on the Yangtze. Harper Collins.
  11. "Travel Writer: Peter Hessler". July 2002.
  12. Peter Hessler, The New Yorker Archived 2014-07-03 at the Wayback Machine
  13. Times: An interview with Peter Hessler - Hot Metal Bridge [ permanent dead link ] Retrieved 2016.11-13.
  14. "Peter Hessler and Kay Ryan, 2011 Geniuses". The New Yorker . 20 September 2011.
  15. Archived at Ghostarchive and the Wayback Machine : "Long-Form Journalist Peter Hessler: 2011 MacArthur Fellow | MacArthur Foundation". YouTube .
  16. 1 2 "On the road less traveled". Archived from the original on 2011-04-11. Retrieved 2011-09-20.
  17. "Talk Like an Egyptian", Letter from Cairo, New Yorker, April 17, 2017
  18. Foley, Dylan (August 28, 2019). "Journalist Peter Hessler on Moving to Egypt After the Revolution". Literary Hub. No. Literary Hub. Retrieved 30 August 2019.
  19. "《寻路中国》作者何伟回来了,全家定居成都,任教四川大学" [Peter Hessler, the author of Country Driving, returned and his family settled in Chengdu to teach at Sichuan University]. The Paper (in Chinese). 30 August 2019. Retrieved 30 August 2019.
  20. "Peter Hessler". Sichuan University-Pittsburgh Institute. Archived from the original on 22 May 2020. Retrieved 10 September 2019.
  21. Bures, Frank (2019-10-16). "Unearthing the Story: An Interview with Peter Hessler". Longread. Retrieved 23 October 2019.
  22. "China author Peter Hessler loses teaching post at Sichuan University". South China Morning Post. 31 May 2021.
  23. He, Yujia (July 19, 2021). "Peter Hessler's Last Class". Sixth Tone.
  24. Sideline Sinology
  25. "Time Out Hong Kong – Book Reviews and Interviews | Interview: Leslie T. Chang". Archived from the original on 2010-05-20. Retrieved 2010-12-07.
  26. "MacArthur Foundation 'genius grant' recipients". Archived from the original on October 16, 2011.
  27. Hessler, Peter. "The Double Education off My Twins' Chinese School". The New Yorker . Conde Nast . Retrieved 27 June 2023.