I recently re-read River Town on a rainy Sunday in Somerset, years after I first encountered it as a student with no intention of ever moving to China. Back then I thought it was beautifully written but slightly distant — an American observing a world he could never truly enter. Then I moved to Shanghai, and I picked it up again. The distance I'd sensed suddenly felt like the whole point. Hessler wasn't pretending to be Chinese; he was doing something harder. He was paying close attention.
The book is Hessler's account of two years teaching English literature in Fuling, a small city on the Yangtze that most Chinese people had never heard of either. It was the late 1990s, and China was changing faster than its people could quite comprehend. Hessler documents his students, his neighbours, the local officials, and the landscape itself with a patience that feels almost radical by modern standards.
Hessler's refusal to resolve China's contradictions is what makes the book extraordinary. He records them. The result is a portrait of a place in transition that feels more honest than most political analysis I've read. When I walk through the older parts of Shanghai now, I find myself noticing things — signs, gestures, silences — that I might have missed if Hessler hadn't taught me to look.
The classroom scenes are particularly striking. Hessler was a teacher, and that matters. The classroom is one of the few places where a foreigner and a local meet on roughly equal ground. You're both trying to make something understood. I've felt this myself, standing in front of a class of Chinese students, trying to explain British irony. The misunderstandings are the material. The failures are the story.
Some people say that Westerners cannot really understand China, and that books like River Town are inevitably superficial or even exploitative. There's a valid concern here — there's a lot of shallow foreign commentary on China. But Hessler never claims authority he doesn't have. He knows exactly what he is: a guest. He lets the contradictions breathe. He doesn't extract "lessons" from his students; he listens to them. That humility separates him from the majority of foreign correspondents who pass through for a week and write a column.
I'd recommend this book because it teaches you how to look. Fuling in the late 1990s is barely recognisable today. The Three Gorges Dam has reshaped the landscape. The economy has reshaped everything else. But Hessler's observations about how people adapt — how they mourn and celebrate and argue in the middle of upheaval — feel timeless. It reminds me of something I noticed in London local government: the policy changes every year, but the human reactions are remarkably consistent.
If you're interested in China, or in teaching, or simply in how to write about a place that isn't yours, read this slowly. The power is in the accumulation of small details. Visit a place you've never heard of. The real stories are rarely in the capital cities.