Peter Hessler 何伟

Staff Writer, The New Yorker · Author of the China Trilogy and Other Rivers

Ridgway, Colorado, USA (home base) · Correspondent in Beijing (2000–07), Cairo (2011–16), Chengdu (2019–21)

The New Yorker (staff writer, 2000–present)

National Geographic (contributing writer)

Peace Corps (volunteer, Fuling, Sichuan, 1996–98)

Sichuan University, Chengdu (writing instructor, 2019–21)

Princeton University (BA, English and creative writing, 1992)

Mansfield College, Oxford (BA, English language and literature, 1994; Rhodes Scholar)

Biography

Peter Benjamin Hessler (born June 14, 1969) is an American journalist and author widely regarded as one of the finest practitioners of long-form literary journalism working in English — specifically the kind of immersive, unhurried, character-driven nonfiction that emerges from years of living in a place rather than visiting it. He grew up in Columbia, Missouri, in a university town that shaped his intellectual character, attended Princeton University (BA, English and creative writing, 1992) and, as a Rhodes Scholar, Mansfield College, Oxford (BA, English language and literature, 1994). He is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he has served since 2000, and a contributing writer at National Geographic. He is married to Leslie T. Chang — herself a former Wall Street Journal reporter and author of Factory Girls — and they have twin daughters, Ariel and Natasha. The family is based in Ridgway, a town of approximately 700 people in southwestern Colorado, which Hessler has written about with the same quiet attentiveness he brings to China and Egypt.

Hessler has written six books, all of them rooted in the extended immersive residencies that define his working method: two years as a Peace Corps teacher in Fuling; a decade as Beijing correspondent; five years covering the Egyptian revolution from Cairo; two years teaching writing at Sichuan University in Chengdu. He is known in China, where he has a substantial readership, by the Chinese name 何伟 (Hé Wěi). He conducts reporting and interviews in Mandarin and Egyptian Arabic as well as English — a language commitment central to his methodology, in which access to the full texture of daily life is possible only through the local language. He was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2011 and won the National Magazine Award for excellence in reporting in 2008.

Fuling, the Peace Corps, and River Town

Hessler first went to China in 1996 as a Peace Corps volunteer, assigned to Fuling Teachers College — a small institution in Fuling, a Sichuan river city then known primarily for its production of pickled mustard stems, which was in the process of being partially inundated by the Three Gorges Dam. He taught English for two years, 1996 to 1998, and began writing about what he saw. The manuscript of River Town — his account of those two years — was submitted unsolicited to his eventual agent, William Clark, in 1999; Clark took it on, and it was published in 2001. River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze won the Kiriyama Prize for books contributing to better understanding among the peoples of the Pacific Rim and South Asia, and established Hessler as one of the most promising nonfiction writers of his generation. Its account of Fuling's students — their intellectual earnestness, their political formation, their complicated relationship with American culture and its representative in their classroom — introduced American readers to the texture of Chinese life in the reform era with an intimacy and lack of condescension that was immediately recognizable as something new.

The China Trilogy: Beijing, Bones, and Country Roads

After completing his Peace Corps service, Hessler moved to Beijing, where he became The New Yorker's China correspondent from 2000 to 2007. The decade he spent in China — from 1996 to 2007 — produced three books. Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China's Past and Present (2006) followed the lives of several people Hessler had come to know — former students, a factory worker, a collector of oracle bones — while weaving a parallel history of China's archaeological past and its contested present. It was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2006. Country Driving: A Chinese Road Trip (2010) tracked the transformation of China through the vehicle of driving its roads — north of the Great Wall in Hebei province, a village experiencing the second phase of rural China's transformation, and a factory town in Zhejiang manufacturing rings and buckles for the global apparel trade. Together with River Town, the three books constitute what is commonly called the China trilogy — a decade-long documented record of China's most rapid transformation, told through the specific and the individual rather than the aggregate and the statistical.

Hessler's journalism during the Beijing years also produced the 2007 National Geographic story "Instant Cities" — a two-year study of a new factory city in China's Zhejiang province that won the 2008 National Magazine Award for excellence in reporting. A collection of his best magazine work from the first decade as a staff writer was published in 2013 as Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West.

Egypt: The Arab Spring and The Buried

In October 2011, Hessler moved with his family — his wife Leslie Chang and their twin daughters, then one and a half years old — to Cairo, arriving as Egypt's post-Tahrir Square transition was deepening. He served as The New Yorker's Cairo correspondent from 2011 to 2016, learning Egyptian Arabic alongside his work. The five years in Cairo produced The Buried: An Archaeology of the Egyptian Revolution (2019), which approached Egypt's revolution and its aftermath through a series of interlocking narratives: an antiques dealer navigating the chaos, a doctor in Upper Egypt, the Chinese entrepreneurs Hessler discovered selling women's lingerie in the markets of small Upper Egyptian towns. The lingerie story — how entrepreneurs from an obscure part of Zhejiang province had found their way to an equally obscure part of Upper Egypt — allowed Hessler to combine his dual expertise in China and Egypt into a single investigation of globalization, migration, and the supply chains connecting two ancient riverine civilizations. After five years, the family returned to Colorado.

Return to China, COVID, and Other Rivers

In August 2019, Hessler and his family moved to Chengdu in Sichuan province, where he had accepted a position teaching nonfiction writing at Sichuan University. He wanted to return to the region where his career began, to follow up with his original Fuling students twenty years on, and to write a kind of sequel to River Town. The plan was disrupted almost immediately: the COVID-19 pandemic emerged in Wuhan at the end of 2019, and Hessler found himself at the center of one of the defining events of the twenty-first century. He traveled to Wuhan and reported from the city during its early outbreak, producing New Yorker journalism from COVID's ground zero that drew fire from two directions simultaneously: Chinese nationalists were angry about his frank assessment of the system failures that allowed the outbreak to spread, and American hawks were angry that he gave Beijing credit for the things it did right in containing the virus once lockdown was implemented. He described this as occupying "the unlucky middle" — a position his journalistic commitment to accuracy rather than ideological comfort produced.

Hessler's teaching contract at Sichuan University was not renewed in 2021. The circumstances, as he has described them obliquely — referring to having "run afoul of several things" — are consistent with political pressure related to his reporting. He was reported on by Chinese nationalist "little pink" (小粉红) networks online, his New Yorker articles were scrutinized for ideological deviation, and the deteriorating US-China relationship made the position of an American journalist teaching writing at a Chinese university increasingly untenable. The family returned to Colorado in 2021.

Other Rivers: A Chinese Education (Penguin Press, July 2024) is Hessler's account of the Chengdu years — his new students, his reunion with Fuling students twenty years on, his daughters' experience in a Chinese primary school, the COVID pandemic as experienced from within, and the politics of his eventual departure. In a 2024 interview with China Books Review, he warned that China writing was "narrowing — it's becoming more political, more security focused. We're losing the human element."

Books

• River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze2001 · Kiriyama Prize winner · Peace Corps in Fuling, Sichuan, 1996–98; the Three Gorges Dam era

• Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China's Past and Present2006 · National Book Award finalist · Multiple narratives weaving China's archaeological past with the reform-era present

• Country Driving: A Chinese Road Trip2010 · Three journeys: north of the Great Wall, a transforming Hebei village, a Zhejiang factory town

• Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West2013 · Essay collection drawn from a decade of New Yorker and National Geographic magazine journalism

• The Buried: An Archaeology of the Egyptian Revolution2019 · Five years in Cairo, 2011–16; the Arab Spring and its aftermath, told through interlocking lives

• Other Rivers: A Chinese EducationPenguin Press, July 2024 · Sichuan University, Chengdu, 2019–21; students then and now; COVID from inside China; the political departure

Recognition

MacArthur Fellowship

2011 · "Genius Grant" from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

National Magazine Award — Excellence in Reporting

2008 · For "Instant Cities," National Geographic — a two-year study of a new factory city in Zhejiang

Kiriyama Prize

2001 · For River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze

National Book Award Finalist

2006 · Nonfiction, for Oracle Bones

Rhodes Scholarship

Mansfield College, Oxford, 1992–94