An American’s view of life in China during the tumultuous Covid years
When Peter Hessler, the celebrated chronicler of Chinese society, arrived at Sichuan University in the autumn of 2019, he was expecting to take a break from writing. Hessler made his name as a journalist documenting the lives of everyday people during China’s boom years in the early 2000s. But he first got to know the country as a Peace Corps volunteer in rural Sichuan in the mid-1990s – an experience that formed the basis of his first book, River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze, a bestseller that introduced a generation of readers to a rapidly changing China. Nearly a quarter of a century on, he had planned to focus his energies on teaching.
But events were about to blow him off course. Ninety-five days after Hessler’s first lecture in Chengdu, a cluster of patients with pneumonia-like symptoms appeared in Wuhan, the capital of nearby Hubei province. Forty-seven days after that, Chengdu went into lockdown. Within two months, more than a dozen reporters working for US outlets had been expelled from China. Though not technically a correspondent, Hessler found himself one of the only western writers able to describe what life was like on the ground during one of the most extraordinary periods in China’s recent history.