Peter Hessler, "River Town"

River Town is Peter Hessler's memoir of living and teaching in rural Sichuan province as a Peace Corps volunteer in the 1990s. It is one of the most widely read accounts in the English-speaking world of living in China as a foreigner, and was published in Chinese as 《江城》. Hessler went on to write several more books about contemporary China and published many articles in The New Yorker.

Citation information

Author: Peter Hessler

Title: River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze

Date of publication: 2006

Publisher: Harper Perennial

Place of publication: New York, NY

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Excerpt: "Running"

This passage describes the beginning of Hessler's quest to master Chinese.