Peter Hessler champions 'average people'
- Source: Global Times
- [21:06 July 26 2009]
- Comments
Fast facts: Peter Hessler
"From my first experience in China, I learned what it’s like to be different from everybody else. I learned to be patient. That’s the only way to learn Chinese in a place like that."
Peter Hessler
Author
A native of Columbia, Missouri, Peter Hessler studied English literature at Princeton and Oxford before going to China as a Peace Corps volunteer in 1996. His two-year experience of teaching English in Fuling, a town on the Yangtze, inspired River Town, his critically acclaimed first book. After finishing his Peace Corps stint, Hessler wrote freelance pieces for Atlantic Monthly and the New York Times before returning to China in 1999 as a Beijing-based freelance writer. There he wrote for newspapers like the Asian Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe and the South China Morning Post before moving on to magazine work for National Geographic and The New Yorker.
Travel:
He started his international experience in 1992 when he received a scholarship to attend graduate school at Oxford University. From 1992- 1994, he visited about 30 countries and decided to return home around the world. The trip started in Prague and continued by land and sea all the way to Thailand, via Russia and China. After the trip he made a long hike across Switzerland in 1995 before joining the Peace Corps a year later.
Travel writing:
During his junior year he took a course in nonfiction creative writing, taught by John McPhee, and for the first time found nonfiction as his real interest.
“And soon it became pragmatic: I found myself in parts of the world where I could find interesting stories, and it was an easy way to make spending money. By the time I finished grad school I realized that I wanted to try and write nonfiction for my career,” he said.
He published his first serious story in 1995, when he wrote an essay about taking the trans-Siberian train from Moscow to Beijing. He sent it to the New York Times and they published it.
“I was surprised because I knew nobody there and just sent it to a name on the masthead. After that, I did another half-dozen or so stories for them, over a period of four years or so. It wasn’t a lot of writing, but in a sense it was important to me because during those years I was often in very remote areas, especially during the Peace Corps,” he said.
