Welcome to the 'Rhodes Scholars & China' interview series, where our Chinese Scholars interview Scholar alumni with work or life ties to China, including leaders in academia, journalism, business, medicine, law, and many more fields. In this second post in the series, Ryan Yan (China & Brasenose 2020) and Xiaorui Zhou (China & Pembroke 2020) interview Peter Hessler (Missouri & Mansfield 1992). Read the first post in the series, 'Researching China: An Interview with Michael Szonyi'.
Peter Hessler (何伟, Hé Wěi) is a writer of narrative nonfiction and the author of five celebrated books. In 1996, he joined the Peace Corps, which sent him to Fuling, a small city in southwestern China. For two years, he taught English and American literature at Fuling Teachers College, an experience that eventually became the subject of his first book, River Town (2001). This book was followed by two others about China: Oracle Bones (2006), and Country Driving (2010). Together they comprise Hessler’s 'China trilogy', covering the decade in which he lived in the country, from 1996 until 2007. From 2011 to 2016, he moved to Cairo, Egypt, where he covered the Egyptian Arab Spring and post-Tahrir Egypt. He wrote about this experience in The Buried (2019). Since 2000, Hessler has been a staff writer at the New Yorker, and he is also a contributing writer at National Geographic. River Town won the Kiriyama Prize, in 2001, and Oracle Bones was a finalist for the National Book Award, in 2006. He was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2011. Beginning in 2011, three of Hessler’s books were published in editions for mainland China, translated by Li Xueshun, a former colleague from Fuling Teachers College. River Town and Country Driving became bestsellers, winning multiple awards in China. His books have been translated into fourteen languages. Read Peter Hessler's full biography here and more of Peter Hessler's work in The New Yorker.
Read the Chinese version of this interview, translated by Ryan Yan and Xiaorui Zhou. For more Chinese-language content, follow Rhodes China on WeChat (ID: RhodesChina) and Weibo.
Ryan Yan (RY): In your book Strange Stones (奇石, Qi Shi), you said that the adjective Qi (奇) could also be translated as 'marvelous' or 'rare'. This semantic ambiguity reminds us of how the ambiguity of words resemble the ambiguity of life. Sometimes we have to posit ourselves dangerously in a state of strangeness or foreignness in order to get rid of our common viewing habits, and to appreciate the marvels of life and of human beings. On the other hand, the Chinese character Yi (异) could be translated into 'foreignness' or 'differences'. You've lived in many countries, and you're familiar with the psychological state of being a foreigner in a foreign land, so I'll ask questions in this regard. My first question is about your experiences as a Rhodes Scholar. We would like to know more about your experiences reading a second BA in English Literature at Oxford, and some of the most memorable things you did while there.
Peter Hessler (PH): It's been 25 years or so since I was there, and it was, when I look back, such a different phase in my life. That was the first time I had the experience of living as a foreigner. I grew up in a fairly small place in mid-Missouri, and I didn’t even have a passport in high school and college. I didn't speak any other languages. But I had this strong feeling as an undergraduate in the United States that I wanted to go overseas, and when I was a senior, I only had two ideas for how to do this. One was to apply for the Peace Corps, which I did, and the other was to apply to go to Oxford. I was actually on track to go to Africa in the Peace Corps, and then I got this scholarship to go to Oxford, so it put me to a different direction.
Because I was a little naive and I hadn't travelled much, I thought Oxford wouldn't be a very difficult transition. I had already studied English language at Princeton University. But I was very unprepared about how foreign the culture was, or how foreign I felt. In some ways I felt my time at Oxford was partly a failure, because I wasn't resourceful enough about getting integrated into the community. In my last year, I did a tutoring project at a high school near where I lived, and that was one of the things that I actually enjoyed the most. In retrospect, I should have done more things like that, to find a way to be connected, because I think it's somewhat a difficult place to feel part of local life. British culture is somewhat formal. In some ways, oddly enough, it was more of a challenge than to integrate in China. Chinese culture of course is very difficult—the language and everything—but there is an informal element to Chinese culture that reminds me a little bit of America. People were pretty patient. They would laugh off mistakes. In Oxford I didn't always feel that way, but a lot of it was my own fault. It was a good lesson, and it prepared me for the transitions I made later in life.
My course at Oxford was English Language and Literature, and it was a very different era in the sense that a lot of Rhodes Scholars still did the second BA. For me it was a very good course, because I wasn't focused enough to be ready for a graduate degree. This way, I did experience the traditional Oxford undergraduate education, where you have a tutor, and you're preparing for your exams. I learnt a lot from it and appreciate a lot from that experience. I was at Mansfield College, but I didn't live in central Oxford. I was always in the outskirts, which in some ways I felt disappointed by. But Mansfield had excellent English tutors, and I did have very good support from them academically, and I became close to a couple of them, so academically it was a great experience.
Partway through the course, I realised that I was probably not going to do what I had thought I would maybe do eventually, which was to become a professor in English literature. So I was a little bit directionless; I was trying to figure it out. I knew I wanted to write in some ways, but writing is a difficult career, because how you become a writer is very open. In some ways it's great because there's a lot of freedom, but it's also intimidating, especially when you're in your twenties. And I felt a lot of angst about that in Oxford, a lot of uncertainty. But I did feel fortunate in my tutors and in my course.
It's funny, because I thought I was done with English literature and I was up to something new in life, and of course, what I ended up doing not long after that was teaching English literature to Chinese students in a small town in interior China. That education at Oxford was actually incredibly valuable at that time, because in the 1990s in China you couldn't go on the internet and get your materials, and a lot of what I was doing depended on my memory from what I had studied at Oxford. In America people don't do exams for literature anymore, but the Oxford exam system forced me to address all of these periods in a one-week set of exams, and it really stayed in my head. So, I was able to guide my students in Fuling without great materials.