Hessler’s work challenges traditional coverage of China. I met him in 1999, when I hired him to be a researcher in the Beijing bureau of The Wall Street Journal. By then he had already spent two years in the small Chinese city of Fuling as an English instructor at a teachers’ college. He was living at home in Columbia, Missouri, having just completed the manuscript for River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze, but wanted to return to China to keep writing. I was impressed that he had experience in a fairly remote part of China and offered him a job over the phone. Read more
