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.
