Return to River Town: Twenty Years in the Life of a Chinese City

Peter Hessler served as a Peace Corps volunteer from 1996 to 1998 in Fuling, a small city in the Three Gorges region of the Yangtze River. Since then, Hessler has made frequent visits back to Fuling, where the city has been transformed by the new dam and the rapid pace of China’s development.

Hessler will talk about the experience of witnessing such changes, and also about what he has learned from staying in touch with more than one hundred former students over a period of two decades.