Author and staff writer for The New Yorker Peter Hessler will speak at a So Kwan Lok Distinguished Lecture event titled A Chinese Education: Teaching and Learning from Two Generations of Students on Tuesday, Nov. 26, from 4 p.m.-5:30 p.m. at UCSD, Ida and Cecil Green Faculty Club, Atkinson Pavilion and Patio.

A reception will start at 4 p.m. and the lecture will start at 4:30 p.m. So Kwan Lok Distinguished Lecture is organized by the 21st Century China Center at the UC San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy.

Registration is required but the lecture is free to all. Register at: shorturl.at/mty8L

For any questions, contact GPS Events Coordinator Susan Zau (jszau@ucsd.edu).

About the speaker: Over 20 years after arriving in Sichuan, Hessler returned to teach again, observing the sweeping changes of China’s Reform era.

In 1996, Hessler was sent as a Peace Corps volunteer to Fuling, a small city on the Yangtze. Almost all of his students had grown up in rural homes, often in poverty, and usually they were the first members of their extended family to enter higher education.

After teaching for two years, Hessler wrote his first book, “River Town,” and he became The New Yorker’s Beijing correspondent. For more than two decades, he stayed in close touch with his former students, observing how they negotiated China’s Reform era.

In 2019, Hessler returned to teach again in the same region, at Sichuan University. In the classroom he met members of the next generation of students, almost all of whom had grown up in urban middle-class homes that had been restricted to a single child. While teaching, Hessler also revisited Fuling and the people he had taught in the 1990s, an experience that helped him gain a new perspective on China’s transformation.

For more information about this named lecture, visit www.china.ucsd.edu/events/named-lectures/sokwanlok/index.html