I realize I’m about a decade late posting a review of Peter Hessler’s River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze
I can’t be certain why it took me so long to pick up Hessler’s seminal work, but I think it was due to the weight of it. Not the book itself mind you, though a bit weighty for a travelogue, it reads quick and handles well. Rather, because for any post-Y2K laowai, Hessler is definitively known as the laowai. Next to Mark Rowswell, few foreigners in modern China are as well known.
I suppose I was worried that reading Hessler’s experiences might colour my own. Lord knows I’m susceptible to such things, as it took me more than a couple years to stop spouting off facts learned from Jung Chang as gospel (worry not Changites, when last I visited an expat pub the doctrine was alive and well).
and 
. Hessler does a great job of reminding us (even several years since this talk) that despite its massive amount of change, when you get outside of the first and second tier cities, China is still a whole different world.
