如果要评选中国人民的老朋友，那我肯定投何伟（Peter Hessler）一票。现在回想一下，大概十年前我读到他的《江城》，这不仅是我读的第一本外国人写中国的书，更是我第一次接触到“非虚构”这个概念。 从那之后，我又读了他的《甲骨文》、《寻路中国》、《奇石》，他同事Michael Meyer的《再会，老北京》、《东北游记》，他妻子张彤禾Leslie的《打工女孩》。对我来说，这一系列书算是打开了新世界的大门。 而当我去密苏里上学之后，有一次在youtube上看何伟的演讲，我心想他的口音怎么这么熟悉易懂，结果一查才发现他就是在密苏里长大的，这也算是很牵强的缘分吧哈哈。

这本Other Rivers在2024年出版，主要分成两部分。第一部分讲中国的教育，这也是本书的副标题a Chinese education。何伟从2019年秋天开始在四川大学任教，同时重访了九十年代在涪陵师专教过的学生， 还作为家长把自己的双胞胎送入成都的公立小学就读， 书里就以从这三个视角出发写了他对中国教育的观察。书的第二部分就是关于疫情时期的中国了。说实话这部分我读得很慢，也有点难受，因为会想起疫情时的事情。下面的这些摘抄只是书的第一部分，第二部分等我读完再补上。

In my new life as a teacher, the city was bigger, the campus was bigger-even the students were bigger. Young Chinese were now more than six times as likely to attend college than the students of their parents’ generation. Universities had been expanded or rebuilt on a scale that was almost unimaginable, and the per capita GDP was sixty-five times higher than it had been at the start of the Reform era. More than a quarter of a billion farmers had been transformed into urban citizens.

But I still taught next door to the College of Marxism, and the university still hosted old-school Communist rallies. The fact that the anniversary numbers were getting higher only underscored how much had stayed the same. Same rallies, same images, same songs-“The Motherland Will Not Forget.” Of course it won’t forget, not with the same things happening over and over. Even the cadres of the same Party wore the same expressions while giving the same speeches with the same words. For a returning teacher, this was a mystery: How could a country experience so much social, economic, and educational change, while the politics remained stagnant or even regressive?

The Old Campus

这一章主要讲何伟在九十年代在涪陵师专教的那一批学生。

In the fall of 1996, Adam and I received our absentee ballots for the American presidential election. We both immediately had the same idea: This is perfect realia. One week, each of us took a section of senior students, showed them our ballots, and embarked on a lecture about the U.S. political system. I listed key political vocabulary on the blackboard, and I described the election process. At the end of the lecture, I answered questions, and then I allowed the students to inspect my ballot.

The room became very quiet. One by one, each student took the bal-lot, studied it, and passed it on to a classmate. There were more than forty students, and by the time I retrieved the ballot and voted for Bill Clinton, the room was so silent, and they were watching with such intensity, that I could feel my pulse thudding in my ears.

Afterward, I waited for the fallout. Two weeks later, a Peace Corps administrator in Chengdu told me that a Fuling official had telephoned to express displeasure with what Adam and I had done. The college left it at that-nobody called us in for a discussion, and we were never told exactly what we could or couldn’t talk about in the classroom. With sensitive topics, communication was often indirect. The Fuling cadres assumed that the Peace Corps would pass on the message, and that Adam and I would learn to be more careful.

下面的Anry和North都是何伟之前在涪陵师专的学生：

Over the years, as former students became financially successful, I doubted if my teaching had had anything to do with their material rise. I couldn’t say that my lessons had helped Anry find his way in Shanghai, or that they showed North how to manage his elevator projects. But I was struck by the little things that students remembered—certain poems from class, or offhand remarks in conversation.

Once, while visiting Fuling, I ran into a former student named Richard on the street. We hadn’t been in contact for years, and he told me that he was happily teaching at a local high school. During our conversation, he mentioned the lecture with the absentee ballots. “That made a deep impression,” he said.

Like North, Richard didn’t say whether the class had made him feel more positively about American democracy, or if he was inclined to see it, in Mao’s words, as “another name for the dictatorship of the bourgeoi-sie.” Either way, the conclusion seemed beside the point. The most important thing was that Richard had been exposed to something new, and he still recalled the class after twenty years.

不管观点如何，“been exposed to something new”这件事才是最重要的。

我还是会好奇这本书的目标读者到底是谁。如果没有去过中国的话，有多少外国人知道什么是Hong-qiao station呢？

He arrived in Shanghai with less than three dollars in his pocket. That evening, he slept outside in a public square next to the city’s Hong-qiao station. He couldn’t believe how many other young people were in the square-farm boys and farm girls, and migrants from small cities, and recent college graduates, all of them sleeping together under the open sky. Since leaving home, Anry had often recited “Love of Life,” a poem by Wang Guozhen. In the 1990s, Wang was a favorite poet of the younger generation, so many of whom were on the move:

I don’t think about success
Since I chose the distant place
Simply travel fast through wind and rain.

At some level, it didn’t matter which river town you chose: if you sent young, open-minded Americans to remote parts of China, they were bound to learn about their surroundings, just as they were bound to teach new ideas. They were also bound to stumble-the job included plenty of failure and frustration, which wasn’t a bad thing. The experience forced volunteers to consider other perspectives, which is one of the most useful lessons anyone can learn, especially when young.

我觉得这也是所谓的“壮游”，通过游历不熟悉的地方来挑战自己既有的价值观，而不是像现在绝大多数出国游一样，坚持用一套中国的标准来评判全世界。

The New Campus

这一章讲2019年何伟在四川大学的学生，以及他们与父母的关系

Generations in China also interact differently than they do in a democratic society. Even the basic conception is different, because Chinese tend to group age cohorts by decade. People born between 1990 and 1999 are known as jiulinghou, or “post-90s,” whereas the students I taught at Sichuan University, many of whom were born in 2000 or later, were “post-O0s.” Such groupings are too short to be truly generational. It’s unlike Americans, who are accustomed to thinking about differences and conflicts between generations, in part because each cohort gains a degree of political power through participatory democracy. An important part of the national narrative is the way that generations succeed each other-the notion, for example, that George H. W. Bush was a member of the Greatest Generation, and that he was defeated in the 1992 election by Bill Clinton, who was a Boomer.

But people in China rarely speak of generations in this manner. The country’s direction can be shaped by individual leaders-those godlike figures—but they aren’t representatives of a specific era or age cohort.

The gods are of the Party, and the Party is outside of time. For average citizens, in terms of political participation, there is no real difference between post-00s and post-70s, or between somebody like Vincent and his parents. One quality of an authoritarian system is that it treats everybody like children.

最后一句和我不谋而合。我这次回国印象最深的一点就是，公共场合充斥着无穷无尽的噪音，重复不断地提醒你“不要倚靠电梯扶手”、“不要嬉戏打闹”、“不要坐在地上”、不要干这，不要干那，就像把所有人都当成是智力尚未发展的小孩一样。 当然，这可能也可以归结于中国巨大的城乡差距吧。

But it also seemed clear that a number of these students were not engineers by inclination. When we met outside of class, they sometimes told me bluntly that they had little interest in their majors. In many cases, parents had chosen the course of study. Engineering jobs paid well, and parents sometimes explained that no matter which direction the Party winds happened to blow, there would always be a need for engineers and tech specialists. The system’s schizophrenic qualities-increased educational and economic opportunities on one hand, narrowing political space on the other-produced young people who were themselves a study in contradictions: the George Orwell fan who dreams of Chinese tech, the Gabriel García Márquez magical realist who hopes to work in automotive engineering.

At the same time, Vincent didn’t strike me as a dissident. When he wrote about his brush with the internet police, he never stated that such monitoring should be prohibited. Early in the semester, we read George Orwell’s “A Hanging,” which, in the description of an execution in colonial Burma, makes a powerful case against the death penalty. I held an in-class debate about the issue, and Vincent was among the slight majority of students who supported capital punishment. He referred to the death penalty as a human right—in his opinion, if a murderer is not properly punished, such leniency violates the rights of other citizens to a safe society. Vincent was also a proponent of the right to bear arms, which seemed contradictory to his interest in social safety. He told me repeatedly that one of his dreams was to study in the United States and legally purchase a firearm.

I couldn’t easily summarize Vincent’s politics, other than to say that they were individualistic. Students often described their generation in such terms-they believed that their parents had been much more group-oriented. Nevertheless, these young people seemed remarkably filial; I rarely sensed serious tensions between them and their parents.

… It reminded me of Vincent’s police essay: parents and children seemed unusually close, in part because of Chinese traditions of filial piety, but also because of the one-child dynamic. And the adults often had little guidance with regard to parenting. Their own fathers and mothers had been poor farmers with virtually no schooling, and now they had to figure out what it meant to be an urban middle-class parent raising a child in the modern world.

Unlike in the past, Sichuan University and other Chinese colleges no longer restricted dating, but the current students seemed nearly as romantically inexperienced as the previous generation had been. This contradicted the notion of a more individualistic generation, but students often told me that their personal development had been stunted by the intensely competitive environment of high school. A couple of freshmen wrote angry essays about how their teachers had secretly photographed them with partners and sent the images to their parents. Like Vincent, many students described such patterns as damaging.

But their response rarely seemed to involve open resistance or even an attempt to loosen up. If anything, their instinct was to find a way to make dating seem like work-this seemed to be their comfort zone.

There were college courses that helped young people approach romance with the same diligence that they applied to academic subjects. One nonfiction student had recently taken a class called Economics of Love and Marriage, which was taught by a professor in the school of public health. Each Economics of Love student had to fulfill two assignments, one of which was to develop an organized and detailed plan, presented via PowerPoint, that illustrated how he or she would pursue an individual who was sexually attractive. The other assignment involved another PowerPoint presentation that focused on market development for regional matchmaking services. My student, who described himself as shy and inexperienced, seemed to like this approach. He believed that after formally studying the Economics of Love, he could go out and apply this knowledge to some young woman.

啊？

Across Chinese cities, digital surveillance had expanded on a scale that was staggering. Some of it was private, like the cameras in North’s elevators, but the coverage was especially thorough in government-run public spaces. It took me a long time to count the devices in my local subway station of Dongmen Dagiao: fifteen cameras at track level, forty-seven at the turnstiles, thirty-eight for the various escalators and stair-ways. The total was a hundred, not to mention the two cameras that were positioned inside each subway car that passed through the station all day long. Who was monitoring all this stuff?

For the first-year classes, I was careful with my content during the early weeks. I decided to save Animal Farm for the latter part of the se-mester, when I would know the students better. A number of friends had warned me that the young people in Xi Jinping’s China were more narrowly patriotic than previous generations. There was a term for these youths: Xiao Fenhong, or “Little Pinks.” They were known for being rabidly pro-Party, making social media attacks on anybody deemed insuf-ficiently patriotic. On college campuses, Little Pinks sometimes reported instructors to the authorities if they said or wrote something that was politically incorrect.

我都已经要忘记“小粉红”这个词了，慢慢就习以为常了。

Chengdu Experimenal

何伟有两个双胞胎女儿：Ariel and Natasha(采采和柔柔）。何伟和妻子Leslie决定让她们入读公立的成都实验小学。这一章讲他们作为家长对中国义务教育的观察。

During registration, was instructed to join the other parents on WeChat. Some WeChat groups develop their own distinct language, and in Class Six the standard pronoun was first-person plural, as if parent and child had merged: We are wearing shorts. We have finished our math homework. For usernames, parents identified themselves by their children, and often they included the school-assigned student numbers. (I have changed the names and numbers of other children, for privacy.) In ex-changes, people politely referred to one another by their full usernames-Number 35 Li Jialing’s Mama, Number 42 Zhu Zhentao’s Baba-as if these were formal titles.

Leslie and I often felt overwhelmed, but even the parents of children who had been there since first grade seemed to be playing catch-up. Virtually all of Ariel and Natasha’s classmates were enrolled in private supplemental courses, and it was hard to imagine parents more attentive to their children’s education. On the first day of school, I counted forty-nine beeps from the WeChat group. There were seventy more on the second day. Day three clocked in at 237: an average of one beep every six minutes for a span of twenty-four hours. That was also the day that I figured out how to mute the alerts on WeChat.

The system also maximized parental support while minimizing input to effectively zero. Parents were discouraged from entering the front gate, with the occasional exception of photographers or others with special business. On WeChat, Mamas and Babas busily engaged in fee collecting and other administrative duties, and they exchanged thousands of messages about homework, uniforms, and virtually every other topic under the sun. But I never saw a parent post advice for Teacher Zhang. There were no suggestions, no complaints, and no criticisms. The school’s message was clear: We are in charge.

Children also had to memorize the number of days in each month, and certain questions were devious:

Ping Ping: “I was looking through a calendar and saw that there was one year when November had five Saturdays and five Sun-days.”
Huang Feifei: “So what day of the week would November 1st have been that year?”\

Was this really math? As a language teacher, I had always observed a tendency toward rote memorization. Students studied long lists of English vocabulary words, writing them over and over, a pattern that came from the ways they learned characters. I had assumed that math would involve repetitive worksheets, but the subject was far more dynamic than that. Even the problems had problems-students had to figure out what the question was really asking, and which information was extraneous. They were required to show how they arranged equations, and grading was strict. At the end of the first semester, when parents gathered for a conference at the school, the math instructor concluded her talk with a statement on values. “Math is virtue,” she declared. “Math is a way to cultivate yourself.”

It also seemed designed for a hypercompetitive society in which citizens needed to be alert. One guiding principle behind Chinese third-grade math could be summarized as: Don’t be a sucker. Leslie said that when you read an American exam you can tell that the writers of the exam want children to get things right. But Chinese exams are aiming for wrong answers.

Nevertheless, I knew that instructors like Teacher Zhang were deeply committed, a pattern that I also recognized among my former students who had become teachers. … But they could be scathing about the state-mandated material that they had to teach. “China’s education is like junk food,” one woman responded on a survey. Another wrote, “I think China’s education is rubbish. No creativity, too much work, pressure, and most of what the students are learning at school is useless in the future.” “ In 2017, I asked former students to identify China’s biggest success in the previous decade, and everybody mentioned something related to economics or development. The most common response by far was improved transportation. Out of thirty people who answered, nobody mentioned education.

Earthquake

这一章在讲当时何伟突然在微博上被造谣攻击的事情

When I taught in Fuling, the political courses had titles that included “Mao Zedong Thought” and “Building Chinese Socialism.” Since then, another two decades of Communist history had piled up, and the names of mandatory classes at Sichuan University seemed to be getting longer: “Introduction to Mao Zedong Thought and Theoretical System on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics,” “Research on Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era.” If these titles seemed ungainly, things got even worse when students opened the texts:

Only by taking the socialist core values as a major task with basic internality and targeted norms can we realize these core values While enhancing the people’s self-confidence in the path forward, theoretical self-confidence, institutional self-confidence, and cultural self-confidence, in order to ensure that socialism with characteristics is always moving in the right direction and constantly showing stronger vitality.

It was appropriate that the term self-confidence was repeated four times in a single sentence. That was a fundamental problem: the Party lacked the confidence necessary to allow young people to think for themselves.

一些在中文里熟视无睹的词，用另一种语言写出来，才觉得很搞笑