Peter Hessler’s Former Students and the China Earthquake
Travel Blog • Jim Benning • 05.23.08 | 1:09 PM ET
A quick note before we head off for the three-day weekend that the New Yorker has posted correspondence from former students of Peter Hessler about their experience in the deadly Sichuan earthquake. “I am sorry to say my parents’ house collapsed,” one wrote. Hessler chronicled his Peace Corps teaching experience in Sichuan Province in the (now classic) travel book River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze.
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Jim Benning is the editor and co-founder of World Hum.
Marilyn Terrell 05.24.08 | 9:54 AM ET
The New Yorker piece by Hessler was pretty fascinating, especially about the massive dam that didn’t get built because of seismological concerns—if it had, the earthquake could have been much, much worse.
Hessler included emails from his former Peach Corps students in a story on China’s rapid industrial-urban-societal changes in National Geo’s China issue last month, and it’s interesting to see that the changes have been so fast and deep that even his students, who are now mostly teachers, see a gulf between their generation and the students they teach:
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/05/china/journey/hessler-text
Ling 05.25.08 | 12:20 PM ET
I just read in the news that some 70 dams have been damaged by the earthquake and are in danger of bursting. And they’re facing heavy rains and landslides. Plus there was an aftershock today, and the landslides are blocking rivers, so they’re blasting through to free the rivers before they overflow the banks.