Really?

I’ve just started listening to the audible.com audio book of Peter Hessler’s River Town. In it, he includes several excerpts from his students’ writing assignments.

The narrator reads the student essays as if he has a speech impediment. Occasionally, he speaks with a stereotyped vaguely East Asian accent.

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This evening, I cracked open a Chinese textbook published in 2009 on American culture. While much of what it said was true, the truths it selected were presented such that they made America sound rather more terrible than it is.

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I don’t know if in either case people were aware of what they were doing.

But I think I will write a letter to Peter Hessler.