Peter Hessler is best known for his writings in The New Yorker, and a trilogy of reported books from China in the late 1990s and 2000s until he left in 2011. After a stint in Cairo, he returned to China in 2019 to teach writing at Sichuan University in Chengdu, two decades after his time as a Peace Corps volunteer in the same region. It is that passage of time — a chasm in China years — that drives this spiritual sequel to River Town, in which Hessler reconnects with his old students, placing their lives (and writings) side by side with those of the new generation of university students, and in triple parallel with the education of his young twin daughters in a local public school. His time in Chengdu also coincided with the outset of the Covid pandemic, which he reports with detail and sensitivity. Hessler left China again in 2021 after his contract was not renewed due to political circumstance, which is a loss to both China and writings about it. At least we get to learn from this last lesson.

Yan Lianke, one of China’s pre-eminent novelists and short story writers, is also an incisive essayist and literary critic, as attested in this collection of his non-fiction over the last decade plus. Tackling topics from “China’s darkness” and national amnesia to American literature and the consolations of censorship, Yan is at his strongest when writing personally, such as a powerful essay about his journey from army propagandist to fiction writer (“my fear of real life led me to escape into my fiction”). His voice as an essayist, precisely rendered in Carlos Rojas’ translation, is more direct than his at times surrealist fiction, and carries with it a sense of mission that we could only read between the lines of his novels. “My writing,” runs a line in his acceptance speech for the Kafka Prize in 2014, “is like the blind man with the flashlight who shines his limited light into the darkness to help others see the darkness — and thereby to have a target to avoid.”