Flowing Generations

This book is a collection of outstanding works from the English-language nonfiction writing contest held by Sixth Tone, the all-digital English-language news outlet under The Paper, on the theme of "generations." It was published by Zhonghua Book Company in January 2025. The book is divided into two parts. The first part collects exclusive interviews with four judges: the anthropologist Xiang Biao, the nonfiction writer Peter Hessler, the food writer Fuchsia Dunlop, and the writer Qian Jianan, who discuss how "generations" are understood and passed down from perspectives including the generation gap, nonfiction writing, the kitchen table, and family memory. The second part gathers more than a dozen prize-winning entries, in which the authors write about a saxophone-playing "uncle" in a Shanghai ballroom, workers in a Fujian factory, inmates in a Singapore prison, a barbershop in Manhattan's Chinatown, the youth of Tibet-aid workers in Tibet, Tsinghua and Peking University graduates at tutoring institutions, and immigrant families who have gone abroad, spanning seventy years in time and nearly twenty thousand kilometers in space. These stories do not chase strong drama; instead, with calm, realistic, and restrained writing, they record how ordinary people live amid the currents of history, the barriers and bonds between generations, and the diverse ways contemporary China and the world are interconnected, forming a richly colored panorama of ordinary lives and a miniature of Chinese social change.