In China

China and Europe stand at a delicate crossroads. Into this landscape steps a book that offers no answers, only something rarer: attention paid.

A Chinese-European cultural broker shuttles between worlds, guiding Dutch students through the Yangtze Delta. Their uncynical questions open a door that refuses to close. What follows is not travelogue, memoir, or policy analysis — though it carries the residue of all three. It is a map of disorientation drawn in pencil, erased, and redrawn.

以小见大 — let small details carry larger meaning. 以史为鉴 — let the past illuminate the present.

Everything in it happened. Dialogue reconstructed from memory. Names changed. Nothing invented for effect. "Memory is not a recording," the author writes. "It edits without permission, flatters without warning, and fills its own gaps with plausible invention."

In an era when headlines reduce complexity to soundbites, this book keeps its eyes open, notebook ready, questions unresolved. For anyone trying to understand not just what is happening between China and Europe, but how it feels to live in that space, this is the book.