Within eighty-two days of arriving in Pittsburgh to continue his education in the summer of 2021, Vincent, a student from Sichuan University, in Chengdu, acquires a used Lexus, a twelve-gauge Winchester shotgun, a Savage Axis XP 6.5 Creedmoor bolt-action rifle, and a Glock 19 handgun. As the months pass, he samples the sermons at an evangelical congregation, briefly falls in with Mormonism, and eventually is baptized as an Anglican. His opinions about his home country, meanwhile, begin to turn negative. Anxiety over anti-Asian violence in America and uncomfortable feelings of displacement are overshadowed by the sense of liberty and individuality he discovers. “I need to be in a place where I have freedom,” he explains to our staff writer Peter Hessler. And he’s not alone.

In this week’s issue, Hessler tells the story of several Chinese students among the hundreds of thousands who study abroad in America. He is uniquely positioned to observe generational changes in attitude toward the U.S., having taught at a small teachers’ college in the city of Fuling, in 1996, and again, more than twenty years later, at Sichuan University. Hessler writes about increasing reports of young Chinese people engaged in what is known as runxue, or “run philosophy,” and taking flight from their home country. Those who do return from abroad often exhibit “a new degree of unease,” an awareness of being surveilled and a pessimism about their lack of agency. For Hessler, Vincent represents a new cultural landscape, one in which Chinese expats take up the endless options Americans take for granted.