New York City schools are experiencing a spike in discipline problems among children, evidence that the disruptions caused by the coronavirus pandemic are having lingering effects, educators and experts say.

Most of the misbehavior involves lower-level disturbances, which teachers and advocates say show many students are still affected emotionally difficult time after the stress of the pandemic.

Despite a handful of high-profile episodes — at least two students were shot at Staten Island’s Port Richmond High School this week, for example — student arrests account for a small percentage of discipline incidents, police said.

Luis A. Rodriguez, an assistant professor of educational leadership and policy studies at New York University, said the increase was not necessarily surprising given the isolation and stress students and their families experienced during the pandemic.

“Schools have had to take into account the impact Covid has had on socialising,” he said.

At the High School of Fashion Industries in Manhattan, Rosa Isabel Chavez, a fashion design teacher, said that when schools reopened, students returned without “a high school-level mentality.”

“They were still very childish,” she said. “We had freshmen still holding hands like little kids do in elementary school, which was cute, but still scary.”

There were also fights, she added, because students thought “the response was to hit instead of talking things out.”

According to police data, there were 14,048 school safety incidents last school year. In the 2018-2019 school year there were 11,504. The increase comes amid discussion about how schools should respond to discipline problems.

In recent years, both the police department and the Department of Education have tried to reduce the frequency with which officers respond to low-level violations such as disorderly conduct. Police data shows that when uniformed officers and school safety officers respond, they are now more likely to send students back to their schools for discipline rather than arresting them or issuing a citation.

Still, the number of times students were suspended or expelled from class rose to 36,992 last year from 31,738 the year before, although this is still below pre-pandemic levels.

“Most discipline incidents are not serious,” said Madeline Borrelli, a special education teacher and member of Teachers Unite, an organization focused on ending “the school-to-prison pipeline.”

She said less-resourced schools, where teachers may be overwhelmed, may have to rely on punishments, including expulsion, suspension or calling in school safety officers, “to respond to normal child behavior.”

Rohini Singh, director of the School Justice Project at Advocates for Children of New York, which has called for school safety reforms, said law enforcement still plays an “outsized role” in school discipline.

And racial disparities persist. Black students make up a quarter of the city’s public school population but account for 40 percent of suspensions or expulsions from classrooms. More than 50 percent of incidents in which police intervened involved black students.

According to the mayor’s office, serious incidents at schools, such as assault and burglary, have generally remained relatively low compared to the end of 2010, but some recent incidents have been violent.

In February, two students were stabbed at Martin Van Buren High School in Queens; a 14-year-old boy was cut in the chest with a pocket knife outside MS 246 in Brooklyn; and a 12-year-old girl was stabbed at Pathways College Preparatory School in Queens, according to police.

And this month, an 8-year-old boy was found with a gun at his Brooklyn elementary school, though it was not loaded and no one was injured, police said.

David C. Bloomfield, a professor of educational leadership at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center, said that gang activity appears to be on the rise in the city, and that “some of that has to do with the adolescent alienation that we see more generally .”

The increase in disciplinary problems in schools is disturbing for students and parents.

In December, a student was stabbed at Edward R. Murrow High School in Brooklyn, prompting a lockdown. Fumbi Joseph Vilme, a freshman, said he stayed in the piano room for several hours. He said he wished there were metal detectors, “because you’re supposed to feel safe at school.”

His father, Marvin Vilme, who also attended the school, said he was shocked by the incident and has since considered homeschooling his son.

But Sumarha Tariq, who attended the High School of Fashion Industries, is among students who may have benefited from efforts to reduce police involvement in disciplinary issues.

After she was found in 2022 with pepper spray in her backpack, which is illegal for minors, a security officer escorted her to a school office.

The security officer referred her case back to the school. A school counselor issued a warning, but not a suspension, after Ms. Tariq wrote a statement explaining that she carried the spray because she had experienced harassment during her commute. She went through the rest of high school without any problems, graduated and is now a freshman at Yale University.

According to Ms. Tariq, this was “the best-case scenario.”

Hurubie Meko reporting contributed. Benjamin Steiger contributed research.

Good morning. It is Wednesday. Today we’ll look at a clash between two schools sharing one building in Manhattan, and how it reflects two of the crises facing urban school districts.

Two high schools have long shared a building on West 105th Street in Manhattan, and as sometimes happens with residents of shared spaces, tensions have arisen. Enrollment at one of the schools, Public School 145, has increased in recent years, while the other, West Prep Academy, has lost students.

I asked Troy Closson, whose reporting focuses on K-12 education in New York City, to explain this two-school story as it highlights the demographic shifts caused by the Covid-19 pandemic and the migrant crisis .

The first deputy schools chancellor said there are too many schools “that have fallen below critical mass.” One of these is the West Prep Academy. How many students, why the decrease and what does the student population look like?

West Prep serves largely low-income Black and Latino students. Before the pandemic, it had about 200 students. It is located in District 3, which includes the Upper West Side and parts of Harlem. That area has lost families and students since the pandemic. West Prep’s current enrollment is approximately 170.

The Ministry of Education wants to move West Prep to another building, and West Prep is also told it needs to grow. That has led to a tense conflict between West Prep and PS 145 over resources, space and what these student populations need.

That reflects the larger problem of declining enrollment across the city, doesn’t it?

We’re now at a point post-pandemic where there aren’t as many families in town, and many schools have questions about their current size and enrollment. School officials have said they are interested in doubling down on what works and what is popular so they can win families back into the system.

But unlike other cities where we’ve seen families leave public schools because of the quality of the schools, here in New York there isn’t much evidence that this has caused enrollment losses. It’s just families leaving New York, especially black families.

One of the questions some teachers at West Prep have is: If they have to move to another building for the purpose of increasing enrollment, and the same number of students are simply no longer in the district, what happens? They worry about the future.

Meanwhile, PS 145 is bursting at the seams.

PS 145 is one of the schools that has had an exceptionally high number of children in the last two years, from Latin America and Eastern Europe – Ukraine and Russia. The school has bilingual programs that make it a good fit for these families, and they have helped increase enrollment.

But parents at PS 145 have said that as student numbers increased, the school made painful decisions about repurposing the library and scaling back programs like music and media.

A complicated debate has emerged about what children deserve. Parents have argued about whether programs at PS 145, such as additional 3-K and pre-K classrooms, are necessary or luxuries when space is so limited.

That added an extra layer to this debate: what is a necessity?

How did the PS 145 change as space became tighter?

Parents say it has been difficult for them. At a hearing a few weeks ago, many parents who may have had an older child there a few years ago and now have a younger child there talked about the differences in those experiences and access to programs that aren’t about math. or reading, but developing other skills that their children do not get.

Where does the money come from – because it will come in anyway?

Funding from the Ministry of Education is allocated to schools based on the number of children they attend. School officials have said their concern is that if a school becomes too small, it won’t be able to offer all the programs it would like to offer. Can we invest in our sports team, or should we offer an after-school program?

What about the building West Prep needs to move to?

The Department of Education is trying to move West Prep to a building a few blocks away, but families and teachers consider it unsuitable and unsafe. West Prep has a special program for students with autism. They wander off more often.

A major sticking point is that the new building has rooms that open onto fire escapes. The concern is that West Prep’s specific student population would likely run down the fire escapes and be injured.

The new building also does not have its own outdoor space. The current building has a unique playground for children with disabilities, so the children at West Prep would actually have to take field trips to the building where they are now.

Later this spring, an education panel will vote on whether West Prep should be moved in time for the school’s opening in the fall.

If enrollment continues to shrink, how far away is New York from closing schools?

School administrators try to avoid having to confront this. We know from research that closures can be tough on children.

Any discussion of closures is unpopular to begin with. It’s something no one wants to talk about in any city, but especially here — because it’s not a school board that runs the system, but the mayor — it’s a particular landmine for City Hall.

Weather

For the first full day of spring – the equinox that ushered in the new season occurred at 11:06 a.m. last night – prepare for a mostly sunny morning with a chance of afternoon showers and temperatures in the low 50s. At night it is mainly clear with a minimum temperature of 32 degrees.

ALTERNATE PARKING

In effect until Sunday (Purim).

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METROPOLITAN diary

Lorimerstraat

Dear Diary:

I lived in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn in the early 2000s and had never ridden the L train past my Lorimer Street stop.

But one night I was out late with colleagues in Manhattan and had a little too much to drink. To get home, I took the L at Eighth Avenue, where I sat as the train idled awaiting its departure.

About an hour later I was woken by the train conductor at the last stop, Canarsie-Rockaway Parkway. He asked what my intended stop was. When I said Lorimer, he asked me to get up and follow him.

I walked him to the front of the train, where he told me to sit across from his booth. He left the door open and we spent the next hour talking about life, work and sports as the train headed back to Manhattan.

When we arrived in Lorimer, I got out, rummaged home to my apartment and went straight to sleep.

There were cocktails and there were sliders. Pop hits were played by a DJ at The Bungalow, a mid-century modern lounge in Long Beach, California, where Rep. Katie Porter had rallied supporters after more than a year of campaigning for a coveted Senate seat.

But there were no televisions.

The crowd — and Ms. Porter — had already guessed what election night had in store.

Had there been screens blaring the news, supporters would have seen a Democratic rival, Rep. Adam B. Schiff, advance to the runoff of California’s general election in November. And shortly afterwards they are said to have watched Steve Garvey, a Republican and former baseball player, take the other spot – not least because of a trick by Mr Schiff that sidelined Ms Porter at the first opportunity.

It was the end of the road for Ms. Porter, 50, a liberal Democrat who built a following by punishing pharmaceutical executives with a simple whiteboard on Capitol Hill. It is unclear where she will go, as she had to give up her seat in the House of Representatives to run for the Senate.

She had used social media effectively and had become the candidate of choice for suburban progressives. But it was clear that Mr. Schiff, beloved by other Democrats for pursuing impeachment charges against former President Donald J. Trump, was the establishment’s choice.

In the first months of the campaign, Democratic heavyweights rallied around the 63-year-old Schiff. And a much-appreciated show of support from Nancy Pelosi, then Speaker of the House of Representatives, provided unprecedented fundraising power.

Although Ms. Porter and her supporters knew Mr. Schiff had greater resources, they were irritated by the way he and his allies deployed them. Tens of millions of dollars were spent not only promoting Mr. Schiff but also signaling to Republican voters that Mr. Garvey was the conservative who voted for Mr. Trump twice. Many thought the race was limited to how California voters felt about the former president.

It was Tuesday at The Bungalow, which had no television but was full of anger at Democratic leaders, where Ms. Porter and her fans vented their frustrations. She attacked Mr. Schiff for “spending more on boosting the Republican than on promoting his own campaign.”

In the final weeks of the campaign, a cryptocurrency super PAC spent millions on ads attacking Ms. Porter, who has supported more regulation of the industry and rebuked several business leaders during congressional hearings. The ads called her a hypocrite for accepting donations from companies, which Ms Porter disputed, and renewed allegations that she abused staff.

“Too many people are more interested in getting elected than actually doing something to solve the problems that ordinary people face,” she told her supporters in a brief concession speech. “That’s why special interests and billionaires spent nearly $20 million trying to keep me out of the Senate. Special interest groups and the ultra-rich like politics as it is now.”

“You scared them, Katie!” someone from the audience shouted.

“We scared them,” Ms. Porter replied.

Ms. Porter’s supporters described Mr. Schiff’s advertising strategy as cynical and sexist, noting that it had the effect of excluding a qualified woman from the general election, leaving the state without a female senator for the first time since 1992 to sit.

“I think Schiff was supposed to be there,” said Larry Limoges, 51, as he waited for Ms. Porter to address the crowd. “The way he does politics is a lot like the way Republicans do politics. Instead of promoting the party, he promoted himself.”

Ms. Porter, 50, launched her campaign for Senate in January 2023, before Senator Dianne Feinstein announced plans to retire after more than three decades in office. Ms. Feinstein was the first California woman to serve in the Senate, and weeks later she was joined by Senator Barbara Boxer in a 1992 election hailed as the “Year of the Woman.” Their rise inspired a generation of young women like Ms. Porter, who at the time was just starting out at Yale University.

Mr. Schiff announced he was running for office a short time later, as did Representative Barbara Lee, 77, a progressive woman from Oakland best known for casting the lone vote in Congress against the use of military force after the attacks of September 11.

In other states, one might assume that a Democratic frontrunner would face a leading Republican in the general election. But California has an open primary system, in which the top two voters go to a runoff regardless of party. Before Mr. Garvey entered the race, it was long thought that Ms. Porter and Mr. Schiff had the best chance of competing in November.

But Mr. Schiff and his supporters used Mr. Garvey’s rise as an opportunity to defeat Ms. Porter and make Mr. Schiff an easier opponent in a state that hasn’t elected a statewide Republican since 2006. Garvey, they could cause more Republicans to flock to him than there would be Democrats to elect Ms. Porter in a crowded field. Their ads did what Mr. Garvey couldn’t do on a shoestring budget.

Some Democratic strategists said it was a smart bet that would allow Democratic groups to shift their money to battleground House races that they would otherwise have spent on a nail-biting Senate race between the parties. In an effort to counter Mr. Schiff’s efforts, Ms. Porter’s campaign paid for online ads telling voters that another Republican, Eric Early, was the real conservative candidate for the Senate.

Mr. Schiff has said his ads both highlight his achievements and contrast him with Mr. Garvey.

“The clearest distinction in terms of the policies of everyone on stage today is not between the three Democrats,” he said after a debate in San Francisco last month. “It’s between the three Democrats and the one Republican. So I’m not going to avoid that contrast.”

Daniel Orea, 28, who uses the pronouns they and them, said they were first impressed by Ms. Porter at an event years ago hosted by the Lavender Democrats of Orange County. Ms. Porter understood what it was like to survive as a worker in one of the most expensive places in the country.

MX. Orea said they were frustrated with the way Mr. Schiff was running his campaign, avoiding tough conversations about how to solve problems for Californians by highlighting what they said was an exaggerated threat posed by the Mr Trump.

“We could have talked about issues that people actually care about, instead of talking about Donald Trump all the time,” they said.

Ms. Porter was elected in 2018, as part of the post-Trump “blue wave” — when voters in once solidly Republican districts in California’s suburbs voted for Democrats, allowing the party to take control of the House of Representatives.

Ms. Porter’s decision to run for Senate meant she had to leave her battleground district, leaving an open seat that Democrats will try to hold this fall without an incumbent. It was a risk that left Democrats in her district feeling conflicted, torn between frustration that she had left her seat vulnerable and a desire to see her profile rise further.

“I don’t feel like criticizing a woman for having ambitions because we want to inspire, uplift and elevate more women to leadership positions,” said Katrina Foley, the first Democratic woman elected in Orange County. Board of Supervisors. “I’m also aware of the timing of things. We are in a more vulnerable position because of the Senate race.”

And Ms. Porter is faced with a looming question: What’s next? She greeted supporters on Tuesday as she left the party but did not answer questions.

Shawn Hubler reporting contributed.

Israelis largely welcomed a U.N. report supporting allegations of sexual violence during the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack, even as a top Israeli official accused the United Nations of not doing enough to address the findings — a sign of the increasing tensions between them.

The UN report, released on Monday, found both “reasonable grounds to believe” that sexual violence against multiple people had occurred in at least three locations in Israel, and “clear and convincing information” that hostages had been taken into Gaza on October 7. subjected to sexual violence, including rape.

Tuesday, President Isaac Herzog of Israel said on X that the report was ‘of enormous importance’, and he praised it for its ‘moral clarity and integrity’.

But Israel Katz, Israel’s foreign minister, accused UN Secretary General António Guterres in a social media post of making a concerted effort to “forget the report and avoid the necessary decisions.” In protest, Mr. Katz recalled Israel’s representative to the United Nations, Gilad Erdan, for consultations — a step short of withdrawing the ambassador for a longer term. Mr. Erdan was on a plane back to Israel on Tuesday, he said.

A UN spokesman, Stéphane Dujarric, said he did not accept – or even understand – the criticism and that the report was prepared “thoroughly and expeditiously” and that “the Secretary General in no way, in any form, did something to ‘bury’ the situation. ‘ the report.” UN officials warned journalists prior to the report’s release and held a press conference to discuss it, and the report received extensive coverage.

Mr Guterres has been an outspoken critic of Israel’s invasion of the Gaza Strip and has called for an immediate and binding ceasefire. And there is deep distrust of the United Nations among Israelis, who view the organization as biased against their country – a fact noted in the October 7 report.

In Cairo, negotiations over the release of hostages and a ceasefire ended without a breakthrough on Tuesday, both Israeli and Hamas officials said. Hamas has insisted it would only agree to a ceasefire and hostage exchange for Palestinians held in Israeli prisons if Israeli forces withdraw completely from Gaza, a condition Israeli leaders have rejected.

Osama Hamdan, a senior Hamas official, said on Tuesday that the group had told Egyptian and Qatari mediators – Hamas and Israel do not officially speak – that its position was unchanged.

The Biden administration, which has stepped up its push for an immediate ceasefire in recent days, has placed responsibility on Hamas.

President Biden said Tuesday that ceasefire negotiations are “currently in the hands of Hamas.” He said the Israelis, whose negotiators were not in Cairo, had “cooperated” in the indirect talks, and that “a rational offer” had been made.

“We’ll know in a few days what’s going to happen,” Biden said as he returned to the White House after spending the weekend at Camp David in preparation for his State of the Union address on Thursday. “We need a ceasefire.”

Mr. Biden’s comments echoed similar remarks earlier in the day by Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and on Monday by Vice President Kamala Harris.

As fighting continues, food shortages in Gaza have become increasingly acute. The United States carried out a second round of airdrops in the area on Tuesday, with US Air Force cargo planes dropping 36,800 ready-to-eat meals in a joint operation with the Jordanian Air Force.

The first US airborne took place on Saturday, two days after more than 100 Palestinians were killed when Israeli forces opened fire on a crowd swarming a convoy of aid trucks in northern Gaza. Doctors at hospitals in Gaza said most of the casualties were the result of gunfire.

The Israeli military has said most of the victims were trampled on Thursday as they tried to seize the cargo, although Israeli officials acknowledged that troops had fired at some people they said had threatened them.

A statement of UN rights experts, released on Tuesday by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, described the bloodshed as a massacre and accused Israeli forces of killing at least 112 people and wounding around 760.

“Israel has deliberately starved the Palestinian people in Gaza since October 8,” it said in one of the harshest words used by the United Nations since the start of the war. “Now it is targeting civilians seeking humanitarian assistance and humanitarian convoys. Israel must end its campaign of starvation and targeting of civilians.”

After the convoy killings, President Biden said the United States would find new ways to deliver food and other supplies to the Palestinians. Only a trickle of aid has reached northern Gaza by land, but aid groups have criticized airdrops as ineffective. The amount of aid delivered by a French plane in an airborne landing last week was far less than a single truckload.

The Times of Israel reported on Tuesday that Israel has begun bringing aid through the border between Israel and northern Gaza, where the United Nations says the lack of food is extremely acute. The aid had only entered through two border crossings in the far south of Gaza, one from Egypt and one from Israel.

Fifteen children have died of malnutrition in a hospital in Gaza City, the United Nations said on Tuesday, adding that the figures in other hospitals could be higher.

At the same time, the death toll among Gazans from Israeli bombing continues to rise. Gaza health authorities said on Tuesday that nearly 100 Gazans had been killed by Israeli forces in the past 24 hours. The death toll after almost five months of war is over 30,000 people, the majority of whom are women and children.

The UN report released on Monday was based on information collected in Israel and the occupied West Bank by a team of experts led by Pramila Patten, the Secretary General’s Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict .

The report noted that a range of fighters from Hamas and other groups took part in the October 7 attack, and that UN experts, who conducted two-and-a-half weeks of investigations in Israel and the West Bank, were unable to determine whether anyone who had committed sexual assaults belonged to specific factions. The report details significant challenges in determining what had happened, including the team’s limited time on the scene, the failure of overwhelmed Israeli authorities to focus on collecting forensic evidence and the destruction of some evidence in fires.

Nevertheless, many in Israel welcomed the report. Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, a law professor at Bar-Ilan University and women’s rights activist, said on Tuesday she was confused by Mr Katz’s decision to recall Mr Erdan.

The UN report “serves at the highest level to confirm that sexual violence and gender atrocities were indeed part of Hamas’ attack on October 7,” she said.

Israeli activists have in the past expressed frustration over what they perceived as the United Nations’ slow response to reports of sexual abuse during the October 7 attack. President Herzog’s wife, Michal Herzog, said on Israeli radio on Tuesday that the report was “the first time after five months that a senior UN official has supported what we have been claiming in recent months.”

Hamas rejected the report, calling the findings false.

The Hostages and Missing Families Forum, a group representing the families of the Israeli prisoners, said in a statement Monday evening that the U.N. report made it “abundantly clear that the female hostages are going through hell every moment and every minute.”

Israelis “will not forgive Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the cabinet” if they fail to bring the hostages home, the group said.

Reporting was contributed by Michael D. Shear, Victoria Kim, Farnaz Fassihi And Adam Ragon.

During Shuang Xuetao’s early teenage years, he wondered for a long time what hidden disaster had befallen his family.

His parents, proud workers at a tractor factory in the northeastern Chinese city of Shenyang, stopped working and the family moved into an empty factory warehouse to save money on rent.

But they rarely talked about what happened, and Mr. Shuang worried that only a special shame had befallen his family.

Only later did he learn about the mass layoffs that swept northeast China in the 1990s, during the country’s shift from a planned economy to a market-based economy. The region had been the industrial heart of China, but suddenly millions of workers found themselves unemployed. Crime and poverty increased. Even today, the region, also called China’s Rust Belt, has not fully recovered.

The legacy of that common suffering animates the writing of Mr. Shuang, now 40 and one of China’s most celebrated young authors. For his short stories about the economic decline of his hometown and the mass disillusionment that followed, he has been praised for drawing attention to a time and people that China’s public imagination had long written off.

His stories also address the isolation of individuals within that collective experience. His characters disappear from their neighbors’ lives without saying goodbye or, in one of his signature magical realist twists, trek through the heavy snowstorms of the Northeast and end up in a cell at the bottom of a lake.

Mr. Shuang describes himself as both a participant in that era and a bystander – making him perhaps the ideal person to introduce it to a new generation of readers.

“That was my childhood,” Mr. Shuang said during an interview in Beijing, where he now lives. “So I was part of what was happening, but I didn’t necessarily understand it either.”

The question of how to understand the region’s history has become particularly relevant recently, as a wave of art about the northeast, known in Mandarin as Dongbei, has gained widespread popularity. A television drama about a faded factory town it was China’s top-rated show last year, and songs by Dongbei musicians have gone viral. Mr. Shuang published a new collection of short stories in February, and a star-studded film adaptation of one of his novellas is planned this year.

Cultural commentators have proclaimed a “Dongbei Renaissance.” Some have suggested that young people see a resonance between that time and China’s current economic slump.

Many stories set in the Northeast, including Mr. Shuang’s, have a raw aesthetic of huge chimneys, blinding snow and snow. and surrounding despair. When Mr. Shuang began writing, he rarely saw that face of the region represented.

Yet Mr. Shuang now worries that these characteristics are being interpreted as stereotypes, or worse, as gospel truth.

“Now that people have paid attention, I think we should remind them: this is not the real Shenyang,” he said. “It’s mine.”

Shenyang, where Mr. Shuang was born in 1983, was the largest city in China’s most urbanized, prosperous region. State-supported factories produced steel and heavy machinery, and their workers basked in the promise of lifelong job security. Mr. Shuang’s parents dropped him off at the factory’s kindergarten every day; the 7,000 employees enjoyed a factory hospital, cinema and auditorium.

When Chinese leaders began allowing private companies to compete with state-owned giants in the 1990s, that idyll collapsed. Mr. Shuang’s mother started selling tea eggs on the street.

Determined to earn a steady income, Mr. Shuang studied law at university and then went to work at a bank. But he soon got bored. As a teenager, he had found solace in the lost young men of Ernest Hemingway and JD Salinger. He began writing secretly at night about his own lost young men.

At first, Mr. Shuang wrote about Shenyang because that was all he knew. But when he found an audience – by winning several major writing competitions – a sense of responsibility developed. “I said, OK, I want to help others better understand this place of ours. I want to leave a record of these people.”

Many of his stories feature a recurring cast of characters: tea egg sellers, police officers, former employees who try to reinvent themselves with varying degrees of success.

The three novellas in “Rouge Street,” the first collection of his work published in English, are set in a tough neighborhood full of young dropouts, “heads hanging, smoking all the time, still not starving.”

Mr. Shuang’s prose is vernacular, and he doesn’t shy away from the unsavory choices his characters make to survive. There are murderers and drunkards. But he also lingers on the connections they forge, even if they are ultimately fleeting.

Religion is another motive. Itinerant preachers spread hope to single mothers, and churches serve as local landmarks. Mr. Shuang’s best-known work is a 2015 novella called “Moses on the Plain.”

On the surface, it’s a murder mystery. The characters quote from the book of Exodus as they ponder revenge and redemption. In one scene, retired workers protest plans to replace a statue of Mao Zedong with a gaudy golden bird. The gathering is eerie, almost ritualistic: “A group of old people in work uniforms walked down the middle of the road in a somewhat ragged formation, completely silent.”

Mr Shuang is not religious, but said he was fascinated by believers’ search for meaning. He had seen a similar quest in his parents’ embrace of socialism. During the layoffs, he said, “it is not only their source of income that collapsed, but also a kind of faith.”

Jia Hangjia, the pseudonym of an essayist from northeastern China, said “Moses on the Plain” rediscovered a period that many would have preferred to forget.

“It’s not like people processed what happened and then moved on. They just buried it,” Mr Jia said. “To dig these things up again and push for some kind of venting, I think that was very courageous.”

Mr. Shuang is hardly the first writer to examine China’s historical traumas. Renowned authors such as Mo Yan, the first Chinese citizen to win a Nobel Prize for Literature, have written about the scars of Mao’s failed collectivization campaigns or the country’s one-child policy.

Yet the experience of Northeast China had received less literary attention in the 1990s. Censorship has also become stricter — and only more so since Mr. Shuang began writing.

A commentary on the success of Mr. Shuang and other northeastern writers published in a Chinese Communist Party newspaper called their works “sincere.”

“But to wallow in this kind of writing,” the piece continued: “is what we don’t want to see. We need reflective literature, healing literature, literature that looks to the future and is full of power.”

A film adaptation of ‘Moses on the Plain’, which was set to premiere in China in 2020, was postponed without explanation. It’s now expected this year, with a more secular title: ‘Fire on the Plain’.

Mr Shuang said he thought fiction writers still had considerable leeway, due to their relatively small audience. Only one line was removed from “Moses on the Plain,” he said: a character asking, “If Mao Zedong were alive, would they dare?”

And Mr. Shuang is not an activist. His stories focus heavily on individuals and make little mention of the government.

Some critics have said they don’t go far enough in exploring the roots of the pain of that period. “He doesn’t talk about the why of history, the deeper historical meaning,” said Nie Zinan, associate professor of literature at Shenyang Normal University.

But for Mr. Shuang, the expectation that he will write about the Northeast at all has become a burden. In the decade since he left Shenyang, his visits have become less frequent. He now finds the city largely unrecognizable.

Zhang Yueran, Mr. Shuang’s wife and herself a leading novelist, said the Dongbei label had “brought him great benefit.” But, she continued, “when an author wants to expand to a broader stage, you naturally feel limited.”

Mr. Shuang has attempted to lift those restrictions, with some of his recent stories set in the early 20th century. Others show somber writers from Beijing.

But he is quick to emphasize that these newer stories are as representative of his current life as his previous works were. That is, maybe not at all.

“Fiction cannot be responsible for transmitting information,” he said. “As an author, I believe in telling the truth by lying.”

Siyi Zhao research contributed