In Chinese, the region that was once the cradle of the mighty Qing dynasty is today rather prosaically known as Dongbei, the Northeast. Home to 110 million people, it has smoggy cities and bitingly cold weather. It can seem drab or worse to a visitor. But Michael Meyer has a more refined sense of history and poetry, and with his new book, “In Manchuria: A Village Called Wasteland and the Transformation of Rural China,” he seizes the opportunity to dig beneath the region’s gritty surfaces.

Mr. Meyer’s motivation for writing his book is simple and straightforward. “Since 2000, a quarter of China’s villages had died out, victims of migration or the redrawing of municipal borders,” as the country urbanizes, he notes early on, adding: “Before it vanished I wanted to experience a life that tourists, foreign students, and journalists (I had been, in order, all three) only viewed in passing.”

“In Manchuria” shifts back and forth among various genres. It is part travelogue, part sociological study, part reportage and part memoir, but it is also a love offering to Mr. Meyer’s wife, Frances, who grew up in the unfortunately named Wasteland, the village that Mr. Meyer chooses as his base near the start of this decade, and to the unborn son she is carrying by the time “In Manchuria” ends.

To tell his story, Mr. Meyer alternates between chapters that examine a broad historical canvas and those focused on his daily life in Wasteland. There he sleeps on a kang, a combination bed and stove heated by burning rice husks; uses a rudimentary outhouse and a public bathhouse; and tries to adjust to a place defined “by what was absent,” with “no local newspaper, no graveyards, no plaques, no library, no former mansions or battlefields.”