What is a person without a dream?
I had one too when I was young—a small, stubborn dream of literature.
Lately I’ve been thinking a great deal about where that dream began, and the answer has become surprisingly clear. If it was once a seed, then it was planted very early, back in childhood, when I was still in primary school.
At home there were several thick magazines that had belonged to my aunt when she was a student. To me, they looked enormous. I still remember their names: October, Contemporary, Mangyuan, Kunlun, Qingming... serious literary journals, most of them bimonthlies, published roughly between 1978 and 1986. I was too young to understand much, but after school I would sit quietly and flip through them.
In the countryside in the late 1980s, life was still fairly hard. There was little in the way of entertainment or spiritual nourishment. Those magazines, half-understood and casually leafed through in idle hours, became my first teachers in literature.
My family was slightly better off than some others around us, so I had more to read than just those journals. There were also my aunt’s copies of the Four Great Classical Novels, Song of Youth, The Divine Comedy, and a few other books I can no longer clearly recall. I read all of them in a very unsystematic way, so not much stayed in my memory. But one piece did. I no longer remember which issue it was in, only that it was in Mangyuan, and the title has remained with me ever since: Genghis Khan’s Steed.
As I grew older, I went to middle school in a nearby town. My grades were neither especially good nor especially bad, and I served as class monitor. Our homeroom teacher, Mr. Ma, taught Chinese. He was probably in his thirties and treated us well. In the class that entered in 1994, he took the lead in founding the school’s first literary society.
At the beginning it was just a dozen or so students from our class who liked to read and write—though at the time it would have been more accurate to say we simply enjoyed scribbling and thought ourselves a little more gifted than our classmates. Under Mr. Ma’s guidance, the group was formally established. A girl in our class who was an outstanding student—always ranked first in the grade—and also the class’s academic representative, became the society’s first student head and organized our writing activities. Mr. Ma even gave the group a name: the Young Eagle Literary Society. I think many people from our cohort would still remember it, because in the end the group grew quite large.
By the second year of middle school, that classmate stepped down to focus on her studies, and Mr. Ma asked me to take over. Those were the years when my writing burned with adolescent passion. After finishing homework, I would often fill sheets of manuscript paper with whatever came to mind. Once a week, I collected everyone’s pieces and posted them on the large blackboard wall at the back of the classroom. During breaks, students would gather there, heads tilted up, reading.
Most of the blackboard space was covered by my own writing. Poems, stories, essays—I wrote all kinds of things, though mostly poetry. Even now I still like writing poems, if only because they are relatively easy to produce and take up a satisfying amount of space. Ten short lines of tiny handwriting, and there you have it: a poem no one but the author can understand.
I remember doing well in the school’s timed composition contests on two occasions and even placing in them. Looking back, I can see that my writing from that period was immature in every way, but the experience itself was powerful. It made literature feel close and vivid, something I could actually participate in rather than merely admire from a distance.
High school gave that dream another small chance to come alive, this time through the internet. I first got online in 1999. At the beginning, like many people back then, I mostly used it for chatting. There wasn’t all that much online anyway, and I had no clear idea what else I might do there. Then in 2001 I happened to find the forum of the Chinese Poets website.
I can’t say with certainty that 2001 was the first year of online poetry in China, but I do believe it was an important year in its development. From around 2001 to 2003, literary websites and forums seemed to appear everywhere, many of them created spontaneously by people who simply loved literature and wanted a place to exchange work and ideas. I still remember names like Chinese Poets, Poetry Forum, Wuling Literature, Poetry Journal, Ancient Style Forum, Wild Grass Forum, Rongshuxia, and many others. They sprang up like bamboo shoots after rain.
I feel lucky to have witnessed those early years of online literature in China. I spent a great deal of time on those forums, got to know some fellow lovers of writing, and even received poetry collections from online friends.
There was another episode from high school that still amuses me. During the year I was repeating my final year and had transferred to another high school in town, I somehow ended up working as an editor for the school newspaper. A teacher there—his surname was Long, if memory serves, a middle-aged man in his forties who also held some position in the Youth League at school—was in charge of the newspaper from the school’s side.
I no longer remember exactly how we got acquainted. Most likely he noticed an article of mine published in the school paper and reached out to me afterward. He invited me to help edit the paper and encourage students across the school to submit their work. I liked that unofficial job very much. I also liked spending time online in those newly emerging literary forums and websites. Between the two, I let my actual schoolwork slide badly. Thinking back now, I can’t say I regret it all that much.
University, by contrast, was the dullest period of all. What I remember most is sleeping, going online, and playing games. The world outside was lively and full of distractions, and somehow I had no time left for the literature I had once cared so much about. Only a few times did I force myself to write some rather ordinary poems, mostly in hopes of impressing female classmates. When I think of that now, I do feel a little regret. Even my memory of Zhengzhou remains colored by that sense of waste.
After graduation came work, then marriage. Life settled into a calm that resembled water at the bottom of a well—still, enclosed, without ripples. I stayed online, continued subscribing to magazines such as Tianya, Shanghai Literature, and Dushu, and often bought books from the Xinhua Bookstore in town. Yet I kept feeling that the literary dream of my youth was drifting farther and farther away.
I have always wanted to hold on to that dream, and even more than that, to see it come true. But a dream alone is not enough. Without the passion to lift it up and the persistence to sustain it over time, it remains only a dream. As for my actual literary ability, I am clear-eyed about it: in many ways it has probably remained somewhere around the level I had in middle school or high school.
I often want to write something, yet nothing comes out. Time has worn away the old fervor. Talent seems absent. The dream itself has faded from its original bright colors into something pale and thin.
After several days of thinking all this over, I made a decision: I want to pick up that literary dream again. Clumsily, perhaps, by tapping on a keyboard with unskilled hands, I want to write words that allow me to live with myself in peace. Not to show them off, not to parade them before others to feed my vanity, but to leave something behind for myself, something I can return to slowly.
When, if ever, will that small literary dream be fulfilled?
Perhaps the more important thing is to put aside pretense, to look at my own soul in the mirror of honesty, and to write a few small pieces that truly belong to me—and are written for me. A life lived that way would feel more meaningful.
