So it all started from my grandma…
If I could ever finish writing a book, it would be all because of my grandma, the woman who once told me dozens of stories when I was a child — true and fictional ones. As time goes by, the fictional ones are easier to fade away, because you can always spot some flaws in them, but the real ones, the true stories from her own memory, have become part of my memory, too, intertwined with a child’s imagination about the life of people from other generations. In the last several years of her life, my grandma had been confined to a kang, a typical bed found in the rural areas of northern China, unable to talk or eat by herself — a stroke has made her clearly uttering the names of her children and grandchildren a hard feat to celebrate, let alone telling me any more stories. It is a strange feeling to see how she, who was once so strong and able in her life, became so sick and so weak. This made me feel that it is my sole responsibility to tell these stories — not only hers, but also her children’s.
Where to start? I always feel they are stories too difficult to tell because they happened long ago. You cannot understand the stories without understanding the context. My lack of confidence in narrating an objective historical context of a family and an academic-like pursuit of objectivity in my own storytelling has stopped me from writing those stories. But since my grandma passed away this summer, it has come to my mind clearly that the objectivity of these stories is not of the most importance, but the pure humanity in these stories that are based on the life of people who lived in the small towns in China in recent times matters the most.
They are the people I know. When I write their stories, I cannot combat against my instinct to speak for them, because I was one of them. Although they made small or even huge mistakes in their life, they also suffer from the consequences of their choices. Or should the right question be: did they have a choice?
After I made up my mind to write down these stores, I made one promise to my readers, which is that I will write genuinely.
You see, writing is the brave’s game. You have to be honest with yourself first. The experiences that you want to explore in the writing are unfolded by yourself, alone. You must re-visit the past that has been there in the darkness of time for long. You must dig your way to it, look at it, touch it, feel its texture, and then re-understand it, then you must also be able to find a tunnel back to the present. If you also experience this journey in your life once or twice, then I hope that the light at the end of the tunnel would shed the light upon your lonely journey. After you are out of the tunnel, possibly you want to bury the entrance to the tunnel and hide the past from all the other curious eyes, but I prefer to guide people back into the world that is on the other end of the tunnel — the world of my grandma and her children.