The Daily: The Sunday Read: ‘The Art of Telling Forbidden Stories in China’

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Hi, my name is Han Zhang and I'm a contributor to the New York Times

magazine. I write about the political and literary narratives that are shaping the

Chinese world. This week's Sunday Read is a recent story of mine from the

magazine that started off as a profile of a Chinese writer named Hao Chun.

Hao grew up in a farming village but because he tested while in his

university entrance exam he got to go to school in Beijing. Hao got a job in the

corporate world in the early 2000s but during a spell of boredom he decided to

take up creative writing. He started posting chapters of a novel online and

it just exploded quickly attracting an audience and the attention of

publishers. The internet novel came out as a very successful book and for the

next decade he enjoyed life as a best-selling author. But all this came

to an end in the early 2010s when one of Hao's good friends was detained by the

Chinese authorities. This friend was a scholar who was calling for political

reforms. Hao spoke up in defense of his friend and very soon afterwards Hao

found out that he was blacklisted. Being blacklisted meant that it became more or

less impossible for him to continue to speak or publish whether online or in

print. His writing career was effectively over. By taking a public stance that was

sympathetic to a dissident Hao had become a dissident himself. Still in

early 2020 Hao felt compelled to write about the Wuhan COVID lockdown but he

had to do it all in secret. He traveled to Wuhan and finished a non-fiction

collection called Deadly Quiet City detailing what he saw. His publisher

urged him to flee China before the books release and today he's living in exile

in Australia. Hao isn't alone. Although my story started out as a proof of Hao

it quickly became a broader story of today's Chinese writers and about how

the Communist Party has mobilized to totally control how China is talked

about. Increasingly the internet under President Xi Jinping has become a place

to exert power. It hasn't been uncommon for someone's social media posts on

WeChat or Weibo to be scrutinized and deleted. But these days say something

vaguely provocative in a social media post and your whole account might be

wiped out or you might get invited for tea by the Chinese police which is a

slang for informal interrogations. While reporting the story I reached out to

many Chinese writers. I think it's easy for people to think about this world as

being defined by quote censorship. I was a little fixated on that framing too at

first but then one of the writers I spoke to said it's the wrong way to think

about it. Their wish is to be expressive, to create and that was a clarifying

moment for me. There was a lot of good will but a number of them told me it's

just too difficult for them to talk to a journalist right now. Sometimes when I'm

texting with a writer I can tell from the bubble icon that they are

deliberating. I see them tapping away at a message and editing it for a long time

before sending it. And sometimes they retracted messages they'd already sent

to me. One writer said that life was like walking a tightrope. Another told me

that it was like living in a cage. Let's say you're a writer. You write the wrong

thing. Not only could your current book be banned but so could the books that

you've already published. That's what you could be facing. Your career could just

disappear overnight. So here's my article, the art of telling forbidden stories in

China, read by Emily Wu Zeller. On an August evening in 2021, the best-selling

Chinese novelist Hao Chun, who writes under the name Murong Xue Zun, was

procrastinating in his one-bedroom apartment. He needed to be at Beijing

Capital International Airport around 6th the next morning to catch a flight to

London but he found it hard to pack. Though Hao had a valid tourist visa to

Britain, the Chinese government had kept tabs on him for years and it was

possible that he would be prevented from leaving. Other public intellectuals had

tried to travel abroad only to discover that they were under exit bans. Hao

might have been packing for a life of exile or a feudal trip to the airport.

His forthcoming book, Deadly Quiet City, would be published soon and Hao's

editors were worried for his safety. A collection of nonfiction. It was about

the terrifying Kafka-esque early days of the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan where

residents had been subjected to an unrelenting information suppression

campaign. The Huanan seafood wholesale market was considered the pandemic's

origin point but the state had strangled reporting on daily life there. When

Hao arrived at the shuttered market in April 2020, he was met by tired guards

who, to discourage him from taking photos, presented coercion as patriotic duty.

You know the Americans are exhausting their ways to frame our country. One of

them said, it'd be no good if your photos were used by foreign media. Please cooperate.

Hao was not deterred. Square-faced and of average height. He has the look of a

Chinese everyman. You can picture him striking up conversations with ease and

over the course of his reporting trip he talked to people from all walks of life,

office employees, store owners, taxi drivers and migrant workers. Some

introductions were made by reporters who were forbidden to cover many aspects of

the pandemic. These meetings were often hours long affairs. At the time people

had a strong desire to talk, Hao recalls. One interview with a citizen

journalist named Zhang Zhan lasted from noon until after dusk. All the while he

tried to shake off the eerie suspicion that he was being watched. It was a

paranoid hunch, but it wasn't an irrational one. After all, the Guobao,

or Chinese secret police, had shadowed him for the better part of a decade. In

Wuhan, he conducted conversations at odd locations, on a street lined with

office buildings abandoned during the pandemic, or by the windy bank of the

Yangtze River. In his hotel room, he sometimes made phone calls under a

blanket to ensure privacy. One night, the sound of two men speaking in hushed

voices outside his door, left him thinking of citizen journalists who had

disappeared after posting reports from the city. A distant memory flashed. Five

or six years ago in Beijing, Hao was invited to a celebration at the Swedish

Embassy. A couple of Guobao officers showed up at his home a day before the

event. You won't be able to go. One of them informed Hao, hinting that they

would physically stop him if he tried. Feeling rebellious, Hao insisted that

he would go, but the Guobao taunted him. Look at yourself, one of them said.

How many blows would you be able to withstand? The men in the hallway

eventually left, but Hao was covered in cold sweat. Days after he departed

from Wuhan, he got word that Zhang had been arrested.

Deadly Quiet City, which was published in the United States in March by the

new press, captures Hao's such state enforced silence, combined with

inadequate access to medical care, intensified ordinary people's despair

during the crisis. Reading these stories, you not only feel for Hao's

subjects, but also fear for the political trouble Hao's unflinching clarity

invites. After Hao submitted the manuscript to Hardy Grant Books, his

Australian publisher, in spring 2021, his editors urged him to leave China out

of concern for his safety. He equivocated. A few years in prison was a price he

was willing to pay for the book's publication. His editors continued to

press him, and by mid-summer, he had decided to flee. He boarded the flight

to London successfully, and after a spell, moved on to Melbourne. When he

spoke to me in late January, he seemed to be in a bit of disbelief at where

his life ended up. Exile in Australia was worlds away from the circumstances

in which he first rose to prominence. As China's drove for a larger role on

the international stage at the turn of the century, the arrival of the

internet and a relatively relaxed political environment sparked an

unprecedented boom in self-expression. Afforded new license, many writers of

Hao's generation tested the boundaries of Chinese literary culture, writing

stories that portrayed the lives of the rapidly growing middle class and the

opulent Nouveau Reich, while revealing the ethical toll an increasingly

materialistic worldview took on their nation. These writers experimented with

subjects that were quotidian but taboo on the page. Corruption, sexual desire and

evolving gender roles, often wielding confession to upend convention. There is

a Chinese idiom. Spilled water will not flow backward. This period opened a

floodgate of creation that forever altered contemporary Chinese literary

culture. Where the government once vetted all writing for its conformity to

state values, the internet provided a marketplace of ideas where writers

could independently attract tremendous audiences. In today's China though, the

pursuit of free expression requires writers to weather new political

pressures and operate under the ever-watchful eye of a complex state

surveillance system. This can resemble a high stakes game of whack-a-mole in which

writers, editors and online publishers try to outmaneuver the Chinese Communist

Party's apparatus, using any opportunity and resource at their disposal to

chronicle life as they see it. In 1978, as China emerged from Mao Zedong's

Cultural Revolution and Decades of Isolation, the Chinese leader Deng

Xiaoping inaugurated his opening up policy. This was both an overture to

foreign business and a kind of domestic glasnost. Over the next few decades,

openness became a political buzzword. By 2001, that ethos had borne its most

symbolic fruits. After campaigning for more than a decade, China became a

member of the World Trade Organization and was selected to host the 2008

Summer Olympic Games. Jiang Zemin, Deng's successor, applied the old man's

vision to cultural work, which, as he said at the 2002 National Party

Congress, should be geared toward modernization, the world and the

future. Soon the government introduced policies like tax relief for companies

that transitioned from state-owned bureaucracies to market-driven

enterprises that equipped creative industries to produce dynamic and

competitive work. This general openness coincided with the popularization

of the Internet, which was new enough that it largely eluded outmoded

print-era censorship. For much of the first decade of the new millennium,

the Great Firewall, the infrastructure that bans an ever-growing

list of foreign websites, hadn't yet been erected. Chinese citizens could

access Facebook, Wikipedia, and Google somewhat freely, and the state had yet

to develop a robust mechanism to track sensitive words as a way to curb the

spread of inconvenient information. By the end of the decade, scholars and

writers debated public affairs on Weibo, a Twitter-like platform. Elsewhere,

vibrant communities emerged around niche passions. The poet who writes under

the name Xiao Yin remembers the new poetry websites of that era as

chaotic and fun spaces. On sites like Poetry Life, his peers quarreled daily

over matters like the possibilities of colloquial poetry writing.

Anyone could start their own bulletin boards, he told me. It was like

bandits occupying hills and claiming to be kings. This internet-based

community constituted a sea change for Chinese literature. Until the mid-1990s,

jobs were assigned by the government. For generations of writers,

membership in the state-sponsored Writers Association and staff jobs at

party publications or state news agencies were more or less the only

path to a career in letters. Some of China's most prestigious novelists,

like Yan Lian Ke and Mo Yan, known for their realist novels about the

village life of their youth, published their debuts while serving in the

People's Liberation Army. But by the 2000s, such formal affiliations were no

longer a prerequisite. Anyone with a computer and an internet connection

could share his or her work on literary forums, where censorship was nascent

and piecemeal. Free from the scrutiny of editors and sensors, writers had a

more direct relationship with their readers, who relished their refreshingly

unabashed accounts of their historical moment. Explaining the differences

between these generations to me over the phone, the celebrated novelist who

writes under the name Ayi borrowed concepts from classic martial arts

stories. Traditional writers, he told me, inhabit in Miao Tang or temples and

courts, whereas writers of the internet age inhabited Jianghu or the unkempt

natural world. Unburdened from the institutional gaze, they explored

subjects and feelings that didn't align with the state's values. One

essayist, writing under the name Muzi Mei, earned her reputation by

publishing sex journals, detailing her one night stands and flirtatious

encounters with rock stars and other public figures. If the era's

cosmopolitanism was thrilling, it was also morally ambiguous. Sometimes

upward mobility could engender a spiritual hollowness. Without the

relative freedom that the open internet provided, how might never have

started writing? After testing into a university in Beijing and studying

law, in 2000 he got a job in HR at a cosmetics company and moved to the

Southern Metropolis, Shenzhen, the heartland of Deng's reforms. When

Hao became a writer, he was an untethered man. His parents, who had

been farmers in his rural home village, had both died by the time he was

in college. He was briefly married in the late 1990s, but that relationship

ended in divorce in 2000. Browsing one of the literature bulletin boards, he

came across a serialized novel titled My Beijing, published under the

pseudonym Drunken Fish. The story of a group of friends finding their way in

the rapidly growing and suddenly wealthy capital inspired Hao to try

his hand at a story that reflected his own time in China's urban

environments. We wrote about the stories happening around us, our own

anxieties, expectations, and sense of rootlessness, he told me. Soon he had

begun a novel about a recent university graduate in the southwestern

city Chengdu, navigating office politics and questioning his marriage. By

April 2002, he was posting chapters to several bulletin boards under his new

pseudonym, Murong Xuecun, a name reminiscent of a hero in a martial

arts novel. Eventually titled Leave Me Alone, the novel captured the hopes and

delusions of recent college graduates who, like Hao, grew up in modest

circumstances and now found themselves surrounded by temptations of fast cash

and meaningless sex. Hao's depiction of Chengdu's seedy underbelly became a

sensation on forums like Tianya, one of the period's largest blogging

platforms. Once, a colleague recommended the novel to Hao without knowing

that he was Murong Xuecun. Within two months, he was approached by booksellers

and publishers, and the novel came out that December. He enjoyed the spoils

of success, frequently treating friends to fancy dinners and letting them borrow

money when they needed it. Beijing is divided into six concentric rings

radiating from downtown. Generally speaking, the closer to downtown, the

more prosperous the neighborhood. By 2010, Hao lived in a penthouse in the

third ring.

Hao's fiction tended to explore imperfect protagonists, abuse of power, and

the moral corrosion of city life. In his 2008 bestselling novel Dancing

Through Red Dust, the narrator, Wei Da, is a well-connected partner at a law firm

who moves with confidence through gambling dens and corporate offices alike. Wei

comes from a simple family, but in a world where money keeps everything in

motion and compassion is weakness, his survival instincts and desire for

influence overwhelm his better nature. In one scene, Wei runs over a poor farmer

while driving drunk. In the end, the farmer is forced to pay Wei for

damaging his car. Hao's transition from a pulp fiction writer to a daring

documentarian and critic of the government was a natural progression. From

the get-go, he has been completely obsessed with how people are corrupted

by the environment in which they live, says Megan Walsh, author of The

Subplot, a book about contemporary Chinese literature. In reading his work,

she says, you come to believe that people can exist in and perpetuate

horrendous cycles of injustice.

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Authorities mostly viewed how and other newcomers with suspicion.

At National Writers Association conferences, leaders urged literature workers to fight against diversification of thought.

Ideas that subverted authoritarian patriarchal norms.

Later, at a propaganda meeting, the deputy party secretary of Chengdu criticized how's fiction for damaging the city's image.

A more correct local performance artist, Li Boqing, accused Hao of failing to present the city's mainstream features.

To him, Li said in an interview, Chengdu was a beautiful, kind and tolerant mother who also has a graceful figure.

Disgusted by the lust and greed portrayed in Hao's work, Li insisted that writers should focus on the city's relaxing atmosphere,

famed history of brocade production, and beautiful Chinese hibiscus.

As Hao went through a political awakening, that distrust turned into persecution.

In 2011, Hao learned that his close friend Ran Yunfei, a scholar of classical Chinese, was arrested and charged with subversion.

After he warned that if China didn't make reforms, it risked an upheaval like the Jasmine Revolution protests in North Africa.

On Weiboa, where Hao had millions of followers, he denounced the arrest and called Ran the conscience of the country.

Ran was released from detention that same year, but Hao's encounter with state repression radicalized him.

Until that point, I had enjoyed my life as a best-selling author and avoided getting into trouble, he says.

But when their hands reached those close to me, I had to step up.

Hao's writing steered to social commentary, and he began contributing to the International New York Times.

The repercussions were swift.

Hao was banned from Weiboa, and before long it became clear that he was blacklisted.

In 2014, he started to receive invitations to tea, slang for informal police questioning.

In the next few years, he had tea about 40 times, as often as once a month.

Sometimes, as if they were old friends, officers would ask what Hao had been up to or what he had been thinking about.

His writing career essentially came to an end.

He never published another book in China, and he made his living by ghostwriting screenplays for movies and TV shows.

When, out of habit, he reached for the bill while out at dinner, friends dissuaded him and insisted that he needed to think about his future.

By the time he left China, he had rented a studio apartment outside Beijing's fifth ring.

Thirty-six of his friends, writers, scholars, activists, and lawyers, had been detained or sentenced to prison.

Late at night, as he fell asleep, he wondered when his turn would come.

He wondered when his turn would come.

I didn't have long-term plans, he says, because I felt that I had one foot in prison already.

Under President Xi Jinping, who took office in 2013, the Communist Party has sought to assert China's position as a rising global power.

Domestically, Xi's government has shown less tolerance for the kind of writing that Deng's reforms fostered,

and has been keen on creating a centralized discourse that nurtures national pride through an emphasis on telling China's story well.

A piece of ubiquitous political boilerplate that Xi introduced into the national consciousness.

In the spring of 2013, less than two months after Xi became president,

state outlets reported on a Party Central document that instructed cadres to prioritize

the struggles in the ideological sphere, and to reinforce our management of propaganda on the cultural front,

and cut off channels of erroneous ideologies and speech at their headwaters.

This course correction was a tacit admission that Deng's opening up policy stoked growing conversation about notions like feminism,

queerness, and civil rights, and that their discussion needed to be curbed.

To that end, the state has developed a robust surveillance and censorship apparatus.

The Guobao, local police officers, publishing authorities, and digital surveillance tools,

are all mobilized into a multifaceted operation, whose purpose is to control China's story.

That machinery has transformed the internet from a place of experimentation into exhibit A of the state's power.

This often takes the form of a 404 error page,

unnoticed that the state has deemed an article or a piece of social media content unfit for public consumption.

No one is immune.

In 2021, former Prime Minister Wen Jiabao published an essay remembering his mother,

writing that China should be a country full of justice and fairness.

On the popular social media app WeChat, users couldn't share Wen's essay on their timelines or private chats.

Xi's approach has strangled free expression.

According to Freedom House, which surveys internet freedom around the world by tracking control measures,

the freedom of the Chinese internet has dropped by 40% since 2011,

and for the last eight years,

China has earned the ignominious distinction of being the most repressive among the countries that the organization monitors.

In publishing, each new title requires individual approval, which can result in an exhausting process.

Once a publisher decides to pursue a book proposal,

it will be reviewed by in-house editors before they submit a request to the National Administration of Press and Publication,

which decides whether the idea will materialize.

In the last decade, the publication of new titles categorized as literary has decreased by 15%.

Seven out of ten literary titles published in 2013 were new works.

By 2021, reprints made up half of publications.

In this environment of intense censorship and fractured cultural infrastructure,

writers must be flexible, willing to forego old forms and move fluidly among genres

if they want to continue making meaningful work.

Journalists become serial entrepreneurs who dream up new ways of creating to fill the lacunae they see.

When one project becomes infeasible, they move on to another.

Zhang Wenmin, a veteran journalist who writes under the name Jiang Xue,

became known for her coverage of a 2002 civil rights case,

in which four policemen showed up at a newlywed couple's home because they were watching porn.

Among many colleagues, there had been the consensus that no matter what,

they had to try to say a little more, Jiang recalls.

Sensing increasing pressure, she quit institutional journalism in 2015 to become a self-publishing blogger.

With long straight hair, Jiang dresses simply.

In contrast to these steely insistence on common sense in her writing,

there is a vulnerable shyness in her physical presence.

I've never been cool, she joked softly, her arms draped in front of her body.

On WeChat, she wrote stories about dissidents,

something no news outlet would allow, she said, because it's like violating a tiantiao,

a statute sent from heaven.

She was uninvited from journalism events.

She lost her Weibo and WeChat accounts, becoming virtually invisible.

Friends and family think I went too far, Jiang said.

When her city, Xi'an, went into lockdown,

a friend offered her own WeChat account to publish Jiang's journals.

They went viral, but also drew attacks.

The worsening media environment in the last ten years makes people see things upside down,

she said.

When you do the most normal thing, it appears abnormal.

Elsewhere, an even more bottom-up kind of writing community appeared.

Its participants are assisted by affordable technology.

Three-quarters of the Chinese population are smartphone owners,

allowing a wider swath of people to publish more varieties of writing.

While house generation of writers was predominantly middle-class and

upwardly mobile, the spread of internet-enabled technology

has allowed working-class people without degrees to pursue literature.

On social media platforms like Kuaishou, where users post short video clips,

factory workers, masseuses, and truck drivers started to compose poems.

In 2017, a 44-year-old single mother, Fan Yuxu,

became a literary star almost overnight after her autobiographical essay

I Am Fan Yuxu went viral on WeChat.

Beginning with a striking line,

my life is a hard-to-read book.

Destiny Bound Me Poorly

It narrates her rural youth and eventual employment by an Uber-rich,

Beijing businessman who hires her to take care of the child he shares with a mistress.

Six days a week, she leaves her own daughters behind and attends to the love child.

She started writing in her free time because she thought,

to live, you have to do something besides eating.

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Rebirth

A former reporter for a business weekly,

she left that magazine in 2014 after growing dissatisfied with conventional media.

Along with a couple of other editors,

she started a popular digital outlet whose name translates to Curiosity Daily,

that covered subjects like the Shanghai Pride Parade,

a Texan who moved into a dumpster for a year to explore sustainable living,

and the work of the Japanese auteur, Hirokazu Koreeda,

who once commented that creators should keep influence of the state at bay.

After the authorities suspended the outlet twice

for illegally building a news gathering and editing team,

the outfit dissolved in 2019.

Young persisted, following that project with a digital magazine called

Shia Niao or Little Birds, in which she published literary writing on subjects

that could no longer be explored in journalism.

Literature is our last refuge, Young told me.

In stories, people can communicate with one another.

Zhang Jieping, a journalist turned media entrepreneur and founder of the fellowship

Zai Chang, or on the scene, told me.

Their joys and sadness become relatable.

With today's news outlets, it's increasingly hard to achieve that.

As journalism institutions collapsed,

Zhang built Zai Chang to create a community and a ladder for aspiring journalists

to learn to tell such stories.

Editors like Young and Zhang want to correct that dearth of connection

by normalizing what Young called everyday messiness,

topics that the state considers counterproductive,

like disappearing traditional villages,

and the rising diagnosis of anxiety in the aftermath of disasters.

In Xi's China, though, publishing this work means courting unwanted attention.

During Shanghai's COVID lockdown,

Shia Niao published a special edition that collected haunting real stories,

including one about a young woman who evaded the rules to cross the city

to see her critically ill father.

Soon, Young was treated to tea by her local police.

Apparently swamped with tea appointments,

they asked her to remove the entire issue from the publication's mobile app.

She complied.

Without public distribution channels,

the special issue of Shia Niao lives as a PDF passed around among friends.

I have no idea how far it has reached, Young said.

There is something Sami's dot like to it, she said,

referring to the underground literature of 20th century Eastern Europe,

which circulated hand to hand.

In today's China, people create knowing the publishing is transient in nature.

Online articles can be taken down, books can be removed from the shelves,

writers can be blacklisted, bloggers can be disappeared.

One of the websites Shaoyin frequented, Poetry Life,

announced its shutdown on July 13th.

Poetry Life was born on the internet where it will dissipate.

The announcement read, it has been a mirage as well as our real land.

Yet many people go on writing in whatever capacity they can manage.

If the goal was to escape censorship, then we wouldn't be in this business, Young said.

They focus instead on creating a new possibility of public writing,

a vibrant breathing thing.

Here people are quick to forget, she said.

Sometimes they are forced to forget.

Other times new events overwrite the old before you know it.

It's like we live in an environment where people can't keep going if they don't learn to forget.

She paused to search for the precise words.

Literature is a good way to help people remember things.

Earlier this year, Zhang Wenmin and Hao were introduced by mutual friends

and met while they were each traveling.

Pondering her future, Zhang was both curious about and daunted by the examples of Hao

and other expatriate writers.

At a dinner with other Chinese writers, she spoke almost to herself.

How does a writer come to accept their status of exile?

In Melbourne, Hao is curious about his new surroundings.

Every experience presents opportunities for discoveries.

After contracting COVID and speaking with a public health official on the phone,

he was prescribed free medication.

Isn't this socialism? he wondered.

He went to observe a local election and chatted with people outside.

It's eye-opening, he says.

There is a party representing sex workers.

There is also a party for animal rights.

Hao is eager to master his new language, but is baffled by the choice of other exiled writers,

like the late Milan Kundera, to abandon their mother tongues in their work.

The act of writing, of making sense of one's experiences,

is so bound up in the language a person speaks,

along with all the little intricacies and inexplicable imagery within it.

To abandon it is almost like abandoning yourself.

He told me the story behind his favorite Chinese phrase,

Huangliang yi mong, or a fleeting dream as the golden millet cooks.

It refers to a story in which a young man falls asleep at an inn as the innkeeper

steams a pot of millet.

In his dream, the man marries a beautiful woman from a wealthy family,

rises to power in court politics, and narrowly escapes death after jealous rivals set him up.

After a lifetime, he wakes up.

The millet isn't done yet.

Which is the reality?

Eventless destitution or surreal splendor punctuated by viciousness?

How has readily joined a growing community of Chinese activists and writers in exile?

As the environment grows dire, he wrote to Zhang on Signal,

the encrypted messaging service.

We are a generation that's destined to be uprooted and scattered,

to drift through the world.

Privately, though, how is still processing the past?

Since self-exiling, how has experienced a measure of survivor's guilt?

His tally of arrested friends has risen to 41.

Last fall, when thousands of citizens protested the arbitrary COVID policies,

how had an intense feeling of missing out?

One day, perhaps, he thought, he would decide to return home as abruptly as he left.

In his early essays, how depicted himself to be a somewhat feeble man?

When he encountered physical conflict in the streets,

he tended to avert his eyes and avoid getting involved.

It's different, however, when the conflict is intellectual.

He finds himself oscillating between wary caution and reckless bravery.

He cannot stomach the government's authoritarian grip on China's literary culture and public life.

Who gives you the right to rule this way?

He wondered aloud.

Last year, how began writing fiction again at the age of 48?

He is in the middle of a new novel he is calling Homeless Dog.

The working title is inspired by a friend's experience during a tea session

when a Guobao officer scolded him.

Don't fancy yourself to be some kind of big figure.

To me, you are merely a homeless dog.

Seen in this light, the title poses a question.

Who gets to define writers like Hal?

I had to make many difficult choices, but I'm proud of the life I lived, how says.

In May, he was touring for his Wuhan book in Norway.

In drizzling rain, on a train passing through unfamiliar cities, he dozed.

A dream came.

He was 18 again and about to take the college entrance exam.

He was feeling unprepared.

He woke up feeling jittery.

Then remembered that the old days are long gone.

He is far from home.

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but it is more curable when detected early.

If you smoke, you may still be at risk, but early detection could save your life.

Talk to your doctor and learn more at SavedByTheScan.org.

Brought to you by the American Lung Association and the Ad Council.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.