文学有最浪漫的构想，亦有最残酷的现实(3)

By the time, I had already decided to make writing as my lifelong career. However, that innocent me didn’t recognize the necessity of seeing the world. This understanding came from what I thought as the literary tradition. I naively believed that a writer only needs to labor the field within her vision. The most impressive modern Chinese literature stuck in the countryside and the writers’ hometown. A Chinese writer was like a peasant, using his imagination to handle a small piece of land: Shen Congwen worked on Xiangxi, Lu Yao worked on Shaanxi’s yellow earth, and Mo Yan worked on Shandong.
I use to believe I belonged to their kind, spending my whole life to work on my little Hubei city. Later on, I was proved wrong. I belonged to a generation of rapid urbanization. Our “hometowns” were to be demolished. I also belonged to a generation under the “One Child Policy.” Having only one child to care about, our parents had high expectations towards us. They hoped that I could move to somewhere more prosperous.
Therefore I was forced to run away from my hometown: first the little city, then Hubei province. To escape became a choice when I grew older. I lived in Japan for a year with no purpose in mind.