Reading the writing on the wall

I remember Tie Ning (novelist and chairwoman of China Writers Association) telling the audience a story during the first East Asian literature forum in South Korea in 2008, when she said she once saw a sentence written in chalk on a wall in a small mountainous village. It read: "The sun rises and the sun sets. When will I become better?"

The sentence made me think about who might have written it. Was it a girl or a boy? Could it also be an old man? What was he thinking about when he wrote that sentence?

There is a longing for the future in the sentence, but at the same time it also contains a sense of powerlessness and a faint sorrow, reflective of reality.