When writing about family members, Chen Xiaowen says one of the major challenges is how to turn individual experiences into literature. "I was told that a writer should love all the characters under their pens. But when writing about people who harmed my family members, I found it hard to reconcile myself with them. After repeated revisions, I began to view everything that had happened from an outsider's perspective.
"After finishing the book, I felt that I had liberated myself and shed the burdens I carried, as I came to realize that what had happened in the past belonged to my family members. Their own experiences, bitter or sweet, shaped them and made them the people I knew," she adds.
Zhang says Chen Xiaowen has done well in telling the story with restraint.
"The best thing about the book is that the author respected reality and did not indulge in emotional narratives. She must have experienced enormous emotional turmoil when confronting stories about her family, but she showed understanding and sympathy, even toward those who had caused harm, and wrote with restraint."
Zhang also says that ordinary people's lives are certainly worth writing about. The point is to discover the parts that can be omitted, the parts that have emotional depth, and to turn them from individual experiences into collective feelings.
"Life has endowed you with sweet grapes, sour grapes, plain and even bitter grapes. But writers can combine them and brew them into the nectar of art and literature," says Zhang.
Zhang's view echoes Chen Xiaowen's own understanding of why family stories matter. "The history of a country is like a framework, and the fate of each of us and each family is like the flesh and blood within that framework. It takes one vivid person after another and vivid family stories to complete the narrative of the entire era," she says.
