The City as the Protagonist

Abstract

This essay explains why Xu Zechen, a writer who lived for eighteen years in the countryside, decided to take the city as the protagonist of his fiction. He does not have the confidence to effectively present the countryside in the form of fiction because he was not born in the countryside. No matter how hard he tries, he can never follow the tradition created by the Chinese writers born in the 1950s, who excel at writing about the countryside. Although urban literature has always been marginalized in contemporary Chinese literature, Xu would still painstakingly make a way of his own to write about Beijing, the city he is living in. After writing several novels on Beijing, the city has become the standpoint from which he views the world.