She Grew Up in an Old Neighborhood, Seeing Life Through the Eyes Her Father Gave Her | 100 People With Ideas

When asked what role her father played in how she came to understand the world, Wang Zhanhei answered without hesitation: "a fellow traveler." "When he was around, he'd take me along. When I was around, he'd turn up too."

Wang Zhanhei is 27 this year and has been writing for about a decade. In high school she had a project she called "Street Heroes," about the ordinary people of her neighborhood. It was a bit like the "108 heroes of Water Margin," she says: she counted off the neighborhood characters as she saw them, one by one, then wrote them up one by one.

The project was shelved in college and surfaced again in graduate school. She began writing, a piece at a time, about the people of the old-style neighborhoods of the 1980s and 90s — a compound gatekeeper, vegetable farmers, a man who sold firecrackers, fruit vendors, a couple running a breakfast stall. Each time she finished one she posted it to Douban. A few people read them, no more.

In March and October this year she published two collections of short stories, Empty Cannons (《空响炮》) and Street Jianghu (《街道江湖》). Together the characters in the two books add up to the shape of an old neighborhood; they wander freely from one story into another, and none of them matches a real person in a real place. "It isn't something absolutely real. It's a relative, abstract kind of real," she says. Readers can more or less find in them the shadow of someone they know — but only the shadow. None of them has a fixed source.

But this is the environment she grew up in: a child of an old-style neighborhood who used her own powers of observation, and her fondness for the way neighbors in such places dealt with one another, to build an ordinary "jianghu world" on the page. Before she came to Shanghai for college she lived in an old workers' neighborhood in Jiaxing, Zhejiang. Now, in Shanghai, she rents a room in the same kind of place. She keeps up with her neighbors as she did in childhood: the adults greet her warmly, telling her she's "put on weight lately" or "got thinner lately," and on her way home from work she runs into the woman who feeds the strays and talks with her about the neighborhood cats. Shanghai's neighborhoods are a little more private and have more short-term tenants, but that hasn't stopped Wang Zhanhei from staying close to everyone. As she sees it, "no matter how old a child grows up to be, he's still a treasure to the adults in the neighborhood — still a treasure at 30. After enough time, the kid next door is as good as your own kid. That's the feeling."

This way of dealing with neighbors came from her father. Wang Zhanhei's father was laid off early and later worked as a security guard. That is also the usual arc of the lives in her fiction: as the old factories shed workers in large numbers, the second half of many careers settled into a single pattern — "men become guards, women become cashiers" — laid-off men into security work, laid-off women behind supermarket tills. None of them carried much resentment about it. The neighborhood's card-and-mahjong rooms were always full of the cigarette-and-mahjong breed of old man, each content, in his own small world, with the modest pleasures of the day.

That may describe her father too. Wang Zhanhei knows society tends to judge such men as "irresponsible, unambitious, unable to make money, useless" — "to their parents or their wives it looks like they're doing nothing, because they're not out there earning properly." They are the people this society considers short on drive. But to Wang Zhanhei, his daughter, her father "took someone with no social experience at all and dropped her straight into a very relaxed, natural little working-class world." That attitude carries on into her fiction, and it is one side of how she looks at society.

"Old Wang" is, you could say, the "absolute protagonist" of Wang Zhanhei's fiction. As she puts it herself: "I may just be a pen in Old Wang's hand, writing down a world he and I lived in together."

In The Story of Cigarettes (《香烟的故事》), the afterword to Street Jianghu, Wang Zhanhei wrote about the last stretch of her father's life, and explained that the character in Mahjong, Winning Hand (《麻将，胡了》) was drawn from the stories of her father, Old Wang, and Uncle Tin Shack. In April last year her father went into hospital with an intestinal obstruction. He stayed six months and never went home again. Patients with an intestinal obstruction can't eat much, and in that period Wang Zhanhei "wrote The Story of Mahjong (《麻将的故事》) with her hair standing on end." At the end of the story "Duidui Wu," the character modeled on her father, dies. "If that last scene had really happened, I couldn't have borne to let him starve. The most miserable thing about a stomach illness is not being able to eat freely, as much as you want, and for Old Wang, who loved his food rich and heavy with oil and soy sauce, that was hard." So in Mahjong, Winning Hand, Duidui Wu's friend "Ge Siping brings all three tables from the mahjong room, each of them carrying several plastic bags, all of them full of food." Before he goes, Duidui Wu eats his fill, his belly aching, retching as he eats. Last October, Wang Zhanhei's father died too. "In the days after Old Wang went, whenever I ate a bit of meat I'd think of him not being able to, and it broke my heart."

When asked what role her father played in how she came to understand the world, Wang Zhanhei answered without hesitation: "a fellow traveler." "When he was around, he'd take me along. When I was around, he'd turn up too." Old Wang appears often in her fiction. He is the neighborhood's "dog commander," the one who walks with the narrator, "I," after dinner and goes up onto the bridge with her to catch the breeze. He is also the one who, after a vegetable farmer in the compound sinks into despair and dies over 350 yuan stolen from him, answers the narrator's question — "Are you sad?" — with: "It's fate. Nothing to be sad about. The old vegetable man couldn't get past it himself; there was nothing we could do."

Her father's attitude toward the world worked on Wang Zhanhei slowly, and she knows it. In a Douban journal entry she wrote: "I'm nothing but a pen in my dad's hand. He gave me a pair of eyes to look at the world around me." Writing calls up decades of experience and memory, even if she isn't always conscious of that as she puts the words down.

What comes through in her fiction is care for the people she writes about — care for ordinary people bound up with her own life. Even where she can do nothing about their fates, she keeps her eye on them and her attachment to them. Wang Zhanhei puts this whole "street" series down to an urge to make something: in secondary school she had already begun, deliberately, to record the alleys being torn down and the street stalls around her. It looks like an inborn interest in this kind of people and things, but at bottom it comes from how a child, under her father's influence, learned to look at the world and understand it. Wang Zhanhei has said that in her writing experience comes first and knowledge second; in the afterword to Street Jianghu she quotes Graham Greene: "The first twenty years of a writer's life cover the whole of experience; the years that remain are spent in observation."

Judging by the fiction published so far, its content really is the sum of her life to date. She is an observer and a thinker, not an interviewer. Much of her writing is descriptive, plain in its words, and rarely reaches for a complicated sentence. Her titles run to "The Story of So-and-So," like a storyteller with an even voice. Some middle-aged and older readers take her stories the way they'd read the popular story magazine Gushihui (《故事会》), and that doesn't annoy her. Many of the people who come to her reading groups are retired uncles from the neighborhood, and like her other older readers they feel these "really are our stories." They're pleased that someone has written their lives down.

Wang Zhanhei grew up in this environment, watching how her father connected with that small neighborhood world and how those connections were made. It is 20 years of experience, so writing it costs her no effort and never sits awkwardly. Judged on the fiction alone, it's hard to guess it came from a woman in her twenties. Zhang Xinying, a professor in the Chinese department at Fudan University, calls her narration "detailed, calm, restrained": "her narration belongs inside this kind of neighborhood life — not outside it, and still less above it." Wang Zhanhei writes at eye level, entering her fiction as a participant. She doesn't push her characters' plots along; they have their own fates. She is a bystander, a member of an old workers' neighborhood. "I want to give it a real, detailed, eye-level rendering — roughly what Shen Congwen told Wang Zengqi: write close up against it."

In September this year Wang Zhanhei won the first Blancpain-Imaginist Literary Prize. The judges' citation for the winning book, Empty Cannons, called her "a young writer born in the 1990s working to join and continue the realist tradition that runs from Chekhov and Shen Congwen," writing "the present condition of ordinary city people, without lamenting their misfortune or raging at their failure to fight."

That refusal to "rage at their failure to fight" also comes from the way her father raised her. Young writers' early work is often heavily autobiographical, and a lot of what people write in their twenties is youthful sorrow. Set against Wang Zhanhei's own life, her past experience is the neighborhood and the neighbors — what her father gave her. At the end of her talk for Yixi she choked up over him: "I don't think my dad taught me anything all that impressive. Just being honest with people, staying cheerful, how to cook, and a few small skills for living — like how to wipe dog shit off your shoe perfectly in a patch of grass. And he gave me a pair of eyes, so I could look at the people and things in the neighborhood."

The love for Old Wang that surfaces now and then in her fiction looks like a given, but it runs deep. The proof is that she takes the world as her father saw it and makes it the impulse behind her writing. There is always friction of one kind or another between young people and their parents, and when young people bring up "the influence of the family you're born into," it is often a wound they can't get past. None of that is in Wang Zhanhei. She understands her father, and she accepts the mark he left on her. That may also be why she writes uncles and aunties so well, and why there is always something slack about her young people.

Meifen's Little World (《美芬的小世界》) is about a mother waiting for her daughter to marry; Meifen is thinking about what to wear to the wedding before the daughter even has a boyfriend. Writing it was also an attempt to understand a person like Meifen. This year Wang Zhanhei wrote another story about the tension between two generations, this time from the daughter's side. For young people it is a fate there's no escaping: "The harder you try not to be like him, the more like him you get, and it's very hard to scrub off the mark left on you by the older generation, by that old way of neighborhood life." But writing someone her own age was heavy going. She set it aside for a while, and when she picked it up again the mood of the story still struck her as bleak. Writing old people, she says, puts her in high spirits; writing this young woman — working in the city, her mother gone, still living in her mother's shadow — left her slack and low. She couldn't see "why writing someone almost 30 produced such a wretched state of life." Writing from a young person's point of view was an experiment on the page, not something she had felt herself: "I don't seem to have that big a generational problem personally."

Her fiction spends its energy on understanding and honoring the older generation and their way of living, which is also how she faces and sorts out herself. Perhaps only by settling your own past can you go further.

The title page of Street Jianghu reads "For King Jiatao" — her father's WeChat name. "I asked for only one thing in my new book: I said I wanted my dad to have his moment in the spotlight, so I insisted on that line going on the title page."

From the start her father called Wang Zhanhei "Little Bro," because "we're buddies, so that's what we call each other." He raised her as an equal, more like a friend than a father. He cared about the neighbors and got on well with everyone in the compound. From an early age he taught her to be polite, to greet every adult she saw: "Saying hello is such an easy thing — move your two lips a bit and it's done." He took her wandering and loitering around the neighborhood, talking to neighbors, helping them out. Boys and girls alike, he thought, should be raised "loose, running wild": "If someone bullies you and you come home crying, I'll be the one who hits you. Someone hits you once, you hit back twice — that's how he taught it." Growing up free-range like that, Wang Zhanhei took on her father's "old urchin" way of looking at the world. Life wasn't well off, but the ordinary days were full of the pleasure of being around neighbors, workmates, friends and mahjong partners.

"The way he raised me was nothing like an ordinary parent's — study hard, get into a good university, find a good job, make a lot of money, get out of this place, hold your head high, that sort of thing. Raised that way, you naturally come to feel dissatisfied with where you live, that you should leave as fast as you can and climb. But my dad was that old-urchin type. He felt I was comfortable in this environment, that I could have good relations with the neighbors. He'd think of it as his circle of friends and want to introduce me to it — that was the situation, basically. So under that kind of upbringing, I never really had the rebellious streak, the teenage rebellion."

That is why Wang Zhanhei came out of this handing-down between generations with such a contented outlook. Her father loved his own life, and he was satisfied with the way he'd raised her. He passed his attitude toward life on to his daughter; the Old Wang in her fiction, always loud, comes across as full of energy and cheer. And in an age when young people are generally worn down, Wang Zhanhei describes herself as "a young person with a fair amount of spirit." While he was alive her father mostly cared about her food, clothes and daily routine and asked about little else — as long as she was "healthy, in bed on time, and eating breakfast at a regular hour," that was enough. Even after she told her parents she'd written fiction, Old Wang would only glance at a title, without reading the whole thing, and say something like: "The Story of Laifu (《来福的故事》) — oh, I know Laifu. Good, good, you wrote Laifu well!"

The name "Old Wang" in her stories comes from Wang Shuo, whose books she read a lot of in high school. She remembers Wang Shuo using it in Letters to My Daughter (《致女儿书》): "There's an Old Wang in Beijing, and there's an Old Wang in our house too. It's just that one has a bit more education and the other a bit less." Raised in a place with no sense of rank, Wang Zhanhei became the writer she is now — one who draws everyday life and human feeling with her feet on the ground.

In fact Wang Zhanhei finds it awkward that people now call her a "writer." In the early days, when she posted her stories on Douban, nobody read them. After the books and the prize this year she became, in everyone's mouth, a "post-90s writer." The trouble is that she isn't writing at the moment, and the lag between the label and the fact makes her uncomfortable.

After finishing her master's in Fudan's Chinese department, Wang Zhanhei took a job teaching Chinese at an international school in Shanghai. Since September she has been homeroom teacher for a graduating class. She has to be at school by 7:30 every morning, and in the evening there are lessons to prepare and parents to answer on WeChat. "You could say a nightlife isn't part of this job." Over the summer she could still write; once the new term started and she took the graduating class, the work forced her to stop.

She became a teacher simply because she couldn't picture a life with five days of annual leave, and teachers get the winter and summer holidays. She had no impressive résumé when she went looking for work either, so she fell back on society's stereotype of Chinese-department graduates and became a Chinese teacher. When she interviewed for a post at a public school, she was knocked out at the written exam, which resembled the Chinese paper of the gaokao.

She ended up at an international school, which suits her character much better. Her school follows the IB curriculum. IB — the International Baccalaureate Organization, IBO — puts great weight on what a teacher's own personality brings to a class, and teachers set their students' reading lists themselves. Wang Zhanhei says she "teaches according to her own ideas." She wants to teach the way her father raised her: "no hierarchy at all, completely equal, the way friends are" — "only that way can you really attend to everyone's individuality." At an international school that idea can be put into practice better.

Outside work she is still a participant in the Dinghai Bridge Mutual Aid Society. It is a self-organized group based in a workers' neighborhood, where those taking part build interaction, mutual aid and cooperation among neighbors and like-minded others, on a principle of reciprocity, through shared study, discussions, lectures, walks and other activities.

"For me, also a young person in the city, it's about looking for some spiritual support, and common ground." The people who take part gather to talk over possibilities. In city life work takes up most of a person's energy, and life gets divided simply into work and family — but beyond that, what other connection can an independent individual have with society? That is what Dinghai Bridge is trying to work out. They gather to occupy public space, sell decidedly unartistic things at art festivals, and publish their own small papers. Once someone puts an idea forward, everyone sets about making it happen.

After she won the literary prize, her friends from Dinghai Bridge threw her a celebration. They wandered from Longhua Temple all the way to the Xuhui riverside and finally found a large space under a bridge, where homeless people and stray dogs lived, and held the celebration there. Having found a usable space that big, they are now planning a "Free Person's Ball" there as well.

The media likes to run Wang Zhanhei the writer together with Wang Zhanhei the doer, but she sees them as two sides of her life. In an interview after the prize she said, "I absolutely refuse to harvest action as literary material." She doesn't go to Dinghai Bridge to gather material, or get to know the local residents as a way of looking for it. Now that she is working and renting a place far from Dinghai Bridge, she takes part much less often than she used to.

The world has stuck plenty of labels on her — writer, post-90s, Chinese teacher, social activist, fan of old uncles — but she thinks they're all stereotypes. At bottom, she believes, she is a young person who cares about urban space. "There are a lot of young people like me who care a great deal about cities, and not just about how a city is now — about what it used to be, how it changed step by step into this, and how the people there live. Some of them take photographs, some just look, and I happen to have chosen writing."

In the month or so after the prize, Wang Zhanhei gave a number of interviews. Then she went back to her own life. What makes her anxious now is being made to talk about writing when she isn't writing. "It makes me feel ashamed of myself, because I've stopped."

If she never writes anything again, she says, she won't be anxious about that either. She isn't the kind of person who thinks "I have to write, my life has no meaning without it." Even if the writing stops, she will go on caring about the city, about the street, about the relationship between people and space.

Cover image and banner photographed by QDaily; the tall cover image provided by Wang Zhanhei herself.