Liang Xiaosheng is an evergreen in Chinese literature. A pioneer of 'Educated Youth Literature', his works profoundly depict the educated
youth's pain, joy, quests, and dreams, honoring their resilience and erecting an indomitable spiritual monument for them.
—People's Daily (Overseas Edition)

Despite vast changes since the 1990s, Liang Xiaosheng's impassioned voice remains uniquely powerful — his works continue to offer readers genuine intellectual fulfillment, just as he does for his students as a devoted professor.
—Zhang Yiwu, Literary Critic

★Prose works by Liang Xiaosheng — One of contemporary Chinese literature's pivotal authors and Mao Dun Literature Prize winner. His writing blends writer's sensibility with scholar's rationality, offering warmth without sentimentality and strength without indifference.
★Chronicling the collective emotions of ordinary people, he resists nihilism through his pen, celebrating kindness through the stories of small individuals while upholding integrity in a turbulent world.
★The truth, goodness, and beauty in Liang's works spring from life itself — flesh-and-blood real, free from pretense or artifice.
★"Man is but a thinking reed." "Living Wisely" probes life, literature, society, and human existence, offering disillusioned and lost readers alternative perspectives.
★Resisting nihilism with his pen, Liang provides the perplexed with new ways to think.

"The life of a human is like flowing water: it may run dry, but never turn murky!"
Living Wisely is to love life even after seeing its truth.
The past is but a prologue to new chapters.

This collection classifies Liang's finest essays into four dimensions:
"Beauty in Measure", "The Roots of Kindness", "The Fatigue of Living" and "Detached Observations".
In pieces like "Literature and I", "Making Our Minds Wiser", and "On Good and Bad People", Liang extracts life principles from mundane details. His focus remains fixed on society's minor players. "Living Wisely" doesn't preach vulgar success — it cultivates independent, upright modern individuals.

Liang Xiaosheng (original name ​​Liang Shaosheng​​) is one of the representative symbols of contemporary Chinese culture and one of the representative contemporary Chinese literary figures. He is also one of the important contemporary Chinese realist writers. He is known as the “writer of the common people” because he is good at focusing on the ups and downs of ordinary people's lives in great times. His works are characterized by a strong sense of reality and a commoner's sentiment. Together with Wang Meng, Lu Yao, Mo Yan, Yu Hua, Tie Ning and others, he has become an important window for observing contemporary Chinese society and cultural trends.

Some readers consider Liang Xiaosheng as the “Chinese Balzac,” because he is committed to writing a “social encyclopedia” and portraying the destinies of people from all walks of life. His works are often used as important texts for studying and understanding Chinese social and cultural developments between the 1980s and 2020s. His work Chinese Peach and Plum is included in the collections of many overseas libraries. His work Father is selected as a textbook for advanced Chinese courses published by the University of Washington Press in the United States.

He has so far created more than ten million words of works, including essays, novels, miscellaneous discussions, and documentary literature. His representative work, The Story of "A Lifelong Journey​", won the 10th Mao Dun Literature Prize. This novel has a cumulative circulation of more than 2 million copies and are called the “fifty-year history of Chinese people's lives”. The TV drama adapted from it caused a nationwide viewing craze as soon as it was broadcast and set a new record for the prime-time viewership of CCTV (with a total audience scale of 371 million people). Disney purchased the overseas distribution rights of the drama in the first month of its production. His another long novel Snow City is selected into the “70 Classic Chinese Novels of New China's 70 Years”.

His works have been translated into English, French, Russian, Japanese, and Italian. The author was awarded as one of the “Top Ten Writers of the 2024 Hall of Fame Annual Humanities List”. In 2023, he was named as the “Cultural Figure of the Year” among the “2022 Annual Influential People” by China Newsweek. Since 1984, his name has been listed in the "World Who's Who" in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia.

I. Beauty in Measure
Amber Is Beautiful / 002
Literature and I / 008
Tang and Song Poetry and I / 041
Why I Love Reading / 044
On Reading / 046
On Watching Movies / 057
"Cloning" Myself / 063
The Feeling of Being Watched / 065

II. The Roots of Kindness
The Lost Pomelo / 070
Impression of Gao Hong / 072
Impression of Auntie Wang / 079
The Old Woman / 089
Unblemished Reputation / 091
Sister Yushen's Stocks / 096
Child · Donkey · Water / 104
Passengers and the Illegal Cab Driver / 111
Why Kindness, Why Sensitivity / 117
Making Our Minds Wiser / 120

III. The Fatigue of Living
The Monkey / 124
Root of the Mountain / 128
Two Kinds of People / 134
On Good and Bad People / 142
Sketches and Quick Drawings / 146
On the Westbound Train / 154
Memories of Grain Coupons / 162
On Selecting Model Workers / 169
Thoughts on National Heritage / 175

IV. Detached Observations
On Nobility and Baseness / 182
On Wealth and Poverty / 187
On Democracy / 196
The Aesthetics of Power / 203
Taxation as Society's Balance / 208
On Universities / 212

I certainly don’t regard "Dream of the Red Chamber" as a "slice-of-life" novel. In fact, its plotting and character destinies are meticulously crafted. Yet it also brims with minutiae of daily life and nuanced emotional shifts — a precision requiring rare confidence.
"Dream of the Red Chamber" is a literary swan specimen assembled feather by feather. Its creation exemplifies "slow craftsmanship". I deeply admire Cao Xueqin's perseverance through solitude and illness. What steadfast loneliness he endured! A confident master of detail, Cao teaches us: depicting life meticulously, once essential to fiction, remains timeless...
I adore "The Travels of Lao Can:A Chinese Odyssey" for surpassing "Strange Tales from the Last Two Decades", "The Scholars", and "Exposure of Officialdom" in prose and structure, plus its poignant natural scenery descriptions.