★Liang Xiaosheng shares over seventy years of creative inspiration and literary journey in this book.
This book, with its gentle writing style, depicts past acquaintances and experiences, fully displaying the myriad aspects of human life. It presents a broad and rich range of life experiences, analyzes the growth path of a generation of writers, and explores the sources of creative inspiration.

★A real and concrete Liang Xiaosheng lives in the very same world with us. In this book, he will share his true inner thoughts on many topics such as love and responsibility, family and education, presenting Liang Xiaosheng-style incisive questions and using the details of every day to break through the difficulties of life.

★Experience the beauty of life and guard the soft spots of human nature. The joys and sorrows that fate bestows are all necessary parts of life. May every reader find the true meaning of life and gain reflection and inspiration from the articles.

Although the world is full of distractions, direction lies always with love.

This book is a collection of Liang Xiaosheng's essays that gather the various aspects of life; it shows the joys and sorrows, happiness and anger of daily life, the unforgettable and resentful aspects of romantic love, the state and difficulties of close relationships between parents, schools, and children in family education, as well as the deep remembrance and mourning for past acquaintances.
The book derives thoughts from stories, reflecting the author's observations of all things in the world and expressing his feelings about the attitude towards life and the experiences of the many flavors of life.

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.

Chapter 1: Daily Life on Earth
The Little Ragged Girl 002
Me and the Romantic Youth 007
Random Thoughts on First Love 013
A Letter from a Strange Girl 020
Teacher Xie Tielü 028
The Glass-maker and His Son 042
The Gallery of Paintings 048

Chapter 2: There Is True Feelings
Love and Opportunity 058
Ambiguous Valentine's Day 065
Love Is Not Smiling at God 077
Why Love Is No Longer Moving 079
"The Bridges of Madison County": A Chinese Revelation of Sex 095

Chapter 3: Worldly Time Unfolds Slow
The Sounds of one Day 128
Over There 132
No Mother Will 144
Little Sesame Seed 149
Look at Those Fathers 156
Return the Pleasure of Observation to Children 161
On the Poetic Nature of Education 171

Chapter 4: Revelation of Life
Me and Our Republic 182
My Mission 184
Ordinary People 189
People Who Light the Candle of Society with Their Lives 196
The Glory of Forgotten- In Memory of a Medical Senior 198
Butterflies Fly Away 217
The Beautiful Friends 221
The Hardest Thing to Pass On Is the Poetic Heart 226
Reflections on "Autumn Rain" 231

The Little Ragged Girl

The first time I saw her was on a day in late January, with a wind blowing at a force of level five or six. All trees on the site of the Yuan Dadu ruins opposite my home bowed their bare crowns, showing their submission to the severity of winter. Yet, around ten o'clock, the shopping mall called to inform that the fitter for the range hood was on his way to my house...
The day before, I had taken down the old range hood and discarded it outside the building entrance. It had served my kitchen for over a decade and was terribly greasy. I had long been fed up with it. Once it was removed, the grease around it was fully exposed. I had to clean it up before the fitter arrived. Detergents and degreasers seemed to be of little use. I thought of using a wet cloth rolled in sand to remove the dirt. As I was carrying a basin of sand I had found outside back to my place, I saw a girl of about eleven or twelve standing by the iron railing. The greasy range hood I had thrown away had been moved there by her. Moreover, half of it had already been dragged outside the railing from beneath; the other half was stuck due to a protruding part.
The girl was stamping her foot hard. She was dressed very thinly, with old and small clothes and trousers. On her feet were a pair of buckle-up cloth shoes meant for summer, with worn-out socks exposing parts of her feet. Her two shoulder-length braids were tied with different-colored hair ties. As soon as she saw me, she immediately stopped stamping, grasped a railing with both hands, placed her feet on the horizontal bar of the railing, and swung her body, as if she were playing there. A bar of the iron railing was missing, and Master Zhu from the guard room had blocked it with several strands of thick wire. For the girl, it was still easy to crawl in and out. Clearly, if I made her feel scared, she would quickly crawl out and run away. In order not to frighten her, I took the initiative to say, "Child, you won't be able to take it away, you know!" — If she, out of fear of me, hastily crawled out and scratched her clothes or even hurt herself somewhere, I would definitely feel uneasy inside.
But she said, "An uncle gave it to me." And she began to stamp her little foot again.
If there was any "uncle" who had given it to her, it could only have been me. And of course, I hadn't.
I said, "Is that so?"
She said, "Really."
I said, "You have to be careful..."
Before I could finish my sentence, she had already bent down, covering her ankle with one hand. The broken plastic was very sharp. I said, "Oh, you've been pricked, haven't you? Why on earth do you want such a dirty thing?" She said, "To sell it for money", in a very low voice. After speaking, she looked up at me, her eyes brimming with tears. Clearly, she was in pain. Then she looked down at her hand that had covered her ankle, and there was blood on the palm. I was holding a basin half - full of sand, and for a moment I stood there, stunned by my own feigned ignorance and the blood on her little hand. She said again, "I am the daughter of a poor person", in an even smaller voice. Her words took me so much by surprise that I opened my mouth but didn't know what to say next. And then the fitter sent by the shopping mall arrived, and I had no choice but to lead them home. While they were installing the new range hood, I found a band-aid and went to give it to the girl, only to see her squatting there, crying, and the greasy range hood was gone. I asked where it had gone.
She said it had been taken by two men on hand-pulled carts who collected scrap. She said one of them had jumped over the railing, and with a hand-to-hand pass, the range hood had become theirs without much trouble... I asked how much money it could be sold for. She said it was worth more than ten yuan, and she cried even more sorrowfully. I applied the band-aid to the wound on her ankle and asked again, "Who taught you to tell people that you are the daughter of a poor person?" She said, "No one taught me. I just am." I didn't believe that no one had taught her, but I didn't ask anything further. I took her to my doorstep and gave her several pieces of old clothes that I had sorted out not long ago. She said, "The daughter of a poor person thanks you, uncle." I was taken aback again and felt my face burning. I had some small change in my pocket and had intended to take it all out and give it to her. But although one hand had already gone into my pocket, it didn't come out. The girl's eyes were hopefully fixed on my hand and the pocket. I said, "No need to thank me, go ahead." As she slung the small cloth bag over her shoulder and went downstairs, I added, "Come back in a few days, and I'll have some books and magazines for you." It was only after hearing her footsteps disappear outside that I took my hand out of my pocket, only to find that I had unconsciously broken into a sweat. I really didn't understand what had come over me at that time...
In fact, I had long noticed the girl's "intrusion" into my living space. It was a kind of mysterious behavior. But it was merely mysterious, without any intention of offense, let alone any dangerous nature. It was nothing more than some old things that I had planned to give to Master Zhu to sell and had temporarily placed in the hallway outside the door, which would disappear every time I went out again. Neighbors on the left and right had all said that they had seen a young "female thief" stealing things. I thought it must have been the "daughter of a poor person"...