Physical disability, emotional imperfection. Through their isolation from the outside world and the tender care of the family of three, they have created a realm without words yet filled with love.
—Lin Jinlan, renowned writer

The “lack of language” among the deaf, mute, and blind evokes sympathy; yet the “lack of language” between them and healthy people who are neither deaf nor mute nor blind sends a shiver down the spine. This is a Kafkaesque work rich in multilayered symbolic meanings.
—Yan Jiayan, professor at Peking University and renowned critic

Dong Xi is a sharp, incisive person—a writer brimming with compassion. His novels always set out from the subtle, perplexing issues at the heart of human nature and society, using narratives that are both modern in style and deeply attuned to the spirit of our times to vividly capture the laughter and tears of an era.
—Xie Youshun, professor in the Department of Chinese at Sun Yat-sen University

★ Rights have been sold for Vietnamese, Korean, French and Burmese!
★ Among these novellas, “The Life Without Words” won the First Lu Xun Literary Prize in China for Novellas! The film adaptation of this work went on to win the Award for Outstanding Artistic Contribution at the 15th Tokyo International Film Festival.
★ While Kafka depicted the transformation of human beings, Dongxi portrays the incompleteness and fragility of humanity. This collection of realist works confronts life head-on, featuring stories such as “The Life Without Words”, “Help”, “Don’t Ask Me” and “The Gaze Grows Longer and Longer”.

“The Life Without Words”
The father is blind, the son is deaf, and the daughter-in-law is mute—three “abnormal” people who form a family that “cannot see, cannot hear, and cannot speak.” Wang Laobing runs a photography studio with his ten-year-old only son, Wang Jiakuan. In a chance incident, Wang Jiakuan suddenly becomes deaf. Wang Laobing pours all his savings into treating his son’s hearing, but his condition shows no sign of improvement. At the same time, Laobing falls in love with Liu Guiying, a widow from the same street. He goes to great lengths to win her favor and marry her, but Wang Jiakuan refuses to accept her. Over the decade of his growth, Wang Jiakuan’s inner world remains forever frozen in the childhood he knew at the age of ten...

“Help”
By chance, Sun Chang is pushed to his home window to negotiate with a woman, Mai Kekuo, who is about to jump from the building. In place of Zheng Shiyou, Sun agrees to marry Mai Kekuo—but unexpectedly, Zheng Shiyou vanishes without a trace. Mai Kekuo has become addicted to seeking death. Sun Chang and his wife, Xiaoling, try to find all kinds of reasons for Mai Kekuo to stay alive, but she lives only for love and demands marriage from Sun Chang. To keep their promise to save her life, Sun Chang and Xiaoling pay the price of a broken family...

“Don’t Ask Me”
Wei Guo’s life has always been smooth sailing; at just twenty-eight, he was promoted to associate professor in the physics department ahead of schedule. One weekend, several colleagues who had failed to get the same promotion got him drunk and, at their instigation, forced a kiss on Feng Chen, the class beauty. As a result, Wei Guo resigned in disgrace. On a train journey from Xi’an to Beihai, Wei Guo meets Gu Nandan. The two hit it off immediately, but by a twist of fate, Wei Guo loses his suitcase containing all his belongings—and what’s even more devastating is that all his identity documents are lost as well. As a result, he cannot take any exams or look for a job. Later, with Gu Nandan’s help, Wei Guo temporarily escapes his immediate financial difficulties, but he soon finds himself in a new predicament: no one believes who he really is...

“The Gaze Lengthens Further and Further”
In a remote mountain village where people believe that “city dwellers have only four toes,” there lives a hardworking woman named Liu Jing. Her husband, Ma Nanfang, is a drunken, lazy, unfaithful, and violent rogue. In this impoverished family, where people think that “even if a wound festers, flesh can still grow back, but money once spent can never be recovered,” the entire burden of life rests on Liu Jing’s shoulders. For her, marriage is no different from a long, drawn-out torture. She once resolved to divorce, but dissuasion based on the rule that “a couple must live apart for two years before they can get divorced” compels her to endure in silence. During this time, her son, Ma Yiding, is tricked and sold away by his own aunt. In her relentless search for her abducted son, Liu Jing’s gaze stretches farther and farther, granting her a kind of “superpower” of distant vision, allowing her to see her son... But what exactly is the nature of Liu Jing’s gaze and longing—a hopeless vigil and yearning?

Tian Dailin (pen name: Dongxi)

One of China’s most influential contemporary writers, currently serving as Chairman of the Guangxi Federation of Literary and Art Circles, Chairman of the Guangxi Writers Association, and Professor at Guangxi University for Nationalities.

His major works include the novels Echo, Loud Slaps in the Faces, Regret Record, and Fate Rewritten, as well as the novella The Life Without Words. Several of his works have been adapted into films and television series, and some have been translated into English, French, Swedish, Russian, Korean, Vietnamese, German, Czech, Danish, Japanese, Italian, and Greek, and published or released in these languages.

The novella The Life Without Words won the First Lu Xun Literary Prize for Novellas. The film Heavenly Lovers, adapted from this novella, received the “Best Artistic Contribution Award” at the 15th Tokyo International Film Festival. His novel Regret Record was awarded both the “2005 Novelist of the Year” prize at the 4th Chinese-Language Literature and Media Awards and the “2005 Best Book of the Year” award from The Beijing News. His novel Loud Slaps in the Faces was adapted into the film “My Sister’s Dictionary” and a 20-episode TV series. His novel Echo won both the Lu Xun Literary Prize and the Shi Nai’an Literary Prize in 2022, and the Mao Dun Literary Prize in 2023; it has also been adapted into a web series of the same name by the renowned director Feng Xiaogang.

Excerpt:

Zhu Ling felt that to Wang Jiakuan, the radio was nothing more than a square box hanging around his neck—a box he could feel the weight of but not the sound it produced. Zhu Ling snatched the radio back once again, held it to his ear, and then slowly turned the volume down. Suddenly, the whole world grew quiet and peaceful. Wang Jiakuan looked delighted. He kept twisting the buttons on Zhu Ling’s chest with his hands and said, “You turn on my radio; I’ll turn on yours.”
—From “The Life Without Words”