Dong Xi has always favored absurd and exaggerated characters and plots to reflect reality. “Don’t Look Back” may be another metaphor: each of us has been slapped countless times by life.
— Reader Tren

He reminds me of Yu Hua.
— Reader Sisi

This is Dong Xi’s signature style: dark humor laced with irony and a profound sense of weight.
— Reader

In the currents of history, individuals continually endure the slaps dealt by fate—loud, piercing, and irreparable. The line in the appendix perfectly captures the literary significance of this novel: “Life is not the days we’ve lived, but the days we remember.” (Gabriel García Márquez, “Living to Tell the Tale”)
— Reader Youzi’s Youyoupi

★ Rights sold: Korean, Vietnamese and Swedish!
★ A classic debut work by the renowned writer Dong Xi, shortlisted for the 5th Mao Dun Literature Prize. Adapted into a 20-episode TV series and a film titled “My Sister’s Dictionary”, the film earned its lead actress a nomination for Best Actress at the 24th Golden Rooster Awards of China.

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Back then, I felt that Kim Dae-in was like a raised hand about to strike—while we were the faces waiting for his slap. Our faces were ready, but the slap never came. He kept us living in constant fear, as if we were trapped in a sea of fire and water.

From this moment on, I walk backward, using the back of my head as my eyes. The trees that symbolize time, along with the tangled weeds beneath them, rush one by one into the back of my head, brush past my shoulders, and finally vanish beneath my eyelids.

The story begins in the summer of 1976, when Niu Hongmei’s father suddenly disappears. To provide for the family, her mother, He Bixue, remarries Jin Dayin. Left to shoulder the family’s burdens on her own, the youthful and beautiful Niu Hongmei clings to her two younger brothers under a sky stripped of their father’s love.

Niu Hongmei, with her striking beauty and precociousness, becomes an easy target for abuse and rape.
One of her younger brothers descends into delinquency, seeking revenge on the stepfather who “snatched” their mother away—and later dies silently while searching for their missing father.
The other brother, Niu Cuibai, attends an art school to study painting. In order to survive, he helps his sister make a desperate choice: she willingly sinks into moral degradation and marries Jin Dayin, the now-wealthy stepfather and gold mine owner, with the intention of bearing him a child and carrying on the family line.

Over the course of more than a decade, Niu Hongmei has played every role a woman can play—girl, elder sister, lover, wife, mother and mistress(the other woman).

The novel traces the fate of a family after the “death of the father”, while subtly using this as a metaphor for the confusion, disorientation, and eventual growth that follow the disappearance of a “spiritual father”.

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.