White clouds, thousands of miles, ten thousand miles

Author: Zhang Sheng
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-01-01
Features: This novel tells a tale of yesterday's legend but confronts the confusion of today's heart. In the search for love and self, it is like the blue sky and white clouds, always accompanying each other, leaving a melancholic yet stirring song of fate for the present and the past. The Great Revolution, the Northern Expedition, the split between the Kuomintang and the CCP, the multipolar confrontation, the Eight-Year War of Resistance, the Four-Year War of Liberation, the frequent movements of the 1950s, the Ten-Year Cultural Revolution, and the rectification of chaos in the late 1970s—this is the story of a French-studied student who returned to China in the late 1920s, who by chance witnessed these rapidly changing historical moments, witnessed the prosperity of old Shanghai, the tranquility of the Jiangnan towns, and the romance of the ancient capital of the Six Dynasties; as well as Wuhan, the hub of nine provinces shrouded in mist, Chongqing, and the exhausted and decadent rear area of the War of Resistance—He struggled and swayed in the waves of time, maneuvered with various forces, interacted with people from different cultural backgrounds, experienced love, family, and friendship, faced ignorance, brutality, persecution, betrayal, chaos, and absurdity. After a life of hardships, he failed to establish his own position, could not eliminate his sense of alienation from the surrounding world, and could not find a final spiritual anchor. This novel has a grand conception, shedding artificiality and intricacy, while questioning the soul and tempering the body, seriously asking what the meaning is of experiencing once in a lifetime, and what it means to live in China or even be reborn into this mortal world.