Ten loves

Author: Zhang Yuoran
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-07-01
Features: This book is a collection of ten stories about love, hence the title "Ten Loves." I didn’t use any of the individual story titles for the collection because they are all equally important to me in my heart. Regarding these ten short stories themselves, I think they will be quite different from my previous short fiction. They will be more intense—there will be sounds of bleeding, tearing, breaking, and crushing. This is raw love, so powerful that it’s like an uncontrollable, jumping pulse you can never hold. It’s hard to console or ease. But I love to watch its posture, just as I’ve always loved the mermaid jumping into the sea and instantly turning into foam, then bursting and vanishing without a trace. I don’t think this is force, I believe it’s an explosion of love, a transformation of love’s energy. There is so much killing and death, and they all seem to arrive suddenly, like a typhoon or an earthquake. Yet the tranquility that follows makes the remaining people soft, lazy, and drowsy, so they forget their grief and mourning, forgetting that there might still be dangers and disasters slowly approaching like waves. Their expressions become vacant as their lives nearly stop, as if they’ve been scared into a stupor by death. Meanwhile, the dead are on their way, carrying the weight of the seconds like a ticking clock, moving forward and vanishing in an instant. Don’t worry—they might just be heading to other stories, where they’ll live it up with all the noise and chaos. So, dear readers, please don’t worry. Those deaths and killings might just be because I quietly opened a door for them, allowing them to enter other times, spaces, and stories…