Haikou Diary

Author: Pan Jun
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2000-06-01
Features: "Haikou Diary" is, for me, essentially a self-assessment of my abilities. I believe I can tell the public a beautiful story. I dissipate the heaviness of life in those leisurely words, reaching the inner self of another "me" through a diary format. I like the man in the novel; his life, in a sense, can be seen as a dreamlike wandering in my mind. Here is an excerpt:
I don’t like Guangzhou this city. It gives me a strange, inexplicable feeling. For example, I often see faces of Malay descent on the streets, making me wonder if I’m in Ho Chi Minh City. The so-called good weather in Guangzhou is just not raining, and you can only feel the temperature without seeing the sun. All the shadows on the ground are bizarre, making it hard to determine direction. Then there’s the language barrier—I don’t understand Cantonese. Talking to someone who speaks Cantonese is very difficult; I can only guess the meaning from their mouth movements, and my judgments are mostly wrong. So, Guangzhou is a city that’s hard to judge. I don’t want to stay there for a short time. The only thing I need to do in Guangzhou is meet a friend. He is the head of a literary journal, and we’ve only spoken on the phone, so we’re not really acquainted. Later, I went to the magazine’s office. I said who I was looking for, and immediately a short, handsome, plump man stood up from beside the phone, saying, "That’s him." Then he examined me and said, "Why do you look so unlucky?" I was genuinely startled. Later, we talked about various things, and eventually the topic shifted to flying. The fat man said he wasn’t afraid of air currents when flying. The principle of air currents is simple—he understands it...