Once upon a time, like a startled swan gliding through the water, she appeared.

Author: Shuang Cheng
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-05-01
Features: Shining light, traces in snow mud, we will grow old, lingering memories of youthful innocence. An elegy for the 70s generation. Many years later, I often told my friends a metaphor: a crystal-clear glass cup, flawless, placed on a sunlit windowsill. Every time you look at it, it gives you infinite aesthetic pleasure, but at the same time, you also have an ominous premonition—that one day, this glass cup will inevitably fall from the windowsill, shattering into pieces, irreparable. Love is actually like this glass cup. My friends listened to me patiently retelling this metaphor, smiling with ambiguous expressions. I knew they mixed my metaphor with another once-popular one. That metaphor was about a two-legged bird, which, once born, could only keep flying and could never stop; the day it stopped flying was the day it died. In their eyes, I was no different from that two-legged bird. Otherwise, how could I keep pouring myself into love time and time again, feeling deeply each time but ending in failure, turning it into stories in my writing. In memory, I endlessly mourned and rued, as if only so I could sustain life. But in my metaphor, that glass cup was already broken from the very beginning. It was all just a process of self-consolation. Someone once said: Meeting is only for separation. Then what about separation? Is it also for meeting? Between separation and meeting, what is omitted? A nostalgic work distinct from 80s youth literature, a novel about love and growth. The sorrow of youth, the confusion of life, the ups and downs of love—these are shared memories of youth for those born in the 1970s. The story is not confined to university campuses; it is merely the background of a phase in the protagonist Li Du’s growth. Youth is far too vast to be contained within narrow school grounds. All the stories stem from the author’s latent feelings for love, care, and authentic life. The novel truly recreates those unforgettable, irreplaceable years of youth, compelling every peer to reminisce about their own carefree youth and evoke strong emotional resonance. This text, originally circulated in printed form among many 80s students and campuses, gained even more popularity and resonance among 70s peers during its online serialization. As a record of personal growth, its genuine emotions, sensitive perception, and reflections on youth are precisely what the (fúzào - restless, superficial) youth literature style of 80s authors fails to achieve.