2 Lives: The Wild Youths of the World

Author: Chun Shu
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-08-01
Features: The clouds fly swiftly, like the sky when we said goodbye after the rain fell. Big, fluffy clouds. A sense of time flowing backward. She thought she had forgotten, but she hadn’t. “I love you,” the boy said. She was silent. I know you love me, but what is love? The moment I thought about it, my heart grew colder. Maybe I don’t hate love, just fear. My love is deeper and fiercer than anyone else’s. That’s why my love is now less than anyone else’s. Either he leaves me or I leave him. And I will leave him before he leaves me. That’s it, no choice. This is the story of two girls. Yu Duan and the good girl Nan Nan. One day, the name Yu Duan suddenly popped into my head, without reason or warning. Why is it Yu Duan? I don’t know. Yu Duan feels more like the name of a clear-eyed, self-aware writer, while the good girl Nan Nan carries the smile and traces of childhood, like the name of a music-loving kid I see everywhere in my life. So I settled on these two names, like the two most important things in my life—literature and music. The entire story is like a confusing movie, no need to explain the beginning or the end. It seems like the beginning is the end. Just as I imagined, a complete story. The scattered details in the middle guide the story’s direction. In the end, they discover despair. This made the writer of them despair too. This story moves from despair to despair, with a faint hope that must destroy everything to be obtained and reborn. The main time and place of the story are blurred, all aliases, so you can imagine it happening anywhere. The 80s representative writer Chun Shu became the symbol of rebellion and uniqueness with the book Beijing Kids. This book is called the most painstaking and serious work the author has ever written, always feeling like it’s never finished. “I wrote this for the past me and the present teenage me, for the children who were abandoned.” The protagonists are two girls—Yu Duan and the good girl Nan Nan. The two contrasting, conflicting girls represent literature and music, respectively. The entire story is like a confusing movie, guided by scattered details, revealing the author and her peers’ confused and desperate survival emotions.