our taoist master laozi said it best: "fortune depends on misfortune. misfortune is hidden in fortune." i left school as a child, often went hungry, was constantly lonely, and had no books to read. but for those reasons, like the writer of a previous generation, shen congwen, i had an early start on reading the great book of life. my experience of going to the marketplace to listen to a storyteller was but one page of that book. after leaving school, i was thrown uncomfortably into the world of adults, where i embarked on the long journey of learning through listening. two hundred years ago, one of the great storytellers of all time – pu songling – lived near where i grew up, and where many people, me included, carried on the tradition he had perfected. wherever i happened to be – working the fields with the collective, in production team cowsheds or stables, on my grandparents' heated kang, even on oxcarts bouncing and swaying down the road, my ears filled with tales of the supernatural, historical romances, and strange andcaptivating stories, all tied to the natural environment and clan histories, and all of which created a powerful reality in my mind.
even in my wildest dreams, i could not have envisioned a day when all this would be the stuff of my own fiction, for i was just a boy who loved stories, who was infatuated with the tales people around me were telling. back then i was, without a doubt, a theist, believing that all living creatures were endowed with souls. i'd stop and pay my respects to a towering old tree; if i saw a bird, i was sure it could become human any time it wanted; and i suspected every stranger i met of being a transformed beast. at night, terrible fears accompanied me on my way home after my work points were tallied, so i'd sing at the top of my lungs as i ran to build up a bit of courage. my voice, which was changing at the time, produced scratchy, squeaky songs that grated on the ears of any villager who heard me.
i spent my first twenty-one years in that village, never traveling farther from home than to qingdao, by train, where i nearly got lost amid the giant stacks of wood in a lumber mill. when my mother asked me what i'd seen in qingdao, i reported sadly that all i'd seen were stacks of lumber. but that trip to qingdao planted in me a powerful desire to leave my village and see the world.
in february 1976 i was recruited into the army and walked out of the northeast gaomi township village i both loved and hated, entering a critical phase of my life, carrying in my backpack the four-volume brief history of china my mother had bought by selling her wedding jewelry. thus began the most important period of my life. i must admit that were it not for the thirty-odd years of tremendous development and progress in chinese society, and the subsequent national reform and opening of her doors to the outside, i would not be a writer today.