潘灵《纸上还乡》

I am profoundly grateful for literature, as it has infused my life with happiness and joy. I feel less isolated and unfortunate thanks to literature than those who inhabit the towering buildings around me. Beneath their seemingly dignified facades, they conceal the anxiety of children estranged from their hometowns. Yet, with my pen as my guide, I have quietly embarked on a journey back home. My heartfelt thanks go to fiction; it has allowed me to live authentically in a genuine world. Without fiction, the world would be more hypocritical, life more absurd, and we would be left in despair with no escape. People often dismiss fiction as false, but reality would be grotesque without it. I consider myself a beneficiary of literature because it has taught me that my writing must carry an attitude and a stance, consciously siding with the weak. Good writers are consistently among the weak. To stand with the weak is to stand with oneself. Writers should not attempt to portray themselves as spiritual saviours; those who do are naive and laughable. Kafka once said, "In reality, the writer is always much smaller and weaker than ordinary people. Therefore, he feels life's hardships more deeply and intensely than others. For him, his singing is just a cry. Art is a pain for the artist, through which he liberates himself to endure new pains. He is not a giant, but just a more or less colourful bird in the cage of life." A writer must feel, bear, and present life.

In my literary world, a sentiment called nostalgia always lingers. Some literary critics claim that I am trying to create a "Chinese-style nostalgia like the cries of cuckoos." In truth, I don't possess such grandiose feelings in my creations; I am simply yearning to return. Unable to do so, I am filled with sorrow. While I do not deny that I write about nostalgia, my novels are not native soil. Those who believe otherwise either misunderstand or overestimate me. Native soil novels grow from the land, like perennial plants and trees. My writing transcends the native soil, a retrospective glance from within the steel and concrete urban jungle. At best, it is a utopia of nostalgia.

Every writer has a spiritual homeland, a freely accessible base for writing, where they can unleash their true selves. Every writer is local, and literature has always carried a local colour, a hue that springs from the land's character. Novels should be localized, and it is only natural for Chinese writers to tell Chinese stories. When I speak of localization, I refer to the novel's core. In terms of form and method, writers should, of course, open themselves up to the world, drawing on the strengths of various schools in terms of technique and skill. Since the 20th century, the novel has been a revolutionary genre.

Today, every mature novelist understands that contemporary novels have delineated their boundaries from traditional ones. It is evident that our native soil novels also possess global significance.

I have been striving to infuse my fiction with a more poetic essence, which explains my recent preoccupation with nostalgia. Every person who leaves their hometown experiences a sense of spiritual displacement. This dual sensation of physically wandering through the city while spiritually yearning for one's homeland leads me to view novel writing as a form of therapy. In this regard, writing becomes a means to mend my emotional wounds. My writing also has a hidden motive: a desire to reconnect with my ethnic roots. I am a Zhongjia person from the Buyi ethnic group, born in an area predominantly inhabited by Han people. During the decade I spent in my hometown, I felt no difference from the Han people around me—we shared the same customs, traditions, festivals, diet, and clothing. The only distinction was that while others would mark "Han" on personal information forms, I would mark "Buyi." It was only after leaving my hometown that I began to embrace my ethnic minority identity more strongly. Through writing, I discovered that my cultural heritage is embedded in my genes, awakened by my literary endeavors, making my work distinct from that of Han writers. Writers from every ethnic group possess a yearning to trace their origins. For those like me, separated from our ethnic roots for generations, can we find a sense of belonging through writing and spiritually reunite with our distant tribe? Is this, too, a form of returning home?