Magazine article Chinese Literature Today. FE: The way I look at it, a writer's childhood experiences must have a great influence on their work. DX: I spent my childhood in a village called Guli. It's in the northwest of Guangxi Province, an area that we call Guixibei. I'm from the Han ethnic group. We spoke a southwestern dialect-our accents aren't too different. I was born in a beautiful place way up in the mountains.
You could see for a long way up there. One of my deepest memories of the place is waking up early in the morning to go to school and looking down into the valley and seeing the clouds spread out like an ocean. There was a single very tall mountain that extended above the clouds, but, other than that, there were only endless, creamy white clouds. Back then, I really thought I was looking down at the ocean!
When night fell, if the skies were clear, we could watch the sun setting. I remember it looked like an egg yolk-so yellow and so soft. The sun would set fast; the sun would hang there for a moment and then slip below the horizon. Our village was isolated: there were no highways to connect us to the outside world; we didn't have electricity, so, when I was a kid, I didn't watch TV. At night, all we had were kerosene lamps.
Instead of TV, I watched the moon. I ended up writing a short story about that, called "Sky Lantern. I listened to the crickets, the cicadas, natural sounds.
I smelled the perfume of the fields, the breath of the trees. We used to eat fruit right from the tree. I had a close relationship with the natural world. Nowadays, I often think back to those scenes from my childhood. I should say, judging by material conditions, the village was relatively poor, but better off than the post generation had been, I imagine. My own family's situation was the best in the village, but compared to now, we were just getting by, even if we always had enough to eat.
