Early Summer

Early Summer is Chen Zhongshi's first collection of novellas—a slim volume, yet an unavoidable way station for understanding White Deer Plain. Printed by Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House in June 1986, it collects four novellas totaling more than 200,000 characters, all drawn from the Guanzhong countryside he knew so well. Worth noting is the road that "Early Summer" traveled: begun in spring 1981, sent to Contemporary and returned for revision, it took nearly three years before appearing as the lead piece in issue 4 of 1984 and winning that year's Contemporary Literary Award; the editor-in-chief Qin Zhaoyang's remark that it "should break through" was something Chen Zhongshi repeated again and again. A long novella polished over three years—that clumsy yet solid way of writing feels, to today's readers, reassuringly grounded. Among the four, "The Kang Family Courtyard" was his first published novella, and "The Eighteen-Year-Old Brother" won the Great Wall Literary Award; both show his strength. These stories are set in the countryside before the wheat harvest, in marriage negotiations and calculations within courtyard walls, among women and old men in village lanes; dialect and farm work are densely woven in, yet never rustic—in a broken engagement or a family quarrel he always captures the hesitation and stubbornness in ordinary people's hearts as an era turns. The old edition has long been out of print and survives mostly in secondhand bookstalls and library copies, its pages yellowed, yet its atmosphere fits the words "early summer" exactly. It suits readers willing to trace Chen Zhongshi's creative path backward, and anyone curious about rural change in the 1980s.