Coming Back

Coming Back is Sun Zhonglun's first work of nonfiction, published in 2017 by Taihai Publishing House and produced by Imaginist. The author was born in 1994 and studied at Pomona College in the United States, majoring in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics (PPE) and German; he was admitted to the University of Cambridge's 2017 master's program in social anthropology. In the summer of 2015, at twenty-one, having finished his junior year, he decided to interrupt his studies and take a year off to return to China and work. Over that year he traveled through Dongguan, Dali, Dingxi, Suzhou, Beijing, and Chengdu, working as an assembly-line worker, guesthouse attendant, middle-school teacher, new-media editor, temple lay devotee, and lacquerware workshop apprentice—moving and working all the while. He wrote down the people and things he encountered along the way: workers on the assembly line questioning life and ideals, a frustrated poet, Brother Hu borrowing money everywhere to open a milk-tea shop, Nuanjuan who lost her young daughter, the young man known as "Foreman Xu," Sister Wang taking her daughter to visit her brother in prison, and the children, parents, and teachers of Dingxi. These concrete individual stories thread together the author's observations and reflections on made-in-China manufacturing, left-behind children, urban and rural education, poverty, and fate. Interspersed through the journey are seven letters the author wrote to his "brother who was never born," along with imagined replies from that brother, weaving adolescent confusion, complex feelings toward family, and grief for a lost relative into the narrative. The title "Coming Back" has two layers of meaning: one is visiting and understanding the land under one's feet, the other is turning back to face a past one has always avoided. The book was recommended by Xu Zhiyuan and Jiang Fangzhou and was selected for the 2017 Sina Annual Good Books list and others.