Emergency Exit

Emergency Exit is a novel published by the writer Gu Xiang at the age of nineteen, appearing in August 1999 and, together with Click 1999 published the same year, marking her earliest appearance in print. Gu Xiang went on to write steadily, with works including The Western Paradise, Good Little Cat, Zhaojiao Village, and Honest Good People, and is also known as a translator and painter. As a young author born in 1980 and raised in Shanghai, Gu Xiang continues in this novel the perceptive tone of her early writing: attending to the emotions, drifting, and self-definition of young people in the city, placing the confusions of growing up within everyday streetscapes, conversations, and moods. The title Emergency Exit is itself a potent image: in a city furnished with exits everywhere, is what young people seek an escape route, or a place to stop and catch their breath? That is the space for reflection the work leaves its readers. It should be noted that this novel was published quite early and publicly available bibliographic information is limited; this page does not offer a specific account of its characters or chapters, lest it be confused with the author's other works. Readers may treat it as an "early specimen" for understanding the starting point of Gu Xiang's writing: here one can see how the light, sensitive observational manner of her later work—always keeping a certain distance from people and things—first took shape in the writing of a teenager.