I Am Not Yang Guo

I Am Not Yang Guo is a youth campus novel by Zhang Yufei, published by Wanjuan Publishing Company in 2009. Running 254 pages, it was marketed by its publisher as "a youth campus romance paying tribute to This Land of Youth" under the tagline "Jin Yong's heroes VS Gu Long's heroes: a complete record of martial-arts heroes' campus lives." The title borrows the relationship between Yang Guo and his "Long'er," Xiaolongnü, in Jin Yong's The Return of the Condor Heroes as a metaphor: the recurring "Long'er" and the line "If the years could come again, I would never make the same mistake" show the author using "I am not Yang Guo" as self-justification, telling of a youthful love lost through his own fault and the regret and longing that follow. The tone is sorrowful and lyrical, with the literary air and self-exposure typical of early online youth writing. Structurally the book has sixteen chapters, with titles such as "Hu Yidao and Xiaolongnü," "The Louse Makes Its Entrance," "Hairtail Huang Yaoshi," "How to Forget Sorrow: Cheating," "The Circular Ruins," and "The Catcher in the Rye," borrowing the names of Jin Yong and Gu Long characters and classics like The Catcher in the Rye as intertextual symbols. Grafting the "jianghu" onto the middle-school classroom, it depicts in parody a group of teenagers' friendships, secret crushes, exams, and rebellion—reading at once like a youth commemorative album and a joking "martial-arts chronicle" written for peers. A product of the "New Concept" youth-writing wave of the mid-to-late 2000s, the book shares the temper of its era with works by Han Han, Sun Rui, and Jiang Nan: gentle mockery of the education system, nostalgia for brotherly loyalty, and irreparable regret over first love.