Joy

Joy is the first novel by the writer Feng Tang, written when he was seventeen. The manuscript was written on more than three hundred sheets of pale green paper, with the date of composition marked at the end; years later the author came across the old manuscript by chance, hesitated for a long time, and finally decided to publish it without changing a single word, presenting it to readers as the starting point of his writing career. The novel is set in a high school campus in the late 1980s, and its protagonist is Qiu Shui, a boy who loves reading. He is sensitive, clever, and also has the perversity and rebellion peculiar to that age: he discusses martial arts novels with classmates, argues about poetry, talks about ideals, and also lets his mind wander over a strand of long hair on the girl in the seat ahead or a string of drool from the math teacher as he lectures. The main thread of the story follows Qiu Shui's secret love for the girl Meng Xun: the figure silently following her on the way home, the casual probings, the kiss he summons the courage for under a streetlight and the slap that follows—all are savored again and again with almost stubborn meticulousness. Unlike the intense prose of Feng Tang's later Everything Grows and Beijing, Beijing, Joy is extremely simple in narrative, with psychological description taking up the great majority of the text; the leaping stream of consciousness, the sentences of three long and one short, the self-commentaries that keep slipping out, make the whole book read more like a poem written with youthful feeling than a traditional story with a tight arc. In the author's own assessment, this old work "is more like a novel in the traditional sense than what I write now," and its depiction of youth is "delicate and brash," something he could no longer write today. The book is divided into chapters such as "Winter" and "Spring"; it reads plainly and truly, ending with a touch of inexplicable melancholy: that era without fame or fortune, those fleeting stirrings—perhaps these are the true joy.