Fushide

Floating World is Chen Chen's first novel, published in September 2009 by Changjiang Literature and Art Publishing House in 13 chapters. Set in a city at the end of the twentieth century, it tells the coming-of-age stories of five urban teenagers, each harboring secrets and bound to one another. The protagonist, Chi Haixiang, suffers from a rare condition in which an unformed twin brother grows inside his body; because his deformed physique makes him look like a pregnant woman, he is mocked and bullied by classmates for years. Through a lonely childhood and adolescence, Chi Haixiang loves the unborn brother in his belly as family. As Yan Yan, Teng Xi, Ji Lan, and others enter his life one after another, his tormented upbringing takes a turn, and the fates of the five teenagers become intertwined. Subways, plazas, high-rises, and the city at night become the places where they pour out their pain and wound one another; carrying their separate secrets, the teenagers draw close, leaving marks of love and hate. Through a fragmented structure and vivid, image-rich language, the novel unfolds a multi-stranded narrative, placing sin and virtue, truth and lies, passion and wounds within a single urban landscape; borrowing the sense of "spiritual striving" from Goethe's Faust, its title explores the desire, loneliness, and self-redemption of contemporary youth. Though the ending is cruel, in the afterword the author still leaves Chi Haixiang a warm coda, saying that he "wanted to make him strong."