Duye

Duye is an urban-life novel by the web author Duanwu Zhengyang (better known by the pen name Zhongqiu Yueming), serialized on Qidian since March 28, 2012. About 2.91 million characters long, it is now complete. "Duye" is an honorific used along the upper Yangtze for the man who steers a local underworld: he must be able to fight and scrap, and he must also value loyalty and brotherhood. The protagonist, Lu Wenlong, is exactly such a boy: born poor, with divorced parents, a father who works away year-round, and a mother busy with business, he is left almost entirely without care. At fourteen he studies while working odd jobs in teahouses, mahjong parlors, and dance halls to earn his living expenses, a rubber baton tucked at his waist, growing up hard in the cracks of city life.

The novel follows Lu Wenlong's growth as its main thread, tracing his path from a teenage tough in middle school to a young man gradually finding his footing in the underworld. Along the way there is the hot-blooded loyalty of brothers who stand by each other in a fight, the tender, tangled, finely observed feelings between him and childhood friends such as Jiang Qi and Su Wenjin, and an ambiguous connection with his middle-school English teacher Tang Canqing that begins with a misunderstanding and is only faced years later. The work relies on no superpowers or cheat-like advantages; every step the protagonist takes is earned through loyalty, resilience, and a hard-won grasp of human relations.

Readers often sum the book up as a "fresh and clean underworld novel": it is about the underworld, but what it actually depicts is the everyday warmth of school, family, and city life. Beyond the blood and ruthlessness, there is more often a boy's simple wish to be cared for and to win a place for himself. Together with the author's Lao Na Hai Nian Qing, it is regarded as a representative of his urban fiction.