Against the Wind

Against the Wind is a novel by Tan Tian (original name Tan Guolin), a writer born in the 1980s, published by Zhuhai Publishing House in 2009. Set on a campus, the novel's protagonist is a boy who seems ordinary but whose experiences are anything but. He enters an "unusual" university hoping to be an ordinary student in peace, but for certain reasons he is branded with a certain label by certain eyes, and so begins a youth unlike other people's. The story unfolds around his loves and circumstances on campus: two intertwined romances with older women leave him playing both innocent boy and ambiguous lover; he has been wounded body and soul over a love, and wept aloud over half a love. These young people are always quarreling, yet it is like a rehearsal; they make films because they cannot find life's perfection in reality, so they carry on their colorful lives in cinema, struggling in the play to perform yesterday's stories and hopes for the future. Pulling and tangling with one another, they go all the way around, and when they return to the starting point three years have passed. The work is colored by the rush of youth and flamboyant, turbulent personalities, writing of a boy's transformation from innocence to a sense that "life is a play," with every line circling the causes of change and inner turmoil, presenting a coming-of-age process woven of pain, sorrow, ambiguity, and sweetness.