From Comic Books to Essay Anthologies to Novels to Galgames...

My reading history goes back to elementary school. When my dad was ordering magazines, he subscribed to one called Children’s Comics — probably the earliest Chinese magazine of its kind, and the channel through which some early Japanese manga got introduced to China, Doraemon among them. But the climate was different back then. It was a domestic magazine after all, and 90% of the content was Chinese comics — plenty of them drawn by elementary and middle schoolers themselves.

I was too young to understand any of it. I read comics just for the noise, and I had pretty gross taste: if a comic had shit-and-piss gags or other vulgar nonsense, I’d be delighted and drag my parents or friends over to look at it with me… thinking back on it, I was a terrible kid.

Apparently Children’s Comics is somehow still alive, though several of its old editors-in-chief are probably dead by now. Honestly I liked those old geezers’ art — the stories were a hundred times better than today’s domestic animation, and a lot of them came with their own snark, a sort of middle-aged-man teasing style that fit the times. One more thing worth mentioning: Children’s Comics seems to have planted a flag for me. I happened to find out one of the top students in my class read it too, and I used that as an excuse to talk to her a few times. And then… nothing ever came of it…

Besides comics, I must have read other stuff in elementary school — namely essay anthologies. My father refused to buy me anything else, convinced that only these would actually improve my schoolwork, so he stubbornly bought me essay collections and nothing else. Bored out of my mind, I flipped through them one piece at a time, and after enough flipping I actually started reading them with gusto — as fiction, of course. A lot of the essays had dead-simple plots. One thick anthology of “national outstanding student essays” left a deep impression because it killed off at least twenty people in its pages, including the authors’ parents and teachers. Which gave me the illusion that the only way to get a high score was to bump off your own mom and dad. I thought I’d discovered a new continent and told my parents this idea, and got slapped for it. Later, after I’d read enough anthologies, they got boring too — the formulas were all the same, zero novelty. Then I happened to get my hands on a New Concept Writing anthology, flipped through it, and felt like I’d found a whole new world. Honestly, a lot of those pieces would still feel fresh if I expanded on them today. One story called The Divine Camera had a fantasy setup so cool I couldn’t believe a grade schooler wrote it — actually I’m pretty sure no grade schooler did. But it gave me some ideas about fantasy. First time I realized essays could be about “unreal” things, and it blew my thinking wide open. I tried it myself later, of course, and got chewed out by the teacher… because she said what I wrote was too fake.

By middle school my father had stopped subscribing to Children’s Comics, and there was no suitable essay anthology for middle school either. Empty and bored, I stopped reading — until one day my grades were so bad my parents banned me from the computer. So the chuuni in me went off and rummaged around the house, dug out a few collections of modern Chinese short fiction, and started reading.

Honestly those stories were way over my head at the time. There was Chen Rong’s At Middle Age, plus Border Town and The Story of Li Shuangshuang, and some others I can’t recall right now… but miraculously, I finished them. Problem was, I wasn’t thinking while I read. When I was done I just felt that At Middle Age was oppressively heavy, like dark clouds bearing down on a city, and that the twin tracking of outer reality and inner psychology, with flashbacks woven in, made it easy to lose track of where the plot was going. Though there wasn’t much of a plot to begin with — it was basically a psychological portrait. I’ve only read it once, but it left a mark on my writing style: I picked up the habit of using dreamlike metaphors for interior monologue. Another one worth mentioning is The Story of Li Shuangshuang. It’s set during the Great Leap Forward, but its eye for everyday detail is genuinely good — that was a trait of Chinese writers back then, a preference for restoring detail as faithfully as possible so the reader feels it’s real. Though later, Jia Pingwa’s Qin Qiang had shit-and-piss descriptions so real they made you sick…

After that I read a few Jules Verne novels on and off — Journey to the Center of the Earth, The Mysterious Island, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, The Children of Captain Grant. My cousin pushed them on me hard. Unfortunately I didn’t feel there was much to absorb. The plots were too a-given; the titles spoil everything. If you call it Journey to the Center of the Earth, then obviously you’re going to get there, so all the suspense turns boring… Plus I was reading translations, so there wasn’t much to study in terms of word choice. To this day I don’t know what the original English name for that palace made of granite in The Mysterious Island is — do they really call it a Palace? The only fun part was that Verne boldly reused characters to tie his stories into one shared world, which made for a cozy read. That little trick isn’t fresh anymore, of course…

Near the end of middle school, to show off how learned (chuuni) I was, I forced myself through Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Honestly I did not enjoy it. It’s a classic, sure, but its atmosphere doesn’t hold a candle to the TV series for sheer thrill. And the timeline seemed weird to me at the time: I figured Liu Bei was the protagonist, so why was his presence during the Yellow Turban Rebellion so thin? Later I understood how it actually worked — that’s another story. My other takeaway from Three Kingdoms was that Zhuge Liang is wildly overhyped… he’s got this whole “strategizing in the tent, victory a thousand miles away” pose going on. Once or twice that calm is fine; keeping it up the entire time just makes him look like he’s flexing. Yeah… like Xi with his big teeth. It wasn’t until the duel with his good buddy Sima Yi that Zhuge Liang started to feel like a person instead of a god. In his final years, knowing a campaign is a long shot, he still insists on going — just to keep a promise. That tragic resolve gets you. That sense of sacrificing yourself to fate resonated with me in plenty of later works, and it’s the thing I most want to express when I read and write fiction. Of course, after the star falls at Wuzhang Plains I kind of stopped paying attention… I fast-forwarded the Jiang Wei arc, and skimmed through Sima Zhao and the rest. Most of the plot I filled in from the TV series. So I guess I’ve never actually finished any of the Four Great Classical Novels in full…

Middle school out, high school in. My reading split in two: computer magazines and the daily paper on one side… and web novels on the other. The first was more about interest, but it was precisely that which taught me, without my noticing, some clear ways of expressing things. Ugly as it sounds, read enough reviews and you can imitate a few yourself; read enough news and you can fill in a template and crank out a few press releases.

I started on web novels around then too. The web novel scene was just getting going. As a kid I’d been too chicken to watch horror movies, so I cheerfully went looking for horror fiction to challenge myself. Oddly enough, after a few stories I found I couldn’t get into anything else — no suspense.

Suspense is a big factor in what pulls me into fiction. It’s a view that’s stuck with me, and it’s a main reason why the stories I write are always stuffed with messy suspense. I’ve always thought content without suspense is like plain boiled water — it just doesn’t grab you. I read a lot of horror fiction then, but the ones that stuck were Ma Boyong’s She Died on Discord, the Girls’ Dormitory series, and some other knockoffs posted on Penglai Ghost Tales…

Ma Boyong’s piece has a pretty goofy plot, honestly, but the premise was imaginative — first story to use Discord to build suspense — so it kept me reading to the end. Though the ending, where the female ghost gets locked in a hard drive and formatted to death, is just too funny… As for Girls’ Dormitory, that was the first time I felt a horror story didn’t need an actual ghost. Each book in the trilogy does its best to explain away the weirdness, trying to create that “there are no ghosts in the world, only in your heart” flex, but a lot of the explanations are so forced and anti-scientific that I felt unsatisfied. Most of the horror on Penglai Ghost Tales starts strong and ends weak, and plenty just fall apart. The funniest one built up a mountain of suspense and then, at the final chapter, suddenly revealed the male lead had an identical twin brother — oh come on, the author clearly ran out of ideas, right?

I read a bunch of power-fantasy web novels in that period too, though I didn’t finish most. The ones I did finish were I Am a Hooligan and How the Bad Egg Was Made. The latter’s plot lines up perfectly with a certain recent “anti-China hero” show — honestly it crushes it. The former is wilder: the male lead never takes a loss, closer to something like The Perverted Ideology of the Rogue Hero. But the fight scenes are so satisfying and the author’s phrasing so funny that it’s clearly more fun than the latter. After those two I couldn’t get through any more power fantasies — they’re all too similar.

In college I read even fewer novels, but what I did read was all one author: Cai Jun. You could call me a diehard fanboy and I wouldn’t argue. The Nineteenth Floor of Hell, Virus, Midnight Flute, God Is Watching You, Margaret’s Secret, The Revolving Door, Cat’s Eye, Butterfly Cemetery — I read basically everything Cai Jun wrote. His style influenced me the most… I was looking for fiction that was romantic but still cool-headed in its descriptions, suspenseful but still real, and Cai Jun fit that exactly.

Cai Jun has real strengths in how he handles a story — the key is that he’s more rigorous with suspense. Er, okay, what I mean is he at least won’t suddenly pull out a Maoshan Taoist priest to catch ghosts or some goofy nonsense like that; he uses emotion as the main thread. The Revolving Door is probably the one I liked best. If The Nineteenth Floor of Hell was a botched ending, The Revolving Door patches it up nicely into a complete story. Cai Jun’s style set me chasing those “unexpected yet logical” twists full of chuuni energy…

And then, as you know, I discovered ACG culture, found anime, got into galgames. Strange thing is, most galgame plots feel very close to what Cai Jun writes. Honestly a lot of his novels could be turned into galgames. Sometimes I think if Cai Jun had written galgame scenarios in Japan, he might have made a pretty good scenario writer…

Looking back on my reading life from birth to now, it’s kind of ironic. I don’t seem to have read anything proper — just comics, web novels, newspapers, some light fiction. When people bring up famous works like The Catcher in the Rye or One Hundred Years of Solitude, I’ve got nothing to say. I stubbornly believe reading should follow your own mood, that masterpieces are for you to decide, not for others to hand down… but even so, I feel a bit inferior about it. No idea what kind of story-driven works I’ll get into next. Maybe film. Or maybe… back to novels and galgames.