Lives of authors

Forming an interesting contrast, novelist Yu's part in the documentary has joyful moments, with humorous storytelling.

Once a "depressed" dentist in Haiyan, a small town in Zhejiang, whose real passion was literature, Yu encountered a turning point in the early 1980s.

He received a telephone call from a prestigious magazine in Beijing, the first such invitation in his life, asking him to travel to the capital to revise his novel's dark ending. Before that, almost all of his manuscripts had been rejected.

After staying in Beijing for a month and visiting many tourist attractions, Yu earned approximately 80 yuan ($12), much higher than an average monthly income of about 30 yuan back then in China.

During the train trip back home, he purchased roast chicken at a stop in Shandong province as a gift for his father, teasingly defining that as "the first time he felt he was rich".

As the first writer from China to win the James Joyce Foundation Award in Ireland in 2002, Yu is among the country's most internationally known writers and has received awards in Italy, France and the United States.

Despite seeing his works translated into over 40 languages, Yu says in the documentary that the month in Beijing in the 1980s was his most glorious moment.

The third author in the documentary, Liang Hong, a professor of Chinese literature at Renmin University of China, is known for two nonfiction books－China in One Village (2010) and Leaving Liang Village (2013)－which examine "left-behind" children and elderly people, as well as migrant workers in the title village in Henan province, as a sample to analyze the unprecedented changes in rural China.