Small angle, wide view

Wang says she never wastes time in unnecessary characters in her works.

"Everyone has a mission," she says, adding her writing starts with setting tones for the characters.

Literary critic Chen Sihe says Wang's novella depicts humane concern in a time of transformation. She can be encouraging about change, "while keeping a vigilant and sober mind on the possible pain it brought about", Chen says.

"In a time like this, I welcome changes, and I have changed, too," Wang says. "But I want to remind people about the value of the unchanged, like the power of literature, and the faith in literature."

Wang says she's lucky to have gained a foothold before the society became too commercialized.

"So that I can publish the six short stories along with the novella. A debut writer would get rejected if they presented those stories," Wang says.

The six short stories, as she insists on calling them, are actually philosophical thinking without a human character. They are experimental and have prompted debate.

"I impersonate objects in the stories. They have plots, suspension and answers for suspension," she says.

It's not her first experiment with words.

Wang's works

"Attempting to be different, I wrote things that I find difficult to read, too, in the 1980s," she says.

Wang was rebellious because her writer mother hoped she would not take on "those pains of being a writer", Wang once said.

"And she seldom praised my writing," she added.

In the 1980s, Wang went to the US-based Iowa International Writing Center for a creative-writing workshop with her mother.

"As I return to the essential of writing, the storytelling, I have realized I also get a lot of inspiration from my mother's writing," Wang says.

Currently dividing her life among writing, reading and teaching, Wang is a professor of creative writing at Fudan University. Her workshop is popular among the students.

She believes young writers often follow blindly the "popular social implications" they get from easy reads.

"They don't know what to write about," she adds.

Though she feels regret when a student fails to get excited upon reading one beautiful sentence, like she does, Wang holds that the current ecosystem of Chinese literature is in good shape.

"We don't lag behind the 1980s, the golden era of literature, too much. Writers are still writing as well, seriously and diligently," she says.