Author finds clues to real life in his whodunit fiction

In just two years, Sun Yi-sheng has been a chemistry major, factory guard, pesticide chemist and writer.

The 26-year-old says he discovered writing to be his calling after intense disappointment with everything else he'd done in life and long hours invested in self-studying literature.

Sun's crime story, The Shades Who Periscope Through Flowers to the Sky, will appear in the December issue of the Chicago-based online-magazine Words Without Borders, which introduces international literature to English-language readers. His novel was the only Chinese selection.

The magazine's editorial director Susan Harris tells China Daily by e-mail that she was hooked by the story's "gradual buildup of suspense and twist at the end". She's also impressed by Sun's unusual approach to familiar scenes.

In the last few months, Sun's short stories have appeared in China's heavyweight literary publications, such as Chutzpah Magazine and Shanghai Literature.

Beijing-based publisher Tiehulu Books editor and novelist A Yi calls Sun "one of the few best new novelists in China".

Chutzpah's editor-in-chief Ou Ning says he "liked the youngster very much" while hosting a session with Sun and two other young aspiring writers in early September.

Sun says his life before September 2010 was a blur. He was born and raised in a small town in Shandong province. He attended a mediocre school and college. He let his college years pass without much thought about the future, he says.

But Sun decided to have an adventure in a truly international city that autumn — a move that equates to an outlook makeover, in retrospect.

He went to Shanghai, where he spent half a year cleaning and repairing the Hilton Hotel's lobby.

"Reality is so different from what you expect," Sun says.

"I was so lost."

Melancholy nearly overwhelmed him for the first time in his life. He took to writing to vent his anger. His first works were a dozen fuming journals.

Sun returned to his hometown in Caoxian county, Shandong province, and then joined friends in Zhengzhou, Henan province. But nothing could alleviate his growing sense of "desolation".

"People working there have no idea how toxic their lives are," he says.

"They only care about their wages, as if that's all there is to the world."

Sun began to rely on writing to give meaning to his otherwise "boring" life while working as a clerk at a Zhengzhou pesticide factory.

"I just felt I had to write or I'd be wasting my life," he says.

He still believes that.

Sun soon found his repertoire of literary skills to be too limited and began intensive self-training.

He learned to divine writers' essences from reading just one of their short stories.

Sun closely analyzed stories' structures, narrations, syntaxes, semantics and word choices. He highlighted and transcribed his favorite phrases into a notebook and rehearsed them. He would spend four days on short stories intended to be read in about two hours.

He rapidly progressed.

Sun says the method enabled him to dissect Raymond Carver to the last nuance, and he feels he has already learned whatever he could from the author and some others.

Sun often visited police officers "to get the feel" of the criminal interrogations he would write about.

"Every part of the story lives as an image in my mind's eye," he says.

In September 2011, Sun's submission to Tiehulu Books connected him with A Ding, the poet and playwright who cruised through Europe. A Ding phoned him, praised his story and offered him an editing job. Sun now works with A Ding at the literary website Jianguo Novel.

Sun also won over Nicky Harman, the UK-based literary translator who worked on The Shades Who Periscope Through Flowers to the Sky and translated the works of Han Dong, Xu Zechen and Anni Baobei into English.

Harman considered Sun's crime story rich in imagery and layered meaning.

"The story looks like a realistic one, but it also has a subtle touch of surrealism," Harman says.

"It's not just a crime story. It lets the readers' imagination fire up. I see a huge amount of talent in Sun Yisheng."

She says she was also impressed by Sun's fastidiousness.

"For a good writer, these are equally important things," she says. "Sun has such qualities."

Sun works hard because he knows how fragile life is, he says.

His family used to run a cremation business. He knows too well how a person can vanish in an instant filled with wails.

That's why he treasures his literary ambition and strives for it.

That's also why he hopes to become China's best novelist.