Chapter 46: That Day, Fang Xinghe Was Driving a Big Truck...

The next day, before Wang Tong had even left, the *Xinmin Evening News* published the manuscript he had faxed back.

*Fang Xinghe: I Am the Lone Wolf*

It was featured as the front-page headline of the social section, complete with a photograph, while his literary piece, *The Added Value of Reading*, was placed in the literary section.

The already surging public interest received yet another wave of fuel, blazing across half the sky.

How should one describe that overwhelming uproar?

There was no way to precisely describe it; anyway, those who cursed him became even more fierce in their wording, while those who supported him slammed the tables in applause.

The two sides engaged in hand-to-hand combat, completely igniting into a genuine frenzy.

Upon seeing this, Father Wan said to his daughter with doting fondness: "You ask me every day what kind of person Fang Xinghe is. Look, he has given you the answer himself."

Wan Baoer felt that this version of Fang Xinghe best matched her imagination and felt deeply proud of it, yet she deliberately stubborned up: "Fang Xinghe wouldn't care at all what other people think of him! And I don't care either!"

Well, that had a bit of the "fans reflect their idol" flavor to it...

Then, when a classmate deliberately made a sour remark—"Fang Xinghe's writing isn't as long as Han Han's, and his looks aren't as good as Lu Yi's"—she immediately teamed up with her good friend and got into a physical fight with the classmate.

Fang Xinghe truly did not care, while Fang Xinghe's fans truly did.

Adorable~~~

...

Wang Yali suddenly tossed aside her newspaper and pounded on the table with a series of thuds: "A lone wolf? Asking blindly, writing nonsense!"

She turned to call Zhao Chunhua, only to have her call rejected.

...

Zhao Chunhua rushed into the office area in a flurry, shouting at the top of her lungs to direct operations: "Stop staring at the *Xinmin Evening News*; they aren't in direct competition with us! Immediately follow up on *Added Value* and dig deeper for me. Don't go down the angle of the lone wolf; write about his loyalty to his friends, write about the softness and tenderness hidden deep within his heart!"

Good move!

Chunhua, oh Chunhua, you certainly understand traffic and engagement.

...

Feng Yuanzheng went to work at the theater, smiling and cupping his hands in greeting to everyone he met, revealing the *Xinmin Evening News* tucked under his arm, yet he never once proactively brought up a single word about Fang Xinghe.

My good friends, do me the favor of being a bit more self-aware.

He Bing, the most tactful of them all, played right into it: "Oh my, I was just looking for the *Xinmin Evening News*. Old Feng, how is your student's new article? Punchy or not?"

Feng Yuanzheng's spirits perked up as he immediately pulled out the newspaper and shoved it into He Bing's hands, all the while putting on an expression of frowning and head-shaking.

"This one is just so-so, I suppose. Arrogant to a fault that overshoots the mark; I personally don't care much for it..."

Wang Gang and Song Dandan had just been about to approach, but upon hearing this, they were instantly rendered speechless. They gestured dismissively at him with their fingers and turned around to make a clean getaway.

Want to put on airs in front of us?

Hah, we won't even give you the chance!

...

Chen Danya went to her brother's place to beg for a piece of calligraphy: *The gentleman is cautious when alone*. But after thinking better of it, she withheld the piece, having no intention of rashly mailing it over just like that.

Hoping for him to become a gentleman was, of course, the most wonderful expectation one could harbor, but the problem was, what should one do if a fourteen-year-old boy simply had no desire to become a gentleman?

Let's wait a little longer.

...

On the other side, Yu Hua and Liu Zhenyun went together to visit Shi Tiesheng. As the three brothers chatted idly, it was naturally and inevitably that the conversation turned to Fang Xinghe. Shi Tiesheng and Liu Zhenyun asked, and he answered.

Shi Tiesheng: "Is Fang Xinghe easy to get along with?"

Yu Hua shook his head vigorously: "No, not at all, he stings!"

Liu Zhenyun: "How so? Is there actually someone you feel intimidated by?"

Yu Hua shook his head again: "It's not intimidation; it's just that the little kid made it crystal clear he doesn't want to play with us."

The two grew even more curious: "How could you tell?"

"We belong to Confucianism; he wants to belong to Taoism."

Yu Hua then recounted to the two of them the casual chat from the drinking session that day, repeating Fang Xinghe's words almost word for word.

Look, the scribbling little puppy was actually someone with a brilliantly clear mind. He saw everything, but that still didn't affect his continued appreciation of Fang Xinghe.

As for Shi Tiesheng and Liu Zhenyun, they remained silent for a long time, ultimately both letting out a sigh.

"A lone wolf indeed..."

"It's so good to be young. So sober, so uninhibited, so wild, and so mad!"

Yu Hua wore an expression of sheer vexation: "He's purely a little swindler. The more I ponder that drinking incident, the more wrong it feels. Damn it, I was intimidated by him that day!"

"Normal. Your courage isn't much bigger than a rat's."

After a round of mockery, Liu Zhenyun said with seemingly casual indifference: "Our Liu Yulin likes Fang Xinghe too. If he plans to publish a book, help me get a copy, and in return, I can write a preface for him."

Yu Hua pointed at him and burst into loud laughter. Shi Tiesheng couldn't help laughing either; the abacus beads were practically clacking right against his face, so laughter was entirely warranted.

Liu Zhenyun wasn't annoyed in the least and forcibly defended himself: "I'm just curious, wanting to know what such an extraordinary young man would actually write. I don't mean anything else by it."

"Fine, I believe you. Tiesheng, did you buy it?"

Shi Tiesheng didn't chime in with agreement, instead marveling: "It's not just Zhenyun who's curious; I'm curious too. That kid is truly absurd. Just reading the interviews makes me feel he's absurd."

"You illiterate, are you trying to say rebellious and unorthodox?"

"No, I just mean absurd."

Shi Tiesheng explained with utmost seriousness: "People who rebel against orthodoxy exist in every era, but they still remain within the same framework; you can generally figure out where they come from and where they are headed. Take Wang Shuo, for instance. Isn't he rebellious enough? Actually, he's quite easy to understand. But Fang Xinghe is different. To me, everything about him feels awkward. How can a fourteen-year-old child be like this? I don't know how else to describe it, so I'll just broadly summarize it as absurd."

"Damn! You really know how to summarize!"

Yu Hua let out a strange squawk and raised his little finger.

...

Liu Zhenyun turned serious, however, and spoke from the heart about his personal impressions.

"I've read all of his interviews. Through those articles and interviews, Fang Xinghe has very successfully established a fully mature literary persona, but that persona is so extraordinary that it bears an indescribable fracture with his external appearance—physically still a child, spiritually self-sufficient in his true nature, contradictory yet abrupt, profound yet weighty. So I think the expectations held by Wang Meng and Mr. Ba Jin make sense; the little kid is truly worth looking forward to."

"Maybe this is just what genius looks like..."

Just as Yu Hua finished lamenting, he turned back to find Shi Tiesheng and Liu Zhenyun staring at him with wide, pleading eyes.

"So... advance drafts?"

"A preface?"

"Are you two making wishes to me?" Yu Hua asked, terrified, as he hurriedly waved his hands. "I'm not even guaranteed to see them! The kid is not a friend!"

"You can become friends!"

Liu Zhenyun looked completely unfazed, while Shi Tiesheng fell into deep thought: "It seems he's under a lot of pressure right now, doesn't it? Why don't you pitch in and help out a bit..."

Yu Hua's eyes widened in utter shock: "You two want to read other people's drafts, yet you're instigating me to go out and pick a fight?!"

Shi Tiesheng was thoroughly righteous: "Well, you shoved me in front of the goal post to be the goalkeeper!"

Old Tie had been paralyzed in both legs for many years and could only use a wheelchair, yet he had been pushed onto the soccer field by this scoundrel Yu Hua to defend the goal with his face. A soccer ball the size of a boulder had whizzed right past his head, scaring him so badly he nearly jumped out of his skin.

At the mention of this, Liu Zhenyun cackled nonstop. Seizing the moment, Yu Hua rolled his eyes and pushed him right back into the fray.

"I'm not doing it anyway. Zhenyun is the curious one, so let him go."

Liu Zhenyun, however, possessed that kind of sullen, reserved personality who tried hard not to offend anyone, and immediately declined: "Forget it then. Actually, I'm not that curious after all."

The three middle-aged children rambled on about nothing in particular, completely boundless and unfocused, resulting in a whole lot of empty chatter that accomplished nothing.

Yet, they saw through the situation with crystal clarity.

Liu Zhenyun asserted: "Fang Xinghe's remark about 'human blood steamed buns' has offended far too many people. There must be an awful lot of people who hate him right now."

Shi Tiesheng chimed in: "The ones cursing the laid-off worker policies and the ones decrying quality-oriented education are the exact same batch of people. Their main profession is stirring up trouble, and their secondary profession is cursing their mothers. What normal person has the energy to wear themselves out against them? The kid doesn't know his own strength, slapping left and right—he's going to have no small amount of trouble in the future."

Yu Hua, however, was unexpectedly calm: "The media has turned things into such a foul mess; it's about time someone taught them a lesson."

Liu Zhenyun and Shi Tiesheng were instantly dumbfounded.

"Wait, who's teaching whom a lesson?"

"Isn't that backwards? I don't even know how Fang Xinghe is supposed to survive this."

Yu Hua puffed on a cigarette, thrust his hands onto his hips with an arrogant swagger, and wore a thoroughly smug expression: "Tsch, survive what? You guys underestimate Fang Xinghe far too much."

Liu Zhenyun immediately realized there was juicy gossip to be had and perked right up: "What's going on? Is there inside information?"

Shi Tiesheng sniffed the air, took a deep breath of second-hand smoke, and then eagerly extended a hand: "I'll join you for one. Tell us slowly..."

*Slap!*

"Get away with you! What kind of smoking are you doing!"

Yu Hua slapped Old Tie's hand away and then dropped some hard truth on the two of them.

"The Fang Xinghe you see is only the one painted by the media. That's why you two, just like the readers outside, think he has potential and talent, but for now that's about it—not worth paying any extra attention to. We judges are different; we see more. Let me ask you a two-part question: purely from the perspective of their works, how would you rank Fang Xinghe's articles and interviews?"

Liu Zhenyun pondered for a moment, then spoke slowly: "To me, *The Town Test-Takers* is first, *Knowing Without Conforming* is second, and *Reading* is third—though it's still above Han Han's *Peering at the Cup*, because the conception and framework win by more than just a little bit."

Shi Tiesheng added: "As for the interviews, *I Fought with Fate* has the most power, *Heaven and Earth Unsettled* is the most haughty, and *The Lone Wolf* is the most unbridled."

Yu Hua smiled craftily.

"As for the ones that have been made public, you can rank them however you like. But in our hearts, he has two more articles that are even more fucking awesome!

One is called *The Dog Days of Youth Are Going to the Dogs*, and it's wild in a way you wouldn't dare believe.

The other is called *Sex, Violence, and Lies*, which is my absolute number one.

So you see, a normal contestant only gets commentary from a single judge, Han Han got two, but Fang Xinghe got a full seven—those seven were the ones published, but actually there were more than seven people who wrote comments at the time; it's just that some felt their writing wasn't good enough and gave up."

"Ah?!"

Utterly dumbfounded, flabbergasted to the core.

"Really, it's that exaggerated!"

Yu Hua spread his hands, offering up a head-tilted expression that clearly said, *I'm fucking speechless too*.

"When we first started reading the manuscripts, we concluded that Ding Yan was a genius; then we thought Han Han was a genius—that kind of spiritual spark is something you can spot at a single glance. But by the time we later saw Fang Xinghe, all of us were fucking dumbfounded. That wasn't just a spiritual spark anymore; the level at which he thinks about problems is already far, far above all contemporary young writers.

Do you know what he wrote in *Sex, Violence, and Lies*?

I made a copy and read it often when I got home, and I can even recite certain passages by heart.

He wrote: *'The suppression or rampant spread of sexual desire has never been a moral issue; it is an economic issue. Once men and women get rich, they all fucking whore around; eunuchs, when living slightly comfortably, still wanted to find a palace maid to share meals with. Elevating this bit of pussy or dick trouble into something too sacred or too vulgar is a sickness, and if you're sick, you need to fucking go get treated.*

*Conversely, being born without raising is not an economic issue, but rather the liberation of the dark side of human nature after neoliberalism has been unthinkably abused and misused without bottom lines.*

*This liberation not only destroys the already precarious moral bottom line of certain humanoid creatures, but also constructs a new firewall within their self-awareness—is responsibility ever more important than freedom?*

*In a demonic paradigm where freedom is above all else, all that is beautiful in the world can be re-priced.*

*How is it priced? Freely judged in one's heart, depending on my mood.*

*This sounds like it hasn't gone completely rotten to the core, as if there's still room for discretion.*

*But what's truly terrifying is that this firewall only stops others, never themselves; they will only grow increasingly frantic.*

*Then you gradually realize that what they crave is never spiritual freedom, but rather willful extortion from the outside, the arrogance of "I can do it, but you cannot speak of it," the hegemony of "those who benefit me are forgiven repeatedly, those who harm me are criminals."*

*Freedom seems like a cesspool where anything and everything can be shat into.*

*In essence, this is having no fucking shame.*

*Yet they will find many reasons to beautify this point: when dressed up decently enough, it's called lies; when not dressed decently enough, it's called violence...'*

...

Listen to that, what do you call a fucking genius?!"

...

"Do you think Wang Meng, Yi Ning, and Ye Xin—three dignified vice-chairmen of the Writers' Association—along with Peking University's Wu Zhipan and Fudan's Chen Sihe and that whole bunch of top-tier professors, why haven't they spoken up until now?

They're all holding back a big move over there!

True, there is no such thing as uncaused love in this world, but for Fang Xinghe, the ones willing to bear this bit of pressure to help him out are by no means just one or two. If it weren't for hesitating out of consideration for the kid's cold, Dao-over-Confucianism personality, people would have already stepped forward.

So stop worrying blindly. Not only does he have the ability to curse his way to victory against a whole crowd all by himself, but even if he did need help, the rest of us might not even manage to squeeze into a spot.

When the time comes, if you want to join the fun, just tag along and beat the drums from the sidelines; if you can't be bothered to move, just sit back and watch the show in peace. He, my friends, is not going to run into any trouble."

"Hiss..."

Shi Tiesheng and Liu Zhenyun stared at each other, momentarily stripped of all ability to express themselves.

Absurd, and increasingly more absurd by the minute.

Yet this result was also logically and bizarrely correct.

As top-tier writers themselves, they could understand the sheer gold content of those angry tirades all too well.

Put it this way: any top-tier litterateur writing sentences like this could single-handedly prop up the core of a Mao Dun Literature Prize-level work.

This kind of penetrating insight, this essential return to truth bridging top and bottom, this critique of the boundless spread of neoliberalism, and this unfettered, wild connection of elements was practically an exposition of world-inheriting caliber.

And what made one's scalp tingle the most was yet another layer of contradiction—

If writers of the same generation's top tier wrote prose like this, well fine, you're awesome, I'll stick up a thumb—happy now? After I go home, I'd still nag and criticize to my old partner about what you wrote poorly, then spread out my paper, vowing to write something even more awesome to crush you to death.

Hey, don't write it off; once inspiration strikes, you might actually manage to write it.

However, when these words come from the mouth of a fourteen-year-old boy...

Motherfucker, that makes the problem a massive one!

Criticize him? Not only can you not bring yourself to shed that old face of yours, but you genuinely can't pick bones out of an egg with a kid.

Praise him? No matter how you look at it, it leaves a bitter taste in your mouth, because this isn't a level that can be brushed off with a condescending comment like "the younger generation is to be feared." Either you keep your mouth shut, or if you open it, you have to give him absolute face, otherwise it just makes you look blind and lacking in skill.

So it really is better to just shut your mouth, stay uninvolved, and pretend you never saw it.

Yet, on the other hand, while you can keep your mouth shut outside and lie to yourself, once you get home, your heart is still in a turmoil!

Damn it, he's only fourteen! Are we old folks supposed to live or not?!

"Damn it!!!"

Liu Zhenyun rubbed his face hard and muttered to himself: "He's truly fucking awesome..."

"This is getting increasingly more fucking absurd..."

A strong sense of bewilderment surfaced in Shi Tiesheng's eyes, and he asked with a lack of self-confidence: "Also, is it just my imagination? How does Fang Xinghe's piece *Sex* match up so perfectly with the current situation?"

"It matches up precisely. As long as anyone dares to pivot toward freedom of speech or freedom of individual will, *Sex* is bound to be a blow straight to the head."

"Hoh, once this gets published, won't those demons and monsters go completely crazy?"

"They're bound to go crazy." Yu Hua nodded with exaggerated solemnity. "Anyway, when we first saw it back then, almost none of us dared to believe it. Li Qigang didn't even stay in his office; he ran to the reception area and guarded him for three days..."

Shi Tiesheng was puzzled: "Then why hasn't anyone brought it up? I looked at your commentaries, and they all seemed quite restrained and general."

"We discussed this matter."

Yu Hua explained: "*Sex* isn't suitable to be released yet, and *Youth* and *Growing Up* were written specifically for adolescents. If we wildly praise him right now, it'll probably be hard to convince the public, so everyone decided to hold back for a bit and wait until his major full-length novel or essay collection hits the market."

Liu Zhenyun suddenly discovered a blind spot and let out a loud cry of astonishment: "Wait! Doesn't that mean none of the people cursing Fang Xinghe right now have any idea that all you judges are standing behind him?!"

"Mmh-hhm~~~ You got it!"

Yu Hua spread his hands and let out a series of cackling, wicked laughs—both wretched and adorable.

Liu Zhenyun and Shi Tiesheng broke out in goosebumps all over, sucking in cold air with hissing gasps. They were completely numb.

"Good grief, are you guys vicious or what?!"

Yu Hua refused to take the blame and spread his hands innocently: "What kind of talk is that? Did I tell them to chase after Fang Xinghe and curse him? Weren't they just asking for it~~~?"

The two men thought about it, and well, that was true. So they set aside their redundant worries and began looking forward to it alongside Yu Hua.

"Well, those fools have kicked a steel plate now. Tough luck for them..."

"Serves them right!"

Shi Tiesheng pushed his wheelchair to the window, Yu Hua stood beside him with his hands clasped behind his back, and Liu Zhenyun folded his arms across his chest to align himself automatically. The three of them lined up in a row like cell phone signal bars.

Deep in the courtyard, vegetation grew lushly, and even in the corners where sunlight never reached year-round, nameless weeds and wildflowers flourished.

"Full of vitality..."

"Mmh."

"We're all getting old..."

"You certainly are, but not me."

"Old Yu."

"Hmm?"

"When on earth is Fang Xinghe publishing his new book?"

"You're asking me? I'm even more anxious than you are, alright? Damn it, just thinking about it makes me itch all over."

"Same here. Want to read it."

The three birds of a feather scratched their heads in anxiety, wishing they could fast-forward straight to that day.

That would be a bright, sunny day with fair weather, when Fang Xinghe, driving a heavy-duty semi-truck, would slam his foot down on the accelerator amidst the ruins of civilization, charging ahead wildly and running the hell over every single demon and monster on the road...

To thereby announce his formal arrival.