The word on the street

Wang started writing at high school to kill time between going to class and doing homework. When she went to university, she became a voracious reader, trying to absorb as much knowledge as possible. She resumed writing in 2014, during the first year of graduate studies for her master's degree at Fudan University.

"I used to worry that my writing would be crippled due to my limited knowledge, but when I started my graduate studies, I suddenly realized that I had something I wanted to say. So, in the following three years, I did very little of the research my graduate studies required, but wrote a lot as if I was trying to pay a debt that I owed before," she says.

Wang posted these short stories on her blog on douban.com without expecting to attract many readers. At first there were indeed few, but when she posted The Story of A Jing, readers of her work increased, which added to her confidence in a writing style that she decided to continue with. After being recommended to more readers by online platforms, Wang published several of her stories in periodicals, and then books

Now her second book Jiedao Jianghu (Street Smart) has been published, she is creating more stories about those "Street Heroes", which she says she finds more interesting, the more she keeps writing.

As Wang seemingly confines her writing in the limited space of the old community, people encourage her to write more about the larger world.

However, she says she feels a power that urges her to write about the community.

As she explained in an article: "I feel obligated to present another kind of landscape that may not be counted as landscape at all, to show the people's inner state when confronted with decline, their endless spirit and vitality even when they are coming to the end of their historical destiny."

"So far, I have written more than 200,000 words, but unfortunately, I have not yet been able to walk out of the community," she continues. "I have always been attached to those people."