Words turn small town lifestyle into a big story

Just like most small cities and towns around China, middle-aged people whose children have left home to work or study favor square dances and short-video platforms on smartphones to kill time. Some of them use mobile karaoke apps to sing local opera and popular songs.

Some, however, go to help babysit their grandchildren and inevitably encounter a bittersweet period, adapting to the younger generation's new urban way of life.

Most of these scenarios can be tracked in Lin's works. He has also dug into the subtle sentiments and life twists of the disadvantaged locals.

There is struggle, there is heartache and there is life-an overwhelmed single mother, parents who lose their one and only child, an old woman selling vegetables, a Vietnamese bride who married a local husband, a beekeeper, a tailor, a fortuneteller and a carpenter who made coffins.

Writer Chen Runting, a friend of Lin, is impressed that figures Lin has created are living amid great conflict, but at the end of the stories they seem to have solved the problems in a symbolic, and often drastic, way.

Lin's doctoral tutor at Beijing's Tsinghua University, renowned writer Ge Fei, also points out that Lin has been greatly influenced by those imaginative literary works he had read that were often legends and full of allegory.

Lin studied in Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Beijing and was once a visiting scholar at Duke University in the United States.

He was trapped at home for six months during the COVID-19 pandemic and had to finish his doctoral dissertation defense on comparative literature online in July.

For the first time in over 10 years, he had a chance to readjust to the life of his hometown, and to take the time to listen to his childhood friends, trying to understand their choices and the subsequent happiness, dullness and stresses that are different from his lengthy campus life.

Lin sees it a rare opportunity to collect vivid materials for further writing.

A literature teacher once asked the author in his high school to pay more attention to people and life around him.

Later, he was greatly encouraged when his mother was moved to tears while reading a national award-winning essay he wrote in 2007 about his family history.

He now actively inserts dialect and local expressions into his work. Literature featuring the Chaoshan region is becoming ever more popular.