Writing his own reality

Peng Jianbin. [Photo provided to China Daily]

When Peng Jianbin was a grade-two student at a boarding high school in Guiyang county, Central China's Hunan province, 24 years ago, as a top student excelling in the sciences, he was looking for a way to entertain himself. Finding that few people went to the reading room, he decided to go there every noon during nap time.

Peng's love for literature burgeoned as he read essays about rural areas in a magazine, which he naturally felt connected to as a young man from the countryside. He also became fascinated by Gu Cheng, a representative poet in contemporary China.

"By then I realized that I had fallen in love with literature and thought if I could write like Gu, that would be great," he says.

"It's like I had secretly found a byway that nobody knew about. No other student was as interested in literature as I was. It was so cool and so exciting."

This was during the second semester of grade two, and, one year later, in 2000, he would join 3.75 million students around the country in sitting the college entrance examination.

But literature had taught him to rebel against examination-oriented education and to pursue something poetic, so Peng abandoned himself to the world of literature, reading avidly and giving up study. Unsurprisingly, he failed badly in the exam.

"I wasn't going to college, but my mother asked me what I was going to do: Study for another year preparing for next year's college entrance examination or find work. It was not until that moment I realized that I had to face reality," he says.

Peng revisits the residence where he spent his childhood in rural Hunan province during this year’s Spring Festival holiday. [Photo provided to China Daily]

Panicked and lost, he ultimately chose to go to a casual vocational college - which he had not even applied to - in a bid to keep reading and writing for another three years, shunning reality by immersing himself in the world of literature.

Absent from most classes, in the library he read fiction by Franz Kafka that set a spiritual backdrop for his writing, as well as Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde and William Faulkner, among others. He wrote too, composing poems, short stories and keeping diaries.

Despite his introverted nature, Peng studied marketing at college. After graduation, like his classmates, he landed a job as a salesman, traveling around to promote products, such as light boxes, grille lamps, wall switches, tiles or curtains, to retailers and personal customers.

Traveling through big and small cities across the Pearl River Delta, and Guizhou and Zhejiang provinces, Peng needed to handle agents and clients and, during the night, he would transform the absurdities and amusing things in life into stories about the love lives, work, failures, struggles and confusion of most ordinary young people.

He changed jobs frequently, with excuses such as "too boring" and "those products are not poetic", as the protagonist in one of his short stories told his girlfriend.

"I would really want to quit after one or two days in a new company. The products were not beautiful and the publicity of my employers was vulgar and unpleasant. But it might be my way to shun reality, because that's how reality looks," he says, pondering, "other people can adapt to it, why can't I?"

Peng (right) attends the Indie Bookstore Festival held in Wuhan, Hubei province, in April. [Photo provided to China Daily]

On business trips, Peng always took small books with him, and finished reading one each day. On the surface, he was a salesman traveling around to sell products, but actually he was immersed in a literary world and could hear a voice speaking in his head all the time.

"When I caught a sentence or a word, I knew I could start my story," he says.

At cheap hotel rooms, which were often not even furnished with a table and a chair, he would lean on the pillows, and write his stories with a notebook and a pen he carried with him.

"It's a romantic thing that few people have experienced," he says.

He wrote fast. At midnight, he went online to post his newly-finished stories before tearing his manuscripts up.

On Douban, an online platform where people can rate and comment on books, some readers said that the characters in Peng's stories often appear vague. In response, the writer says that "characters are not important for me".

"I see a story as a whole, as if it were a friend of mine with blood and flesh and its own personality, rather than focusing on a particular character and their personality," he says.

"For me, a good short story has a shape in my mind. It's not about the details or characters, but the work as a whole. Many works by Kafka or Jorge Luis Borges are just like that. Some of them are like a gloomy person," he explains.

After working as a salesman for about six years, Peng started writing advertisements for real estate developers, which turned out to be even worse work.

"As a salesman, I had a lot of writing materials and free time to write," he says.

I Went to the Dances at Chandlerville. [Photo provided to China Daily]

In 2012, Peng published his first collection of short stories I Went to the Dances at Chandlerville, which were written when he was a salesman. The homonymous story was inspired by the poem Lucinda Matlock by American poet and novelist Edgar Lee Masters. In 2020, when the publishing company Form was founded, they reached out to Peng, hoping to publish his short stories.

In November that year, a new edition of I Went to the Dances at Chandlerville was published. Some other short stories and essays that Peng had written as a salesman in Guizhou province between 2004 and 2006, but had originally felt embarrassed by, were collected in another book Bujiandian Yu Beichanmian Shu (literally meaning a piece of writing in an unpolished language exuded with unrestrained emotion). The title was inspired by a poem written by Yan Jin from the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) on the wall of a hotel in Guizhou.

More than a dozen years later, rereading those "embarrassing" stories, Peng was touched by the courage and solitude of that young salesman.

After writing real estate adverts for two years, Peng spent another two years switching from one job to another, including six months delivering parcels.

However, once his first book was published in 2012, things changed. He was offered editing work by media organizations and publishers.

Bujiandian Yu Beichanmian Shu. [Photo provided to China Daily]

Jijing Lianmian De Shanmai. [Photo provided to China Daily]

In 2017, he got married and became a father. He did not resume writing until 2019, when Chen Lingyun, editor-in-chief of Form got in touch.

Earlier this year, Peng's third book Jijing Lianmian De Shanmai (The Silent Mountain Ranges) was published. Featuring eight short stories, including six new ones written in the past two years to "record his ordinariness and insignificance and prevent himself from vanishing from the world", as he says in the preface of the book. They are mostly about the people that erratic salesmen encounter in their work and life, about their confusion, struggles, expectations, failures and sad love stories.

"I don't think I have an unparalleled talent in writing, but I have written confidently because I've found a new area in which to express my special feelings," he said in a previous interview.

Although the new book has won him more attention from the media, Peng personally dislikes it, because, compared with the previous two books, the stories in the third one appear more realistic.

"For me, writing is not to let readers empathize with the stories, but let them discover a new world, even if at first they feel familiar with it," he says.

"There must be something creative in your writing, in the artistic form or content. Otherwise, what you write will be too cliche. And that's one of my standards for a good story, and what will give me goose bumps in my own reading experience.

"It's not because being realistic is not good, but because I want to lead readers to a reality along a byroad that no one has ever tread before," he says.

Peng Jianbin’s son was born in 2017 and, since the closure of a magazine that he worked for, Peng has enjoyed spending more time with him. [Photo provided to China Daily]

To find that byroad is not easy, but Peng says that the artists or writers he adores, such as Vincent van Gogh and Kafka, managed to keep their personal style, even if they were not acknowledged in their own time. "So what matters is to keep one's own style rather than follow the stream," he says.

In 2021, Peng won the Dianchi Literary Award. Commenting on Peng's stories, the jury said that they have two sides that contradict each other. On one hand the characters face life firmly, and on the other, they appear transient and erratic, like scattered feathers drifting in the wind of night and lonely stones rolling down a slope. The writer creates a Kafkaesque obstinacy, solitude and hollowness.

Several years ago, he rejected an invitation to join a writers' association, and recently he sold his home in downtown Changsha, the capital of Hunan, to go and live in a cheaper suburb. With more savings, "I can write whatever I like," he says.

Just like his diary entries from many years ago, which stated his ambition to transport himself not to further places, but to more remote ones.

In the spring of 2021, Peng and his son take shelter under bushes from a sudden downpour during a hiking trip. [Photo provided to China Daily]