“Oh… Okay.” Dejected, Zhang Yuwen accepted the criticism.
“If you want to create good literature,” the deputy editor advised, “you’ll have to interact with people more and not keep to yourself. You live alone?”
“Yup.” Zhang Yuwen had spent the entire year cooped up at home, working daily on this manuscript. The characters in his story were all products of his imagination. He was adept at finding character archetypes from literary masterpieces and reinterpreting them—as a director, he reworked the characters the screenwriters created, making their actions exaggerated and their personalities distinct. Every one of them had their own unique label, like characters straight out of comic books, vividly brought to life with the actors’ own reinterpretation. But strip away the glamor of the filming sets and the veneer of the performing arts, leaving just the text behind, and Zhang Yuwen’s creative shortcomings were completely exposed.
Indeed, all writers needed to observe other people and have unique life experiences to produce good works.
With that blow to his confidence, Zhang Yuwen went home, taking his manuscript with him. He reflected on his career path since his graduation. Everything had been smooth sailing; money and credentials seemed to simply fall into his lap, and he’d forgotten a crucial lesson his mentor had taught him in his professional creative writing class: The most important aspect of character creation was to connect with people and observe them.
Rather than resent the deputy editor, Zhang Yuwen was grateful to him for his insights. He hadn’t given up; he still wanted to be a writer and leave his mark on history. However, those who strove to make history rarely succeeded and were far more likely to achieve infamy. Only those with passion and lifelong dedication to their crafts could be remembered through the ages.
The next day, Zhang Yuwen picked himself up and took the subway to observe the weary faces of the corporate slaves. Then he went to the shared houses in Jiangnan and watched the people coming and going.
Separated by the Liujin River, Jiangnan and Jiangbei were two completely different worlds. He understood that to pay attention to reality, he first had to step into it, get close to it. Tall and handsome, he carried himself with poise and class, so while he was observing the street food stalls outside the filthy buildings in Jiangnan, many others were also watching him in curiosity, thinking he looked out of place here.
Zhang Yuwen had indeed lived in the Jiangnan District for a period in his childhood. It had been a long, long time since he last returned; so long he almost didn’t feel like he belonged here anymore.
He plucked up the courage to strike up casual conversations with the people, but it felt so awkward that he eventually left in a hurry.
Then, he came up with a bold idea—
I can rent out the house! There are six rooms in total. I’ll take one for myself and rent four out to observe the tenants’ lives.
This brain wave motivated Zhang Yuwen. The next day, he tweaked this idea to “rent out the house to men with the same sexual orientation as himself.” After all, for the sake of their personal safety, most girls wouldn’t want to be roommates with unfamiliar men. And if he was going to rent to men only, then it wasn’t much of a step to limit his tenants to gay men. Being gay was just one aspect of their identities, after all.
A man of action, Zhang Yuwen put his listing up on a local rental website the next afternoon. To keep people from finding out just how wealthy he was, he posed as a sub-landlord, claiming to be looking after the house for a friend who was abroad. He also limited the tenants to male homosexuals, which proved quite effective. After all, most straight men were homophobic and avoided gay guys like the plague. Letting them live among gay men would really trigger their persecution complex.
He wouldn’t need to worry about girls, either. Even if the tenants were all gay, they were still guys, which posed a lot of inconvenience—even if a girl were to come knocking, he could simply dissuade them and send them away.
He set the rent at a rather low price. After all, the goal was simply to find a few samples for him to observe and gather material.
That same night, he received one hundred and twenty-seven messages.
He decided to simply screen them based on his intuition and select suitable roommates who would also double as observational subjects, turning No. 7 Riverbay Road into his own material-gathering site. He could collect ideas for his novel without leaving his house—so why not?