Lin Zhao is underrated. She will be recognized as one of the greatest force in contemporary Chinese writers soon. I have not felt such urge to learn about a writer since Borges's Ficciones and Calvino's Six Memos for the Next Millennium.
The diction is too convoluted and redundant, clogged my imagination a little bit. This technique of overwhelming one’s senses by tuning up the quantity of sensory stimuli rather than their intensity works better in films I think.
Full of signs and symbolism, it jumps, digresses and imagines. And it is what underneath or intertwined that constructs the flesh and blood: everything that a child, a teenage girl and maybe a premature woman has tasted. It is so personal and yet so universal: not everyone has or needs a love crush, an abandoning father or a mourning mother, but the emotions carried by the deliberate giff-gaff speak for itself. It is a flowing creek, an endless stream of consciousness, small, delicate and everlasting.