In the preceding text, we used the phrase "Beijing zhiqing" as a modifier to refer to Lu Yao's two lovers. This was not out of any perverse taste on the author's part. I wrote it this way because Lu Yao himself once said: "Not long after the Beijing zhiqing arrived, I had a premonition that my future girlfriend would be among them." Lu Yao was a man of strength who created his own life. What he described as a premonition was really more of a plan. And he had his reasons for planning this way: "Which local girl could possibly support me through university? Without university, how would I ever get out? Was I supposed to rot away in the countryside for the rest of my life?" Sure enough, Lu Yao did find two "Beijing zhiqing," and neither relationship turned out particularly "happy": the first girlfriend, in 1969, when Lu Yao was under political investigation, had someone deliver a breakup letter on her behalf—back then he was still Wang Weiguo, not yet Lu Yao. It is said that many years later, Lu Yao roared at a friend: "Do you know under what circumstances she abandoned me?" "Do you know what that kind of abandonment means?" "Do you know what it's like to have salt rubbed into your wounds?" "Do you know what a 'backstab from those closest to you' feels like when you're at your lowest?" "Do you know how much suffering I endured, how much I bit down on my teeth, just to prove myself?" What circumstances? It was 1969, and the fires of the Cultural Revolution had been burning for two or three years. During those years, roughneck heroes from every corner turned the world upside down—some names you know: Wang Hongwen, who had fought in the Korean War, leapt from a cotton mill security officer to one of the top figures in greater Shanghai, and in that very year of 1969 was elevated to the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, with an even grander future ahead of him. But 1969 was a nightmare for a larger cohort of rebel heroes. The old guard found their chance to strike back—some were killed, some imprisoned. Yang Xiaokai was arrested in 1969; his mother hanged herself. Yu Luoke, who wrote "On Family Origin," was executed in 1970, sentenced to death at a public trial in the Beijing Workers' Stadium. In 2019, I attended a Luo Dayou concert at that same venue; the concert was called: The Young Man Who Left Home All Those Years Ago. Lu Yao was like Yang Xiaokai and Yu Luoke, and also unlike them. What they shared was that they were all rebels, figures who stirred up storms—and it was precisely for this reason that misfortune found them in different places during the same period. What set them apart was that Yang Xiaokai and Yu Luoke fought for ideas, while Lu Yao's struggle was to escape an ordinary life. Of course, in the ultimate sense, this too is a kind of idea, but there is a difference nonetheless. Now it is 2025, and we can understand that in 1969, Wang Weiguo's situation was different from Yang Xiaokai's and Yu Luoke's—but Lu Yao at the time had no way of knowing this. Then again, perhaps the difference isn't so great: other Wang Weiguos in other places were also arrested, even executed. It is said that a rival faction in Yanchuan County had been filing complaints, claiming he was connected to deaths during armed factional fighting, and so there was talk of arresting him. It was at that very moment that Wang Weiguo received Lin Hong's breakup letter—the postman's timing really was impeccable. He was stripped of his positions and sent back to the village to work the land. We think he was lucky; he himself was scarred to the bone. I believe Lu Yao possessed a kind of wisdom born from his origins—a sensitivity to status and prospects. He knew with piercing clarity: the Beijing zhiqing would go back (and indeed they did, and half a century later took up the reins of succession), while he might rot away on the Loess Plateau. It wasn't that others couldn't recognize this; his wisdom lay in how profoundly and unwaveringly he held onto this recognition, and how resolutely, based on it, he chose to leave himself behind in pursuit of a different destiny. It is said that through a certain Beijing zhiqing, he glimpsed the possibility of writing his way out of the countryside, and so he began following Cao Guxi in writing poetry and running a literary journal. That was around 1971 or 1972, when Wang Weiguo chose a pen name for a poem, and that pen name was "Lu Yao." In 1973, Lu Yao was admitted to Yan'an University. Just as Wang Weiguo—before he became "Lu Yao"—had long foreseen, the Beijing zhiqing Lin Da became his wife, and like a plain-hearted northern Shaanxi woman, she worked hard, lived frugally, saved money to put him through school, went about grimy-faced, scrimping to buy him cigarettes—just as later, when he became the great writer Lu Yao, he would spend every last cent of the household income on premium cigarettes. Lu Yao and the Beijing zhiqing Lin Da's marriage did not end well. In 1992, just months before Lu Yao's death, Lin Da brought divorce papers to his hospital bed at Xijing Hospital, obtained his signature, and then boarded a train back to Beijing—she must have boarded at that station beneath Xi'an's city walls. Just a few months short, she did not see off the Lu Yao she had helped create on his final journey. I imagine that as Lin Da sat on that train leaving Xi'an, she must have thought of the one that brought her here in the late 1960s. What a long and brief span of time. When she left Beijing, she must have seen the red flags fluttering in every street and alley, must have heard the shrill blare of loudspeakers that, like a flood, drowned out their familiar daily lives. They had pledged to devote their youth to the great Northwest—that was said for others to hear; she could never have imagined her years in the Northwest would stretch so long. And when, during the bitter, endless winters of northern Shaanxi, she and that strong-willed, ambitious young man swore their vows, when she sacrificed her own youth, beauty, and future to support and forge that Lu Yao, when they named their daughter "Yuanyuan"—she could never have imagined their road together would be so short. All of this was fated. Just as Lu Yao wrote in his novels. Lu Yao wrote repeatedly about women and marriage in his fiction. He knew deeply that marriage was a crucial path for young men from the bottom to change their fate, and that marriage was key to a man's career. But he knew even more clearly that one can only seek a life partner according to one's own station—that cross-class marriages, where the doors don't match and the gates don't align, are inadvisable and doomed to end badly—with exceptions for a rare few heroes. And he was one of those rare heroes, even though his own marriage could hardly be said to have ended well. Years later, when he wrote Ordinary World, the brothers Shaoan and Shaoping lived out different lives for him. Shaoan refused Runye—he was the Lu Yao who knew that marrying above one's station leads to no good end. Shaoping was another Lu Yao, the one who, through reading, had embraced a larger world and possessed a higher spiritual realm, which allowed him to interact with Tian Xiaoxia with ease and humor. Readers a hundred years from now may be bewildered, so put simply: Shaoping was a coal miner from the Loess Plateau; Tian Xiaoxia was the daughter of a provincial Party secretary and a prominent journalist. Lu Yao wrote Shaoping's vanity and self-respect beautifully—of course he did, because he was writing about himself: he wrote of Shaoping receiving a letter from Xiaoxia, feeling proud to have such a "remarkable" girlfriend; he also wrote of Shaoping being invited to a banquet by the mine's propaganda chief because of Xiaoxia—Shaoping insisting on going, not for the free meal, but for "a man's self-respect"; and naturally he also wrote of Shaoping's struggles and spiritual anguish over the gap in their status. In the novel this flows seamlessly, and this is the key to reading the epic of Lu Yao himself: without reading this, we might have thought he was a true warlord, ruthlessly pursuing wealth and glory, entirely free of inner turmoil! But because we read this, we know that the warlord who stirred up storms in Yanchuan County in his tattered cotton jacket housed within his mighty frame nothing more than a poor child, and the spiritual anguish he endured in transforming from Wang Weiguo to Lu Yao required a great book to heal. He had Tian Xiaoxia say to Shaoping, "Don't take offense, don't be a stranger"—perhaps that was what he had longed to hear, what his Beijing zhiqing girlfriend never said to him. He had Shaoan ruthlessly refuse Runye—that was to shelter a poor man's self-respect. Why did he write Tian Xiaoxia's death? Perhaps he knew what her future with Shaoping would look like—he was living in that future, and from within that future he wrote the essay Morning Begins at Noon, in which he wrote about his daughter Yuanyuan but not his wife Lin Da. Not long after finishing that essay, he died—months before his death, on his hospital bed, he signed the divorce papers Lin Da had handed him. What was he thinking then? Did he think of the wild pear tree pact between Tian Xiaoxia and Shaoping? Did he think of the 1969 breakup letter? Did he think of the long, agonizing road from Wang Weiguo to Lu Yao? No matter how long and painful that road was, it was a road he carved out himself. Among all the pain, only one kind was real: the pain of a person becoming himself. He became the successful man he had set out to become; he became the man who, in the secular world, scaled the spiritual heights he had envisioned; and he became the man who forever left himself behind, and forever called himself back. A few months ago I wrote the following words, as the conclusion to this piece: from Wang Weiguo to Lu Yao was the long march of a will to power shaping itself, the long march of a man leaving himself to meet his destiny, and the long march of a writer grievously summoning the self he had left behind.