Hi there, I'm Zhonglun, and I write.
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“Back then, the world was a vast ocean. The World Wide Web was its reflection.”
Before I turned thirty-two, I had Claude build me a personal blog.
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Sketch · 2026-06-11 · 9 min readSketch 7: Love Life
“She found it difficult to tell whether she was in pain or not.”
A sketch of love: in the beginning, it was his ignorance that attracted her.
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Essay · 2026-04-22 · 15 min readHistoriography in the 22nd Century
“History is the individual, and the individual is childhood!”
By the 22nd century, history has become a luxury good: an old historian hunts for the person who pressed the button in the world war.
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Portrait · 2026-03-31 · 9 min readPortrait 11: The Game Console
“As it slips away, feel the grains of sand rubbing against your skin, and watch it with your whole heart.”
He tells an AI about a game console from a 2003 KFC Kids' Meal—the last time he remembers being happy.
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Jazz · 2026-03-14 · 9 min readJazz 5: Snakehips Earl Tucker
“He felt that daylight did not belong to him. Snakehips came out only at night.”
The fifth piece in the Jazz suite: the life of Harlem's legendary dancer Snakehips Tucker—from religious convulsions to Elvis's pelvis.
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Portrait · 2026-02-23 · 12 min readPortrait 10: The Massage Parlor
“Pain is an obstruction.”
A one-in-ten-thousand massage parlor in Khao Yai, Thailand: a fat woman, a large dog, and healing that does not demand pain as its price.
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Jazz · 2026-02-02 · 40 min readJazz 4: Traveling to Dance
“Many things prolong and sustain life. Very few things widen it. They are rare.”
The fourth movement in the jazz suite: traveling because of dance—from Istanbul to Herräng, two years drawing a circle.
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Essay · 2025-06-04 · 16 min readMicro-Drama: My Husband, the City's Richest Man
“A drowning person, flailing in panic, has caught hold of an aircraft carrier's mast.”
Thirty minutes inside a domineering-CEO micro-drama: who is being humiliated, and who paid 19.9 yuan?
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Portrait · 2025-05-14 · 6 min readPortrait 9: Curtains
“Ugliness is a form of retaliation, like going on strike.”
Beginning with a pair of custom curtains in circus colours: a monologue about houses, mothers, and privacy.
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Jazz · 2025-02-09 · 38 min readJazz 3: Downhill
“We are the lighter ones. One day, we will be the first to float away like balloons, Lele.”
The third movement in the jazz suite: four lives for a child who was not permitted to be born, each beginning with the words: he survived.
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Sketch · 2024-12-24 · 5 min readSketch 6: The Bakery
“In her time, a dignified distance existed between people and things. Something like cooperation, but without the demand for precision, because precision is a kind of harm.”
From a baker on a farm to Grandma's hairtail: five sketches about flour, fire, and waiting.
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Essay · 2024-11-11 · 4 min readOld Angel
“Those were the days. We were hopeful.”
A letter to an old pen pal: hands stained red by bayberries, an angel's name from the Bible, and the days when people still wrote letters.
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Portrait · 2024-07-05 · 16 min readPortrait 8: Letter of Denunciation
“I am innocent. The innocent will go on living.”
A letter to the censors: three generations of women, a sewing machine, and the pendulum of history swinging back.
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Jazz · 2024-06-07 · 11 min readJazz 2: Orpheus
“Beauty is incompleteness. Beauty is ugliness seeping through. Beauty is the scar.”
The second piece in the Jazz suite: a long Orphic poem—a round trip through hell, on the dance floor.
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Jazz · 2024-04-06 · 8 min readJazz 1: Ode to Onanism
“No shame can pierce me now. I am a proletarian, a sans-culotte.”
The first piece in the Jazz suite: the day and night of a masturbator, abject by daylight and king after dark.
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Portrait · 2024-04-01 · 17 min readPortrait 7: Fire
“I think everyone still dies far too soon. They should all have had one more look.”
In memory of a girl whose name felt like fire: her room remains untouched, succulents spilling past the windowsill.
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Sketch · 2024-03-09 · 30 min readSketch 5: Vietnam
“People search decay for salt and savor. Then they wait.”
Travel notes from Hanoi to Huế: a broth simmered for eight hours, and a country simmered for four hundred years.
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Portrait · 2024-02-08 · 12 min readPortrait 6: A Foggy Day
“I cannot feel love unless it has passed forever.”
Remembering an old love in the fog of Hainan: five meetings, one moment that changed them both, and a power bank.
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Portrait · 2023-12-27 · 8 min readPortrait 5: The Urinal
“But perhaps his entire life outside the restroom is tethered to the urinal.”
From Duchamp's fountain to the railway station's waterfall: an urban history observed through the urinal.
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Sketch · 2023-12-24 · 3 min readSketch 4: Highway
“Now everything is clear except you.”
Hearing Norah Jones on Christmas Eve returns me to the back seat of a childhood Passat—Mum in front, the light golden.
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Portrait · 2023-12-21 · 6 min readPortrait 4: Invisalign
“From countless experiments it has calculated the temperature at which the water will not feel hot; you think you are taking a bath until you are cooked.”
A sociology of Invisalign: a modern method for making enslavement perceptible to the smallest possible degree.
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Sketch · 2023-12-11 · 4 min readSketch 3: First Snow
“as if they were the birthmarks of stars running through the night.”
A bar sketch on the night of Beijing's first snow: some go outside to watch it; one girl stays on the empty floor to practise gliding.
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Essay · 2023-09-27 · 12 min readProfessor Erikson
“Not everything is shining, but everything that shines is.”
On the day I learned that Professor Erikson had died, I reread ten years of emails—remembering a teacher who taught for fifty-three years.
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Sketch · 2023-07-24 · 11 min readSketch 2: The Gig-Work Market
“Here, civilization assumes the posture of a basic skeleton.”
A sketch of Beijing's largest gig-work market: at the end of a street selling burial clothes, men waiting for work sit astride shared bicycles they have not unlocked.
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Portrait · 2023-07-17 · 11 min readPortrait 3: The Stepladder
“As I cut the cake in two, H said it was the first birthday cake he had eaten in his life.”
Revisiting H, a friend from the factory: a craft practiced atop a stepladder, a ninety-yuan air mattress, and a cake cut in half.
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Sketch · 2023-07-11 · 10 min readSketch: Church
“I asked one of them where we were going. To the bottom of the sea, he said.”
Two churches in Guangzhou: Hong Xiuquan's counterfeit dream, Ye Mingchen's loyalty, and a traveler stopped at the door.
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Portrait · 2023-06-22 · 4 min readJune Portrait 2: The Blue Replica
“We leave footprints as we travel / Our footprints do not become our burden / But they will become yours.”
The second June portrait: a poem for a shared bicycle—the blue replica lover.
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Portrait · 2023-06-20 · 3 min readJune Portrait
“Fragility exerts a powerful gravity.”
The first June portrait: the man with the most fragile face in the dance studio.
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Essay · 2023-05-13 · 15 min readThe Man Who Eats Napkins
“To be born into this world is to be wounded and recover, over and over.”
A comprehensive examination of a man who eats napkins: from the click of nail clippers to the director behind the hidden camera.
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Essay · 2023-04-01 · 21 min readPaper Alley
“The rice was still steaming in the cooker. It had burned. The greens had been cut and laid on the chopping board.”
On New Year's Eve, I return alone to Paper Alley, where Grandpa once lived—a lane the city passed over, and the site of one man's disappearance.
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Essay · 2023-03-04 · 8 min readThe Restless Person
“One thing connects to the next. One moment becomes a springboard into another. Where was she going again?”
In seat B of a second-class high-speed train carriage, a restless woman tries three positions—and relives an entire life of being unable to sit still.
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Essay · 2022-12-12 · 16 min readOne Day in the Galaxy
“A defining feature of the Galactic Age was that words no longer worked.”
A galactic science-fiction triptych: a human web, a bureaucratic philosophy, and an emperor who never left his little golden room.
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Essay · 2022-11-12 · 6 min readDownstairs
“One day it is a sandpit. One day a dune. One day a desert.”
After two months of lockdown, a child waits by the door in his hat for Mum to finish getting ready and take him downstairs to dig in the sand.
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Essay · 2022-08-28 · 4 min readBoss Wang of the Farmstay
“Eighteen successful imperial-exam candidates have eaten at this table.”
Boss Wang's banquet toast: snake liquor, the scholars' table, and the story of why he gave up drinking in 1988.
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Essay · 2022-08-27 · 7 min readThe Writer Is Attacked
“The writer blinked his remaining eye and murmured, I won.”
A meeting postponed for thirty years: from the death order to the falling of the knife, two lives—the writer's and the young man's.
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Essay · 2022-08-07 · 4 min readThe Anywhere Door
“Sorry, sir. We were looking at the wrong bag.”
At airport security: a traveller who insists he has no thermometer, and an exceedingly thorough search of his bag.
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Essay · 2022-07-03 · 5 min readAddiction
“The moment he breaks his abstinence is supreme. It is as though all the preceding shame and resistance existed to consummate this moment.”
His longest abstinence lasted thirty-seven hours—a man addicted to taking PCR tests.
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Essay · 2022-06-13 · 7 min readFabricated Interviews with Men Present at the Tangshan Assault
“Men are weak by nature; as husbands, they become strong.”
Three invented interviews: the men in the barbecue restaurant who neither struck nor reached out that night each offer a respectable explanation.
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Essay · 2022-03-09 · 16 min readPauline
“We all live inside illusions, don't we? Ours simply went bankrupt first.”
Four letters, four voices: fragments of an affair, sent from millennial China toward Paris and Normandy.
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Essay · 2022-03-06 · 11 min readA False Confession by Dong M.
“The countryside is withering. They are growing.”
A false confession, explicitly labeled fiction: chains, forms of address, and beauty—supplying a silent case file with the voice of its shadow.
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Essay · 2022-02-06 · 10 min readThe Writer and the Underground Man
“My motif is words.”
A writer carries Maslow's pyramid into a basement to interview a man who no longer goes outside.
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Essay · 2022-02-04 · 3 min readThe Little Grown-Up
“Today, as a son and a grandson, I am very happy, very reassured, and very much at peace.”
At a family banquet on the second day of the new year, the twelve-year-old birthday boy raises a glass of milk and delivers a seasoned leadership speech.
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Essay · 2022-02-03 · 9 min readA Girl's Gonna Play Tonight
“She did not reply. So you asked her again: Is that okay?”
Alone in her rented room on Lunar New Year's Eve, a woman announces that tonight she is going to go wild.
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Essay · 2022-01-09 · 5 min readIt's All Up to You
“The truth is, everyone wants to be ruined by someone confident. To be sacrificed for something unequivocal!”
Once the glasses come off, everything in the salon is left to the supervisor—a dialogue about trust.
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Essay · 2022-01-03 · 2 min readJust Rinsing Your Mouth
“I died there. Not actually died. They took me to hospital.”
A kebab-shop owner's machine-gun monologue: Ximeng lamb, seven jin of baijiu, and the two years he did not dare open his doors.
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Essay · 2022-01-02 · 3 min readHanding Back the Tests
“The impartial electric fan will grant every one of them an eternal summer holiday.”
The teacher walks to the front carrying a stack of tests—a primary-school boy lowers his head and awaits the verdict.
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Essay · 2021-11-11 · 25 min readDostoevsky: The Russian in the Sewer
“Only the devil wants to argue. Jesus merely listens—and forgives him.”
A long essay for Dostoevsky's two-hundredth birthday: four moments, from the Semyonovsky execution ground to The Grand Inquisitor.
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Essay · 2021-11-09 · 8 min readPull the Teeth!
“The moment he blindfolded himself, the devil's promises sounded all around him.”
While two wisdom teeth were being pulled, he devised a story about an alien civilization—and admitted that he enjoyed repetition.
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Essay · 2021-04-27 · 39 min readNotes of a Follower: Act III, Finale
“Like a child walking into the woods, searching for the flower crown of his childhood.”
The finale: the sacred books are false, so the Heavenly King will write one himself—Mitya escapes Tianjing and goes to the Dadu River for one final act of following.
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Essay · 2021-04-25 · 36 min readNotes of a Follower: Act III, Part I
“Every human effort in the universe will ultimately lead to chaos and disorder. Yet that humans could build castles in the void filled him with wonder.”
Act III, Part I: Mitya enters the Heavenly King's palace and receives the kingdom's most important assignment—proofread the Bible and find the prophecies about him.
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Essay · 2021-04-21 · 27 min readNotes of a Follower: Act II, Part II
“But what do human beings build that is not a castle in the air?”
Act II, Part II: Rome falls and Anita dies—at the gates of Tianjing, Mitya shouts, I know how to make gunpowder.
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Essay · 2021-04-20 · 16 min readNotes of a Follower: Act II, Part I
“Like a forgotten poem inside a dream. Like the snow of home landing on my tongue.”
Act II, Part I: Mitya crosses the Atlantic to follow Garibaldi, and in ruins stripped of food and ammunition, receives a kiss.
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Essay · 2021-04-19 · 28 min readNotes of a Follower: Act I
“What people often fail to see is that regular, finite breath is a blessing, while freedom and infinity are burdens.”
A ghost born in St. Petersburg in 1810 begins his account: how his life led from his uncle's study toward one answer after another.
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Essay · 2019-01-31 · 3 min readThe Rose and the Garden
“God keeps one eye open and the other closed.”
A fable: roses exchange the sight of their colour for blood, until someone discovers that the petals were black all along.
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Essay · 2016-02-18 · 29 min readChildren of Dingxi, III
“In a distant universe, after a long parting, we meet again.”
The final Dingxi notebook: Teacher Sai's village school, the silences of Song Jie, and my own history of leaving a small town for a new school.
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Essay · 2016-01-22 · 34 min readChildren of Dingxi, II
“In the buzzing of her ears, she could hear time running like water, rushing past like children's distant play.”
Notes from Dingxi: the journal of Yang Li, a left-behind girl; Jingjun running away; and Grandma An, who survived the famine of 1960.
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Essay · 2015-12-07 · 27 min readChildren of Dingxi, I
“Winters in Dingxi were always long—so long she had forgotten what spring warmth and blossoming flowers felt like.”
Notes from teaching in Dingxi, Gansu: Teacher Wang's twenty years at the blackboard, and a bowl of buns from Sister Liu, a single mother.
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Essay · 2015-11-18 · 14 min readThe Women of Sanyue Street
“The spells of night scatter in daylight.”
A twenty-minute quick service in Dali's red-light district: I paid three hundred yuan and did nothing but talk with nineteen-year-old Bugu.
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Essay · 2015-10-24 · 22 min readPeople's Street
“Plod on, plod on. That is how the days go by.”
Working as an inn hand on Dali's People's Street, I meet a hairdresser, a poet, and a street taken in by time.
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Essay · 2015-10-10 · 24 min readDongguan Diary: The Final Entry
“They live in the shadow of the stage, and their stories deserve to be passed down too.”
A farewell supper on the night I quit: two pots of shrimp congee, ten bottles of beer, everyone naming a dream. The moon was full.
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Essay · 2015-09-23 · 21 min readDongguan Diary, September 21–22
“Today the man is gone. His flesh has rotted into the earth, and year after year new crops and wild grasses grow from it. The snake remains intact.”
My fifth and sixth days at the factory, now on the second floor: earthquakes, floods, snake wine, and Foxconn—each person carries a county chronicle within them.
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Essay · 2015-09-21 · 12 min readDongguan Diary, September 20
“And just like that, the day is gone.”
My fourth day at the factory: I ask three people whether they are happy, and receive three rather different kinds of happiness.
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Essay · 2015-09-20 · 14 min readDongguan Diary, September 19
“Everyone here has a story, but they seal the past inside themselves and do not speak.”
My third day at the factory, in Safety Compliance: Sister Wang speaks of her father who sang female roles, her brother behind glass, and the dignity of labor.
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Essay · 2015-09-19 · 18 min readDongguan Diary, September 18
“But if there is a story, it means things are not quite so bad.”
Second day at the factory: Xiguang says everything is the same; Brother Hu says living is only for staying alive—but his QQ Space says otherwise.
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Essay · 2015-09-18 · 10 min readDongguan Diary, September 17
“The production does not belong to you, the product does not belong to you, the soul does not belong to you, you do not belong to yourself.”
First day at a capacitor factory in Dongguan: fifteen-year-old Xiao Li, working under his brother's ID, teaches me what alienation is.
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Essay · 2015-09-10 · 12 min readXi'an and Mr. Dong
“Everyone was on the road, but he alone walked his own.”
In an underpass by Xi'an's South Gate, a wandering musician singing Xu Wei tells me China may never produce another good song, because there is no suffering.
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Essay · 2015-05-08 · 4 min readXu Chunhe and Freddie Gray
“You think that perhaps they both had happy times.”
Thirteen days apart, a man dies on each of two continents—Xu Chunhe and Freddie Gray, read side by side.
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Essay · 2015-04-07 · 3 min readApril 6, 2015
“And the sky and earth that everyone can see, the sun rising in the east and setting in the west, day after day.”
The oldest person in the world has died—her 116 years laid out as a measure of our century.
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Essay · 2015-03-23 · 11 min readTimes Square and Its Children
“The sky was white through the night, without stars—the whole world's spotlights shone here, so bright that no one could see.”
After missing the last airport bus, I speak with three strangers in Times Square: an Egyptian vendor, Donaldson, and Diana.
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Essay · 2015-03-01 · 9 min readNorthbound
“In the end, a fool talking of dreams is still better than foolish talk inside a dream.”
He decides to leave college for a year and return to China as a barber—a succession of negotiations with three professors and his father over the proper order of a life.
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Essay · 2015-01-12 · 12 min readCrab Omelette Rice
“Beyond the tunnel, the sky was high, the mountains distant, and stars covered the night.”
The secret behind a restaurant's signature crab omelette rice—an absurd nightmare after losing a fight with jet lag.
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Essay · 2014-12-15 · 2 min readDawn and Dusk
“Memory is empty, but the theatre is full.”
My final assignment for German poetry class: a poem about the past, read once in German and once in Chinese.
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Essay · 2014-10-26 · 5 min readThe Golden Age
“Only to the earth are fallen leaves fallen leaves. To the tree, they are merely the corpses of leaves.”
Six strangers inhabit the same beautiful morning—a set of fragments from the golden age.
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Essay · 2014-09-20 · 10 min readMartyrs
“The eyes of a beast can see only raw flesh and evil.”
From Polycarp at the stake to laughter in a classroom: early Christian martyrs, and those of us who mocked them.
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Essay · 2014-09-13 · 12 min readThe First Twenty Hours of Being Twenty
“As though the gods descended only in that instant and, among the lights of ten thousand homes, saw only me at my desk, scattering their blessings without reserve.”
Nothing changed on my twentieth birthday—a young man in Munich takes account of becoming an adult.
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Essay · 2014-03-09 · 20 min readDido
“She begged the gods to let the wind scatter her existence, leaving not a grain of sand, pure as a thought passing lightly through the mind.”
Dido, queen of Carthage, and Mrs. Dalloway mirror each other across two thousand years—a story about the fate of women.
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Essay · 2014-02-21 · 6 min readOpening Chapter.
“In certain nostalgic moments, I tend to think of writing as a calling: the calling of a scavenger, alone, talking to himself.”
The beginning of everything: late at night after finishing Siddhartha, a young man emerging from three difficult years decides to take up the pen again.