Before I turned thirty-two, I had Claude build me a personal blog. I started blogging when I finished primary school. I kept at it until college, and then I stopped. A few years after I graduated, Dad told me the old server was about to be shut down and the blog had been backed up. Meaning? Well, nobody read blogs anymore anyway. Everyone was on WeChat Official Accounts, and didn't I have one of those? Though nobody reads those anymore either.

A few days ago, hiking in the spring hills with some friends, we got to talking about my first trip to Beijing. I was in sixth grade. My parents took me to Tsinghua, where I posed beside the great stone inscribed Tsinghua University, one leg bent, for a gloriously camp family photograph. I remember clearly: it was my second blog post. I had just discovered the “add photo” function in the editor. Underneath I wrote, “My future university…” I did not actually want to go to Tsinghua, nor did I have any confidence that I could. But I had already developed an instinct for traffic. A show of determination, I reckoned, could attract readers too.

I forget what the first post was about. Probably something like: from now on, this will be the home of my writing! At first, the blog was called The Making of a Genius. Before long I changed it to A Jiangyin Post-90s Kid. Dad said that name would be more likely to draw in grown-ups.

That must have been 2006. I chose what seemed at the time the cosmopolitan option: instead of signing up for a Sina blog, I would build my own site and buy a domain. Soon, www.sunzhonglun.com was registered. Personal-site templates existed back then, and a programmer friend of the family helped us set it up. Back then, the world was a vast ocean. The World Wide Web was its reflection. In the archive of my mother's blog, I read that the morning after publishing my first post, I was thrilled to discover the view count had gone from zero to six. I told her, “That means one in every billion people in the world has read my blog!”

Later I discovered that every refresh added another view. Which meant I had refreshed three times, Dad twice, and Mum once.

I wrote one post a week, under duress from my parents. At first I recorded things that happened in middle school: who I had got into a fight with; the asshole dorm supervisor kicking our door because we were talking; whom I absolutely had to beat in the midterms; how I had failed to beat him in the midterms but absolutely would in the finals. Apart from my parents, one of Dad's college friends left a comment on every post. He lived in Lanzhou. In the little I remember of him, he was funny and full of energy. One day the comments stopped. I heard that he had drunk too much and died.

In our small city there was a Chinese teacher, Mr. Jiang. The best students in town all went to his basement for extra lessons. Mr. Jiang had stopped taking new pupils, but my parents sent him a post I had just written. It was an outpouring called “A Friendship in Pieces,” about how two primary-school friends and I used to go every weekend to the bathhouse near home, where we had our regular scrubber and a young attendant who towelled us dry, and how all of it ended when the three of us went to three different middle schools. Writing it, I felt for the first time that words could send a chill down my back. I felt that many things had already been lost to me for good. Mr. Jiang said he would take me on.

Every Sunday, twenty or thirty students squeezed into the little room in Mr. Jiang's basement, a converted garage. He did not say much. He gave us a subject, then had us write. It was stifling. Only he stood by a small basement window to catch the breeze; feet and the lower halves of bicycle wheels often passed across it. Mr. Jiang was gentle, easily moved to tears. He had a blog too, called The Bicycle on the Roof Has Sprouted. One day he told me to read the newly published The Kite Runner. I was in seventh grade and had never read a book outside the school syllabus. I cried when I finished it. Mr. Jiang said, You are the only one in our little class who finished the book. He encouraged me to keep writing.

Under my parents' marketing offensive, my blog exchanged links with several major bloggers, among them Jie Chen in Chengdu. Their readers could click www.sunzhonglun.com in a sidebar and arrive at A Jiangyin Post-90s Kid. This manoeuvre brought me enormous traffic. Before long, my page views were in the millions. At school, like Hannah Montana, I quietly guarded the secret of my fame. Only to my best friend Shenghan and a few pretty girls would I casually mention that they could Baidu my name and might find “unexpected results.”

“A Jiangyin Post-90s Kid?” they would ask. Meaning: how could anyone choose a name that provincial when everyone else had a sophisticated Martian-script screen name? (Shenghan's was “D调の华丽”—The Splendour of D Major. I asked him what D major was. He didn't know.) I said my parents had named it. Everything for the clicks. By the way, did you see the number in the sidebar?

On weekends I went to my grandparents' home, on the third floor of an old apartment building. It had a vast rooftop terrace and garden, which I wrote about in “Paper Alley.” Grandpa grew so many flowers and plants up there he could almost have opened a flower-and-bird market. Afternoons were my writing time. I sat at the computer in their study writing blog posts, though what I thought about was basketball. For every second I spent composing a sentence, I gave half a second to close-ups of myself dribbling and shooting threes. Grandma often pushed the door open on tiptoe and set a plate of cut fruit and snacks on my desk. She truly treated me as if I were a great writer: someone not to be disturbed, with certain eccentricities that needed protecting.

In ninth grade, I transferred to a school in Shanghai. The student behind me sometimes mimicked my accent; teachers reminded me where I came from. Looking back, almost all of this came from their jealousy and insecurity. One weekend I slipped back to my old school in Jiangyin and found everything running as usual. My friends had not found life impossible in my absence. I was devastated. I renamed the blog. A Jiangyin Post-90s Kid passed into history; from then on it was A Tale of Two Cities.

One semester before the high-school entrance exam, I visited Mr. Huang Yufeng at his home. He taught at the High School Affiliated to Fudan University, and people said he was the best Chinese teacher in Shanghai. When I came in, he asked what I had been reading. I said I had just read Eugene O'Neill's Beyond the Horizon and Kipling's “The Cat That Walked by Himself,” bought at Wanxiang Bookstore on the street beside Fudan. At your age, he said, you should still read more classics. But don't read Kafka. He is a little mad.

I was admitted early to Shanghai High School. Mum and Dad embraced happily in the sunset, and Grandma, who had come to cook for me near Fudan and build up my strength, cheered until her eyes narrowed into a line. In high school, I no longer wanted to write about my own life. I had read Xu Zhiyuan's Those Sad Young Men and the China Chronicles column in FT Chinese. I wanted to write opinions, to write about public affairs. I wanted to be a liberal intellectual.

From my close study of Xu Zhiyuan, I discovered that titles in the formula “X + X” were especially good at signalling sophistication. I proceeded to produce such mighty essays as “Faith, Left Blank,” “Justice in Haste,” “The Foolish Rebellion,” “Egypt at the Crossroads,” and “The Paradox of Utopia.” Now and then I stole an epigraph Xu had quoted and used it as my own—enough to get a person cancelled today. What I wanted to ask him then was: how have you read so much? Where did you find all those beautiful sentences?

A Tale of Two Cities remained a secret. I shared it only with my closest friends and classmates whom I considered “worth talking to.” By then, the blog had received more than ten million visits. Yet even now, I feel a kind of shame in being able to write.

There are several reasons. First, Jiangyin, the small city where I grew up, is a place of business. It admires enterprise and shrewdness; it regards literature as a depressive illness, an excuse for retreating from worldly success. Shanghai is a city with even less respect for literature—at least in compulsory education. In Jiangyin, I still had many teachers who appreciated me and hoped I would go further with my writing. In Shanghai, there was almost no one apart from Huang Yufeng. (I met him only that once, but later Dad sent him a book I wrote in high school. He replied, “To teach the finest talents under heaven—what joy.”)

At Shanghai High it was worse. Students competed over maths scores. Everyone's English was more or less the same. But whoever scored well in Chinese acted as though they had suffered a humiliation, because being good at Chinese meant being bad at maths, which meant you could only rely on memorisation instead of a clever brain. Fortunately, I was bad at Chinese too. I routinely failed composition—even after studying the formulas with considerable obsequiousness—so there was not much pressure on me in that respect.

After my second year of high school, Mum continued blogging; I wrote less and less. I told her I now understood why she had always wanted me to write more about the amusing things in my life: I could barely remember things that had happened only two years before. She kept faith with writing about life. She loved Eileen Chang. Her last blog post, in 2012, was about a tea set she had just bought:

The tea has what they say is a taste of bergamot in it. Strange. Still strange with milk; not at all to my taste. But using the afternoon-tea set feels so good. Even seeing it sit there is pleasing.

In fact, this feeling is exactly what I want—even if the tea tastes wrong and the tea set, apart from its looks, is coarse in every way.

I think life is always full of people and things that buy the casket and return the pearl. I am one of them. But what can I do? As far as today's tea is concerned, I am a worshipper of appearances. I love these all-show-and-no-substance things.

Soon she began chemotherapy. A year later, she died. Now I, too, drink tea every day and buy beautiful teacups.

Some time after that, following a years-long struggle with illness, Mr. Jiang died. A few more years passed, and Grandpa and Grandma left one after the other. Once, at a friend's funeral, I found I could handle the various procedures with practised ease, while the people around me seemed never to have encountered death. Every year of my adult life, I have dealt with death and its aftershocks. Any year in which no one I love dies, I count as a fortunate year.

I found, later, that it had become difficult for me to love and difficult to trust—and that when I did love, I let go with great ease, almost as a reflex. Nor did I want to marry, to have children, attachments, expectations for the future, while one by one my friends had begun families. It was then I realised how much later I was in growing up, as though trapped in an eternal childhood.

Certain acts seem able to cast off this self-pity. Dancing, for instance. Then you need only immerse yourself in three minutes of music. It asks for three minutes of attention, the whole body given over. Or writing. Then you have to be honest, and you have to be brave, though it takes a great deal out of you.

I do not believe suffering creates literature. A person cannot erupt into creativity like a frightened animal under stress. But happiness cannot create literature either. Or rather, suffering and happiness have nothing to do with creativity. Creativity comes from courage. This is true of creation in any form.

I did not go on blogging. But I wrote books, and I created. I have never been diligent. Yet when I gathered my WeChat essays into this new blog—once I called them all exercises, but now I believe they are creation in the fullest sense; I need to say without shame that I am an author, that I do not make my living from it, but I serve the god of literature—I discovered that I had produced more than seven hundred thousand Chinese characters. I have very few readers left. Still, I go on writing by my own taste and standards.

I had wanted to reclaim the domain of my childhood, www.sunzhonglun.com, only to find it had been taken. Some domain hunter had bought it and would hold it until 2027. So I bought www.sunzhonglun.blog. It should still be a blog, shouldn't it? The ideal that values sharing over shouting, connection over division, respect over belittlement—shouldn't that still exist?

Before I turned thirty-two, the whole thing went live through Claude's efforts alone. I think I should keep writing, keep creating, keep expressing myself—not as an ascetic practice in a post-literary age, but as a precondition for freedom. A free life must require honesty and courage, even if they come only in flashes of illumination, even if in every other moment of your life you live like a fox.

Many years ago, I told a friend that I felt my life shrouded in fate, that I felt myself fastened to the past. That friend told me, “Don't be afraid. Create.” I can still recall the shock of hearing those words. I felt that the most important sentence had been passed to me at that moment—and eternity, too, is only a moment.

So: don't be afraid. Go create.