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Writing from Nanjing 01 | Ye Zhaoyan: Writing from the Nanjing “Stool”

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Writing from Nanjing 01 | Ye Zhaoyan: Writing from the Nanjing “Stool”

To understand how one city can become a literary coordinate system, Ye Zhaoyan is difficult to overlook.

Ye was born in Nanjing in 1957. After finishing high school in 1974, he spent four years working as a fitter in a factory. He entered Nanjing University’s Chinese department in 1978, completed his undergraduate studies in 1982, and earned a master’s degree in 1986. His later work included teaching, editing, and writing professionally. A 2024 China Writers Association interview dates the formal beginning of his literary work to his university years and describes a career spanning more than four decades.[1][2]

Those experiences connect Ye to Nanjing in several distinct ways: it is his birthplace, the city where he studied, and an important setting for his work. None of those facts, however, should be used to infer where he lives today. What can be said with confidence is that Nanjing has repeatedly provided the ground on which his fiction and nonfiction take shape.

Many readers first encountered Ye through the “Night Mooring on the Qinhuai” sequence. Works including Zhuangyuan Jing, Shizipu, Zhuiyue Lou, and Banbian Ying turn toward streets, households, and individual lives around the Qinhuai area. A retrospective published by China Writers Association sources describes the sequence as part of Ye’s movement beyond early experimental fiction toward narratives that reconnect contemporary writing with cultural memory.[3]

In A Love Story of 1937, private feeling and historical catastrophe occupy the same city. The novel is set in wartime Nanjing, but its attention remains fixed on people whose emotional lives continue even as violence approaches. A critical essay hosted by the China Writers Association places the novel within Ye’s wider engagement with Nanjing and with “new historical fiction.”[4] The importance of the book lies not in using a love story to escape history, but in showing how history enters and breaks ordinary life.

Ye’s Nanjing writing is not limited to fiction. Essays such as Nanjing People and Old Shadows of Qinhuai approach the city through character, custom, and memory. His 2019 nonfiction book A Biography of Nanjing widens the frame dramatically. The book begins with Sun Quan’s move to Moling in 211 and carries its account through 1949. Ye described writing it as equivalent to undertaking another course of graduate study. The city becomes both the subject and a platform from which to look across Chinese history.[5][6]

Two more recent novels extend this literary map. Yifeng Gate moves north from the Qinhuai area toward the city gate, Xiaguan, and the Yangtze River. A 2023 interview describes a story beginning in the late Qing period and ending around the Northern Expedition in 1927, using historical change to shape the lives of fictional people.[7] Qu Family Garden returns to domestic space: a Nanjing house, two ordinary families, three generations, and more than seventy years of everyday life. In a 2024 interview, Ye emphasized that the book’s experiences—from education to political and social change—were not only Nanjing stories but also Chinese stories.[8]

That distinction is central to his idea of place. In the same interview, Ye called Nanjing the foundation of his writing and compared it to the stool on which a writer sits:

“Nanjing, this city, is the stool I sit on.” (ANJSO translation)[8]

The stool is a place to begin, not a limit on what can be seen. Ye said he was not simply writing Nanjing: the city gave him a familiar window through which to consider a much larger history. His fiction asks how historical change enters private life, how a city keeps or loses memory, and how ordinary people preserve a daily existence amid upheaval.

Readers can therefore enter Ye’s Nanjing along several paths:

Across more than forty years of writing, Nanjing has changed inside Ye Zhaoyan’s work. Qinhuai, the southern neighborhoods, Xiaguan, the Yangtze, and old houses do not add up to a nostalgic postcard. Together they become a method for looking at history, human relationships, and fate.

Nanjing is the stool from which Ye writes. What opens across the page is much larger than the city itself.

Sources

  1. Nanjing University Press, “Ye Zhaoyan”
  2. China Writers Association, “Ye Zhaoyan: Writing Is a Long Marathon”
  3. China Writers Association, “Ye Zhaoyan: The Sound of the Flute, the Gleam of the Sword”
  4. China Writers Association, “A Love Story of 1937: Mr. Ding, You Are Remarkable!”
  5. China Writers Association, “Writing A Biography of Nanjing Was Like Going to Graduate School Again”
  6. China Writers Association, “A Biography of Nanjing”
  7. Southern Metropolis Daily, “Ye Zhaoyan: Using Nanjing as a Window onto a Wider History of Cities and People”
  8. China Writers Association, “Ye Zhaoyan: I Became This Way Because I Never Stopped Writing”

Sources

License: © American Nanjing Society