The past came to Wang Gang like snowflakes. It was 1999 and three years since he had started, but not finished, writing English, the book that was to become his best-selling coming-of-age tale.
Wang, by then a published author and television producer, was nearly 39 years old and, as he recalls, wandering around the campus of his former school in Urumqi, Xinjiang, he already felt like an old man.
'It was winter when I returned there,' he says. 'It snows quite hard and the snow remains fresh and white, especially on my campus. There are a lot of old trees and when the sun shines, the snow melts from icicles, dripping from rooftops. It evoked a lot of memories of my childhood and adolescence. When I walked around the campus, I really wished to meet somebody from my old days, my teachers. In my memories they are still as young as I was then. But on campus I felt like a very old man. Every teacher I came across was much younger than me.
'These things from the past came at me like snowflakes.'
The recollections gave Wang the breakthrough he needed to go back to work on the novel, which was set in the tumult of the Cultural Revolution. But he also knew that to write a book 'you need more than memories', you need an idea.
His idea was to avoid the pattern of some writers from what he calls his 'father's generation', who framed the period in black and white, with the good people suffering and the bad plotting.