The Nonmainstream Author

"Clatter, clatter!"

"Woo~~~~"

A train slowly pulled into Chengdu North Railway Station. Its hulking body resembled a giant beast, and people climbed in and out through the openings in its body.

Having missed his train, Liu Wanbao returned a day late. He carried a leather bag and was wrapped in an unpleasant smell, yet his face was bright and full of energy, and he didn't forget to wave goodbye to a group of people.

"I'm off, then! Let's keep in touch!"

"I'll definitely write to you!"

Ah!

Liu Wanbao felt a little sorry it was over. He patted the unremarkable little magazine in his bag. Thanks to it, the journey had been easy and enjoyable, and he had made a whole train car's worth of friends.

At first, he had read it himself, then passed it around among the people near his seat. After that, the whole car had passed it around, and one bastard had nearly kept it for himself.

Men!

They couldn't help liking a bit of fighting and killing, the dashing exploits of the jianghu, so naturally they started talking.

One said Ding Mo definitely hadn't died; he must have learned martial arts after falling. Another said Qi Tianyuan was freaking awesome: the Thirty-Six Greater and Lesser Qin Na Techniques sounded absolutely badass. Someone else said there was a master back in his hometown who could carry two big buckets of water and zip onto a roof in a few strides without changing his expression...

Then they all sighed in unison: hidden dragons and crouching tigers had to be lurking among the people!

With five thousand years of history behind the land of China, for all anyone knew, a few old immortals were hiding away in the mountains.

After all that talk, the only thing missing was for them to chop off a chicken's head, burn yellow paper, and swear brotherhood on the spot. In the end, everyone exchanged addresses and agreed to write, a lot more straightforward than hemming and hawing over adding someone on WeChat in later years.

In 1979, Chengdu had only three districts: Dongcheng, Xicheng, and Jinniu.

The first two were in the city, while Jinniu was a vast suburban district with thirteen communes under it and a large population.

Liu Wanbao was a cadre at the Jinniu District Cultural Center. He had gone to Shanghai on business to learn how they enriched the public's leisure time. It was a big city, and he had indeed broadened his horizons.

He got off the train and took a bus home, all the while feeling something stirring inside him, ready to burst out. He seemed to have found a spark of inspiration, and his mind kept returning to everything on the train: those passengers, bubbling with enthusiasm and spraying spittle as they talked, so caught up in the conversation that they wanted to laugh and shout...

"Martial arts fighting-the people really love it!"

"Damn it, how come I only just thought of it?!"

Everything suddenly clicked for Liu Wanbao. He hurriedly got off the bus halfway home and detoured to the cultural center.

The cultural center's function was to spread cultural knowledge and enrich the people's lives. Jinniu District was all countryside, and the locals had little education; they couldn't read things like People's Literature or Budding.

"Old Liu? You just got back?"

"How come you came straight to work? And that smell!"

"Oh, good stuff! I found something good..."

Liu Wanbao took Story Club out of his bag and said excitedly, "This is it! We'll go to the post office and subscribe right away, then send copies to the communes' cultural stations and find people to tell the stories to the villagers. They'll definitely love listening!"

"Calm down, calm down. Let me have a look first!"

The other man opened Story Club and silently buried himself in the stories. After a while, he was even more excited than Liu Wanbao. "What a great idea! We've been worried about not having suitable literary and artistic works to enrich the people's lives!

"Let's do this: we'll get a few copies for each commune and see how the people respond first. If the response is good, we'll order more afterward."

"Sure, sure. That's best."

Story Club was distributed directly in four areas: Shanghai, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Anhui. People elsewhere could also subscribe through the post office; the magazine included an address and contact information.

Liu Wanbao was full of drive and still didn't want to go home. After mulling it over for a while, he sat down and wrote a letter to the author A Qi, to be forwarded through Story Club.

He began by expressing his admiration, then shared his thoughts after reading Kapok Kasaya. At the end, he added, "Our Sichuan, too, is a place of outstanding people and beautiful land, with countless scenic sights. Mount Emei, Mount Qingcheng, and the Leshan Giant Buddha are famous throughout the country.

"Please feel free to visit and travel around Bashu. We will certainly sweep the guest bed clean to welcome you.

"Also, if we had the honor, we would be delighted to see you write a novel drawing on Sichuan's famous mountains and great rivers, its treasured temples and ancient monasteries... Of course, this is just a small, selfish wish of my own. Please don't take offense..."

After finishing the letter, Liu Wanbao went straight to the post office to mail it and ordered sixty copies of Story Club at the same time.

Shanghai's alleyway homes were much like the capital's crowded courtyard compounds: several people lived in a dozen or so square meters, with pots, bowls, ladles, basins, and clothes poles everywhere. Water and toilets were shared as well.

Every household had a chamber pot, and the first thing they did each day was empty it.

The capital had its refined ways, and Shanghai was no less particular. Though the chamber pot was small, there was a lot to it. A poor family's was just a wooden bucket with a lid; a wealthy family's had copper hoops and gold paint, and some were even carved.

At the time, Jiangnan custom required a bride's dowry to include red-lacquered chamber pots in three sizes, large, medium, and small. They were called descendant buckets, which showed their standing.

In the afternoon, school let out.

A little boy returned to the alleyway in low spirits.

"Sonny, who bullied you?" his mother asked as she stir-fried vegetables.

"No one."

"Then why are you unhappy?"

"..."

The little boy pouted for a while, then said loudly, "Everyone else knows the Life-Taking Overlord Spear, but I don't! Everyone else plays at fighting bad guys with the Arhat Fist, but I don't know how!"

???

His mother's head was full of question marks, but she didn't pay it much mind.

A while later, his father came home, grabbed some toilet paper, and made for the toilet. The little boy hesitantly came over and said, "Dad, can your workplace subscribe to Story Club?"

"What Story Club?"

"My classmate's dad bought it. It's really good! They've all read it, and I finally managed to borrow it for one day."

As he spoke, he dug a little magazine out of his schoolbag.

"Our workplace has rules about the magazines it subscribes to. Oh, let me use the toilet first..."

Dad couldn't hold it anymore. He took the magazine and rushed into the public toilet, and then he didn't come out.

A full forty minutes later, Dad emerged hunched over, rubbing his legs and trembling as he walked. "Subscribe. Get a year's subscription!"

"Where's the chief editor? Where's the chief editor?"

"What's got you in such a panic?"

"Something big!"

Not long after Story Club's September issue came out, the comrade in charge of distribution came tearing through the little building. He finally caught the chief editor in the toilet and, paying no mind to the fact that the man was urinating, rattled off:

"Are there any September issues left? Several newsstands at Shanghai Railway Station have sold out. Demand is outstripping supply, outstripping supply!"

"Slow down. What happened?"

"They've sold out, and the passenger bus stations are out too! This issue is selling exceptionally well. The newsstands have had an enthusiastic response, and they're all asking us for more!"

"Chief editor! Chief editor!"

As they were speaking, another fellow ran in. "Hahaha! Suzhou, Wuxi, Hangzhou, Ningbo-they're all out of stock!"

"How many do they need?"

"I did a preliminary count. At least thirty thousand copies!"

Hiss!

The chief editor's whole body shuddered, and his stream suddenly shot up six feet.

Last year, Story Club had still been called Revolutionary Story Club, and its monthly sales had been only a few tens of thousands of copies. Early this year, it had changed its name back and begun publishing popular fiction. Sales had been climbing and had now reached around two hundred thousand copies a month.

An additional order of thirty thousand copies all at once was an increase of nearly one-sixth.

"Where's the chief editor??"

A third fellow ran in, also beaming with excitement. This one piss was turning out to be quite an ordeal!

"Chengdu! We've got subscriptions from Chengdu!"

"One cultural center ordered sixty copies outright, and there are some individual subscriptions too. Altogether, it's over a hundred copies."

Damn!

Their business had expanded all the way to Chengdu. The chief editor pulled up his trousers, not caring whether he had finished peeing, and swept out an arm. "Meeting!"

Soon, the entire Story Club editorial staff had gathered.

The distribution staff explained the situation, and the editors grinned from ear to ear. "Paper's become expensive in Luoyang! Paper's become expensive in Luoyang!"

"We have only one new novel, Kapok Kasaya. Clearly, it directly caused the increase in circulation. Xiao He, you're in charge of that author. Make sure you maintain a good relationship with him."

"We can invite him to Shanghai and give him a proper welcome."

"Hey, that's a good idea!"

"Comrades!"

The old chief editor was still the calmest of them all. He rapped on the table. "We've only just come through a difficult period, and it wasn't easy. Things are looking up now, and I think that when circulation breaks three hundred thousand, we can consider holding a writers' gathering or a storytelling event. In short, we should organize something to bring the authors closer to us and to the readers."

"Mm-hmm, we definitely have to hold a writers' gathering!"

"Only when we've held a writers' gathering can we say we're a major magazine publisher!"

Everyone talked over one another, imagining a bright future.

A Qi had boosted sales single-handedly, but not one person suggested raising his contributor's fee.

Contributor fees were fixed in those days. A magazine publisher could treat an author to good food and drink, or invite him on a trip, but a raise in his fee, let alone a larger share of the proceeds, was absolutely out of the question!

Take Zheng Yuanjie, for example. His early contributor fees were meager, and he noticed that any issue carrying one of his novels sold particularly well. Full of confidence, he went to the publisher and asked for more money.

The publisher said, "How can you prove it was your work that caused sales to rise?"

Zheng Yuanjie said, "Simple. Let me be the only contributor, and you'll know whether circulation has anything to do with me."

The publisher: "Are you nuts?"

Zheng Yuanjie eventually got his wish. He founded King of Fairy Tales and supplied all the content himself. He worked himself half to death every day, but he did make a lot of money, buying ten apartments in the capital to store readers' letters.

One of those apartments was burgled, and the thief was sentenced to twelve years.

The September issue of Story Club sold unexpectedly well, though it made sense all the same.

It spread rapidly throughout Jiangnan, with the occasional copy making its way to other provinces. And no one realized that Kapok Kasaya was the first martial arts/wuxia novel to appear on the mainland after reform and opening-up.

In those days, a clear distinction was drawn between a writer and an author. To become a writer, you first had to join the writers' association. The association would organize a group of critics to hold a discussion about you, examining your work and its significance, and then publish their findings-you had to go through all that before you could be called a writer.

Otherwise, you could only be called an author.

Chen Qi was merely an author, and a popular-fiction author at that. The mainstream looked down on him, so naturally no one would study his work.

Story Club and Kapok Kasaya made not the slightest ripple in mainstream literary circles, and those circles couldn't be bothered to pay attention to a shabby little magazine-unless they felt threatened.

(End of chapter)