I am not a literary giant

Wang Zixu's workplace is no more than 800 meters from his home as the crow flies, and it takes him less than 10 minutes to walk home. He bought this house for convenience, so he could come home anytime. But now, even though he gets off work at 5:30, he often doesn't get home until after 6:00.

It's not because my workplace requires a lot of overtime.

There's a yard downstairs in his building, but the property management doesn't take care of it. The shrubs have grown wildly, almost as tall as a person, and there are red and blue exercise equipment with peeling paint and rust.

This used to be a sandy area, but it has been desolate for a long time, and there is no sand left but mud. In summer, the ground is yellow with excrement and green with grass, and in winter, the ground is yellow with grass and green with excrement. Only dogs and he come here.

After get off work, he would sit on the squatting machine, light a few cigarettes, and then slowly get up and go upstairs when his wife urged him to. The cigarettes he smoked were the local brand "Da Feng Shou," which cost 3 yuan a pack. They were very strong, and smoking too many would easily give him a headache, so he didn't care how much he smoked. He would hold the cigarette between his fingers, letting it burn quietly, and in the swirling smoke, he would think about absurd things. That way, he could sit for a long time after smoking three cigarettes.

After finishing their cigarettes, people would stick the cigarette butts into a nearby rusted iron pillar and inhale them. Over time, the pillar became like a stegosaur, its back covered with a dense array of cigarette butts.

Finally, his wife would always call: "Why aren't you home yet? Working overtime again? Working overtime every day? Should I talk to your boss and tell him not to assign tasks after get off work? Enough! I don't want to hear your explanations. Come home, come home, come home! The food's getting cold..."

He slowly got up and walked towards home. Sometimes, when his wife didn't call, he was even less inclined to go home, wanting a moment of peace and quiet.

They've been married for three years and have no children. He doesn't want children, but she does. Sometimes she'll look at other people's children with delight for a long time. Their disagreements aren't limited to this one issue; they also have differences of opinion regarding whether or not to eat cilantro, how to position the toilet seat after using the bathroom, and how often to tidy up the closet. As these issues accumulate, life begins to feel dull.

After dinner, he would sit on the bed and read. Faulkner, Márquez, Camus, and all the writers who had won the Nobel Prize or were eligible for it. His wife folded clothes beside him, placed them at his feet, and then said:

"I'm so tired. Every day I have to cook, do laundry, and go to the shop. I'm really exhausted."

His fingers froze on the pages, like a child who had done something wrong.

"You can quit your job at the store. It doesn't pay much and it's exhausting."

He spoke these words after a long silence. In fact, he had said them countless times before, and his wife had said them to him countless times as well. He knew perfectly well how she would respond:

"Where would I get so much money if I didn't go to work?"

My salary is a little over 4000 yuan a month, and with my wife's unstable income, we can barely make ends meet in this city. But my wife plans to have a child next year. After having a child, they will have many unexpected expenses.

For example, "I can't go to the shop for a few months after giving birth, which means I'll lose several thousand yuan in earnings." Then it goes, "Giving birth is painful, I want a C-section, but C-sections are expensive, and postpartum care is another huge expense." Then, "I don't want your mother to come and take care of me during my postpartum period; she'll get postpartum depression. Going to a postpartum care center costs tens of thousands..." "And then there's the cost of baby formula, clothes, shoes, diapers..." "If I go back to work, the grandparents will have to help take care of the baby; shouldn't we give them some money? We can't let them take care of the baby for free..." "When he's older, he'll need to go to kindergarten, and he might get sick..." "We need to give the teacher a red envelope for Chinese New Year, right? We need to send him to tutoring classes, right? I want him to learn piano..."

In short, this non-existent child has already brought him endless trouble even before he was born.

The wife had been planning this child for a long time, so long that she had already decided on the child's appearance and who the child's features resembled.

Countless days and nights, his wife described to him what kind of creature the child was: his/her eyebrows were like his, her nose was like his, her mouth was like hers, her skin was like hers...

If someone asks what your child looks like, both of you can draw a picture of the child for them.

The child felt so real to him that not bringing him/her into the world would be tantamount to murder.

"You always come home and just lie around, never helping me out. How can your salary possibly cover our living expenses?"

His wife was still rambling on and on, her words disjointed and incoherent. The more she did this, the more tired he became, and the more he wanted to lie down.

He wanted to say, "I'm writing novels, and I earn a good amount of royalties." But he didn't, because he had already repeated those words countless times day and night. He even knew that if he said that, his wife would shrug and ask, "And what about the royalties?"

This royalties, like the child, are nonexistent, fictional creations; naturally, he can't contribute anything. As a writer, he's actually less imaginative than his wife.

He couldn't tell his wife what kind of payment it was: it would be carefully placed in a white envelope, with a comfortable, solid feel in his hand, delivered by a postman on a bicycle, who would cut open the envelope with a paper cutter, and a small blue receipt would fall out, with the words "Receipt for Royalties" written on it in bold blue letters.

Or, after receiving a phone call, he rode his bicycle through the path covered with camphor leaves to the bank. He put his bank card into the machine, entered the PIN with trembling hands, made two mistakes, and succeeded on the third try. He saw that the number in his bank card had inexplicably increased, and the extra amount was the manuscript fee.

Or perhaps one morning, his phone rings with a "ding," and the message box displays "You have received a payment" in a unique font. Upon opening the app, he excitedly sees an official-looking payer's name followed by a long string of numbers of unknown meaning, with a prominent number at the top.

All three possibilities are possible. There might even be a fourth. But he couldn't say. Because he had never received any royalties, his lack of certainty when recounting the matter to his wife only deepened her suspicions.

At first, writing was a pleasant thing for him, but before he knew it, the most important thing became to quickly earn some royalties to prove himself to his wife.

He specifically looked up the Nobel Prize in Literature's prize money, which is over 600 million RMB—nothing in the world offers a higher royalty. More importantly, the Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded annually.

Once a year, if he lives to 80, he'll have over 50 more chances to get it. What an exciting 50 chances that is! Whether written down or made into a movie, it would be an epic.

He began to study Nobel Prize-level literary works comprehensively. Then something interesting happened—

When he read Faulkner, his writing style resembled Faulkner's, with constantly shifting scenes and shifting perspectives, each character seemingly rambling incoherently like a madman; when he read Camus, his writing resembled Camus's, with each character becoming a lonely, cold castle; when he read Márquez, he felt as if he were in South America, with the heat rising from the paper and ink reminiscent of the rainforests of the Southern Hemisphere.

He felt that he had touched these shining, great souls with his own soul, and that the Nobel Prize in Literature was no longer just a mirage.

However, before he received that 600 million, he needed a faster way to prove himself. That was to submit his work to magazines. After trying five or six times, his submitted novels disappeared without a trace. During this process, his excitement turned into fear, and finally, he lost confidence and began to doubt whether he was cut out for writing.