Cao Wenxuan: Bringer of aestheticism to children
- By staff reporter Jiao Feng
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Cao Wenxuan. |
A Soft Fire Smelts Sweetly
Cao’s most recent novel, Dragonfly Eyes, is the story of a Shanghai family. Du Meixi, son of a silk plant owner from Shanghai, meets a French woman whom he marries in Marseilles in 1925. The couple returns to Shanghai during WWII. Mainly about the life of their granddaughter, A Mei, the novel showcases family solidarity from the child’s perspective against the backdrop of the dramatic social changes during the 1960s and 1970s.
Unlike his previous stories, which often take place in the countryside of his hometown in northern Jiangsu Province, Dragonfly Eyes is about life in an exotic and enchanting metropolis. It proves Cao’s ability to tell stories of urban as well as rural life. Despite a different background, Cao’s latest novel sustains his characteristically artistic and authentic style in giving glimpses of humanity amid hardship.
Cao inwardly nursed the plot of Dragonfly Eyes 20 years before eventually writing it. It originates in a moving story a friend told him many years earlier about her family in Shanghai. He was deeply touched, but bided his time before writing it as a novel. Those who know Cao and how he works are aware that it can often take him decades to mentally prepare the structure, plot, and linguistic style of a work. But once he starts, Cao writes at a phenomenal pace.
The actual writing of the 220,000-character novel Dragonfly Eyes took him just two and a half months. The perfectionist Cao then twice revised the work, painstakingly dwelling on every detail. Although seven years passed before the work was completed, Cao’s publisher was aware that Cao is an author that cherishes his reputation and so must be certain any piece of work of his is indeed finished. This is the principle Cao has followed since becoming a writer.
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