"Gaze in the Deep Wilderness" is a literary autobiographical documentary essay by the writer Langzi Wenqing. It is a supporting writing note for the long-form rural novel "The Watch Beyond the Mountain". The full text is more than 64,000 words. It took six years from the material preparation to the final draft of "The Watch on the Other Side of the Mountain". It was started in early 2020 and finalized in the midsummer of 2026 as a million-word long piece. The notes completely record the entire process of field visits, historical data calibration, character polishing, and stylistic iteration.
The whole book abandons the running narrative of conventional creative summaries, and takes "Mountains and rivers become barren, years become dust, mortals are silent, only staring at immortality" as the core tone. It is based on the rural reality of southeast Hubei and focuses on the normal people's livelihood of urban and rural migration, rural changes, left-behind and wandering in the forty years of reform and opening up. The text breaks away from the pastoral beautification and accumulation of suffering that are common in rural writing, and uses a melancholy and restrained realist writing style to objectively record the pain of the times in rural society and the living conditions, emotional bonds and life fate of ordinary people.
The work combines field documentation, historical material speculation and literary introspection. It is not only a complete record of the creation of this million-word rural novel, but also a sincere review of the persistence, wandering and aphasia of the contemporary rural generation. It retains the true and simple texture of the folk era in the process of urban-rural transformation.
Purpose: This book is the writing notes of the long-form rural novel "The Watch on the Other Side of the Mountain", recording six years of literary practice at the desk. Based on the rural reality of southeastern Hubei, we salvage the fragments of the urban-rural migration era for forty years and analyze the fateful struggle of ordinary people who stayed behind and wandered. Reject traffic gimmicks, use literature to write biographies of the silent rural generation, and write down the persistence, goodwill and eternal gaze of mortals in the wilderness.