Before Love

I was never a good kid. I started secretly reading novels in class back in middle school.

I remember that love stories, especially campus romances, were just beginning to flood the market then, but they hadn't yet earned much status or acceptance. Romance novels were like cockroaches creeping out in the middle of the night: they might not be fit for public display, but no matter how hard you tried to swat them, they just wouldn't die.

A cockroach is still a cockroach. You can put up with a few now and then, but too many become a biological weapon.

Romance novels are much better these days. Some still have far too much romantic coloring and too many additives, but at least once you take a bite, you can call them cake.

I wrote this story during my first year of college. The writing is still very immature and awkward, and has a touch of naivete trying too hard to seem grown-up. But it's my own child, after all, and I love it no matter how I look at it.

This may be called an introduction, but really I just want to talk about why I wrote it back then.

I'd read too many romance novels, especially campus romances, and learned a few things:

1. In 95% of them, the lovers don't end up together, usually because of a single sentence, a gesture, a glance, or simply an unfounded suspicion that brings things to an abrupt end;

2. The death rate for the protagonists is extremely high, even higher than in martial arts novels. Their deaths usually boil down to two causes: car accidents and terminal illnesses;

3. 70% of campus romances take place in a literary society, while the other 30% happen in the student union, the athletics department, tree-lined paths, or the library.

So rather than saying this short story reflects my hopes for college life, especially romantic life, when I first started university, it's more accurate to say it's my naive parody of those tacky campus romance novels...

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