Sailing Against the Wind

Against the Wind, We Sail is a coming-of-age novella rooted in the realities of youth. It tells the story of Lin Zhou, a small-town boy who perseveres through the deaths and illnesses of his parents and the hardships of poverty, turning his literary dreams and sheer determination into a comeback. From memorizing vocabulary on a mountain road at dawn to presenting his essays in a Peking University classroom; from a Braille art studio in an underground passage to defending his dignity in livestream auctions starting at one yuan, Lin Zhou folds his pain into paper airplanes and turns his debts into lesson plans. He rewrites the label “Peking University dropout” as “Peking University’s light-bringer.”

As his mother receives a critical condition notice, his teacher loses her hair to chemotherapy, and the livestream of the girl he secretly loves goes disastrously wrong, one crisis after another, he uses words and paintbrushes to crowdsource a route called “Starfield Return.” A million people leave their fingerprints on a Braille galaxy; a cliff becomes a library, and ruins are transformed into a museum. With the conviction that “beyond the mountain is not the sea, but another mountain,” the novel uses prose both austere and tender to portray a group of young people running in silence. With nowhere left to retreat, they turn the headwind into their direction.