Writer 1979: Starting from Picking up Paper at the Brigade Headquarters

Chen Yan, the author of the online article, was reborn and returned to the Shandong Plain in 1979. Without a father or a mother, he stayed at his uncle's house without enough food and clothing. He was regarded as a lazy man by the whole village because he hid in his adobe house and wrote manuscripts every day. Work points are the last word, pen and ink are not worth half a ration, and waste paper and kerosene have to be saved again and again. Others gossip constantly, and even close relatives are embarrassed. But no one knew that he held a treasure trove of literature spanning decades in his mind. He vowed to use a worn-out charcoal pen and a stack of scraps of paper picked up from the brigade headquarters to break through the poverty, earn some dignity, and embark on a literary counterattack that shocked everyone in the barren 1970s.