A Floating Thought

"A Thought" is a novella of nearly 47,000 words. It tells the story of a young man who dreamed that he had spent his whole life in a coma for seven years. In the dream, his name was Chu Cheng. He experienced the destruction of his family and exile in the snow; he was rescued by the Oriental doctor Chang Zhen and was given the name "Cheng"; he was admitted to the military academy and went to the battlefield, where he was seriously injured; he was framed and imprisoned. Then he woke up. When he woke up, he was still a seventeen-year-old boy. My father stood at the door with porridge and said, "You have been in a coma for seven years." My mother is cooking pumpkin porridge in the kitchen, and the house is full of sweet smell. The home is still there, the people are still there, and the bowl of porridge is still warm. Everything in the dream - exile, war, prison, revolution, reunion, farewell - all disappeared. But those experiences were etched into his bones and became part of his soul. This is a story about loss and cherishment, and also a questioning of "what is real". In the dream, Chu Cheng used his half-life experience to tell us: It takes a lifetime for a person to experience loss before he can appreciate the lukewarm warmth of a bowl of porridge in front of him. The novel travels back and forth between the East and the West, shuttling between Italy, China and France. It writes about the collision of personal destiny and the tide of the times, and also writes about how wounds scab and how people's hearts grow soft. As the book says: Life is a long dream. When you wake up from the dream, your home is still there, the porridge is still hot, and the sun is still shining in the same place.