Passing by the World

"Passing Through the World" tells the story of a young man starting from Liangzhou, walking through the academy, thirteen states and a long life. Xu Huaichuan was born in a village in the northwest. There is a river beside the village and a mountain pass outside the village. When I was young, the distance was still very light. It was just a curve on an old picture, the mud on the soles of passers-by's shoes, the pages of books blown open by the wind in the school building, and an unspoken word in the dusk. In the spring of his sixteenth year, he packed up his bags and left Liangzhou. The luggage contains recommended books, old pictures, red ropes and dry food, as well as concerns, heartbeats and partings from my hometown. He thought he was heading for a distant place, but later he realized that what was really waiting for him were many different paths in life. At Zhou Jun Academy, he saw for the first time how young people from the Thirteen Prefectures met, made choices and said goodbye. Some people are heading for official careers, some are heading for business, some are pursuing freedom, and some are guarding a light of their own. After the academy, he continued to enter the wider world. The wind and snow, the city, the caravan, the old friends, the reunion and the parting, fill in the unfinished parts of the book bit by bit. This is not a story about a boy becoming a king and becoming a saint. It writes about how an ordinary person is shaped by experience, how he sees himself and the world in others, and how he slowly understands when looking back: There may be no standard answer in life. What matters is not where he ends up, but how those encounters, companionships, possessions and losses turned him into who he is today. He passed through the world. Also left behind in the world.