Three Hundred Thousand Words

The night my manuscript was rejected for the seventeenth time, I deleted all 300,000 words myself. At 2:47 a.m., someone knocked on my door. It was my landlady, holding the printout I’d thrown in the trash. Her voice was calm as she asked, “You’re really just going to accept this?” I was twenty-four. By day, I wrote insincere advertorials for a media company. At night, I worked on a long novel nobody read. An Excel sheet recorded seventeen rejections. The next day, my manuscript came back, covered in professional-looking red-ink comments. She said only two things: “Leave the manuscript by the door. Finish a chapter, and it’ll count for a hundred yuan off the rent.” In the old building at No. 9 Huaian Lane lived Zhou Ye, who delivered takeout by day and sang at a live house at night; Uncle Chen, who had spent half his life repairing watches; and a group of young people stubbornly holding on at the margins of the city. The city won’t remember us. So we have to remember ourselves. It took me a long time to understand that what she’d picked up wasn’t my manuscript.