Asking the Azure on Paper

[This book won an Outstanding Work Award in Qimao's Second Realist Fiction Writing Contest, and a print edition under the same title has been published.]

A full-length novel about rural revitalization and grassroots governance.

It follows Dou Huaiye, an online novelist who returns to her hometown after failing her graduate school entrance exam. By chance, she discovers that Ye Wenqing, the senior she has secretly loved, is an inheritor of intangible cultural heritage. He gives up a high-paying job to return home and establish the Huangma Paper Workshop, dedicated to promoting traditional papermaking techniques. Deeply moved, she resolves to help Ye Wenqing promote them.

From their first failed application for intangible cultural heritage status to their eventual appearance in an interview on CCTV, the way the two respond to one event after another reflects the Chinese people's spirit of hard work and craftsmanship: never abandoning a task or giving up.