Wei 1

Yifan Wei
Ms. Park
ENGL106I
January 27, 2015
Alive
Time passes like the waving river. As a writer, I have written in both Chinese and
English for almost ten years since I was enrolled into the primary school. I could still
remember the warm noon that our teacher asked my classmates and me to write a
paragraph about what we had done yesterday. It was pretty awesome for a little boy to
handle a pencil and read the words he wrote step by step even though the wrongly
written words always became laughingstocks. That was the beginning of my writing
life.
However, everything moved roughly. The aim our teacher taught us how to write
was dealing with the writing exam. As we all know, in China, everything need to be
tested to get a good score which can be used to help us get into the high school or the
university. So we entered into the devil because we had to face with the rule of
writing every day. Our writing life, my writing life was just like surviving from the
shipwreck for the feeling that I was struggling in the sea of words. I was just alive.
Sometimes I got high score but usually I could only earn 45 out of 70, which was very
fair. Our teacher often roared to us after she graded our masterpiece, Why dont
you get the point on write skills? It was so easy! I thought that was because I was
given the topic and formula on how to compose, what to describe. It wasnt what I
want to write.
In senior high school, a teacher called Li appeared. She told us that if we wanted
to create good articles, we had to read a lot of books and think the meaning of the
words, sentences, paragraphs. Though some of them might seem useless because they
were not associated with the topics given in the exam, your command of words,

Wei 2
sentences and other factors that influence your articles would be improved
soundlessly. Whats more, reading more books could help you collect examples which
you could use in the paragraph so that your essay would become substantial. Ms. Li
was a great teacher. She told me the key to write articles and she was one of my
literacy sponsors. I tried to read books such as Cultural Journey, written by Yu Qiuyu,
and Lonely Sage, written by Bao Pengshan. It was not the first time I saw such
beautiful words and sentences but it was the first time I could read through my soul
and made contact with the writer, the sage. Obviously, I made progress in writing and
my writing life seemed becoming brilliant though I still had some problemes in
writing. I found sometimes I was good at writing abstruse sentences but I had a poor
command on examples, which I used to illustrate my point. Usually my examples
prevent my score because my comment on them was not enough and I didnt conquer
them even after I attended the college entrance examination.
One night, a man named Fu Gui came up to me from the dark book, Alive. Just as
a wind blew over, I felt gloomy. It was another literacy sponsor, Yu Hua, who wrote
this novel. It was one of my most favorite books. I read it in the midnight thoroughly
and watched the film the next morning. There were no book could make me so
astonished that I could not help crying instantaneously when I finished this book. The
story was about a man who lived in 20th century and he endured family broken up,
the Great Cultural Revolution which was not as friendly as it sounded, war and
impoverishment. The miserable destiny exposed the life those people living in 20st
century in China lived. I wrote one review to express my feelings on this book, those
people living in the tragic period and our lives and uncontrollably shouted to myself
but I felt excellently good after I wrote up it. So attractive did I felt on Yu Huas book
that I read his other short story such as Blood Plum Blossom and The Penalty Expert. I

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found he was writing with his pain and the style of these books was called
consciousness, which meant writing with your mind and heart. It was pretty awesome
for me and I thought I lived beyond the real world after reading them. And I tried to
write following this style. My heart, brain, and body were all exercised with the
moving pen because it was really torturous to go through inside my psyche. In spite of
this, I felt standing at the peak and gained a sense of accomplishment.
Gazing at my writing life, I thought I was just alive to write something in the
first few years. But at the moment I met Ms. Li, my works become alive because the
connection between my article and other books was established. Then I wandered
with Yu Hua, my heart, my mind was alive. Consciousness was one style that could
illustrate our dreams and marvelous, strange imagination. Nevertheless, it was not my
property. Yu Hua was such a guy who undertook great pain in thinking and writing.
What I could do was just appreciating and learning his style but not imitating them
completely because that was his character. I am still on my way to build my own
color, something beyond alive. It is the writing style which belongs to me.
Now I am admitted into the Purdue university as a mathematics major students.
It seems like writing will leave far away from me. But I will not abandon writing.
Maintaining reading and expressing myself, I will suffer the pain in the process to
find my way to compose and my picture to depict. Then, I will enjoy every moment
when I complete my own article.