Essays ⁽³⁴⁹⁾

The new year has arrived. For cancer patients, this is a day worth celebrating, because we have lived through another year, and our cancer age has grown another year. By nature reclusive, I do not like making friends, so the people I have known over…

Occasionally, you pass through my life, just like the tide rising and falling, raising ripples when you come, silent and still when you go. This is fine too, like flowers blooming and falling, like spring departing and autumn arriving, letting me see flowers in full…

1. Love has no boundaries The healer has no boundaries. The longer one studies medicine, the more one is able to cross every kind of "boundary." There are no national boundaries; all people are citizens of the Earth. Promoting narrow nationalism and racism is ignorant…

Great Beijing is so vast that most people who come to this city can never rise to prominence; in the end they all live unobtrusively. Lin Yutang's Moment in Peking opens by creating the figure of Yao Sian, a Daoist man living in Beijing who…

Shi Yunyu, a Zhuangyuan (top scholar) of the Qianlong era in the Qing dynasty, wrote a famous couplet: "Where the spirit reaches, the writing matures; when learning is deep, the temper evens." I have slightly modified it as the title of this piece, to express…

Thank you to all readers for your continued attention. On this occasion of the Lunar New Year, Zhiyuan wishes you all a happy new year. Wishing you great luck in the Year of the Rooster and may all go your way! Wishing my fellow patients…

In my 2016 annual plan, one project fell through: writing a novel called Shi Du (Ten Ferry Crossings). In summer I felt a strong urge to write this novel. Shidu is a famous scenic spot in Beijing; along both banks of the Juma River, mountain…

The year is drawing to a close; it is time to sum up my own year. My biggest feeling about 2016 is that I was busy, and that I have let my family down. On Father's Day, my son's homeroom teacher invited me to host…

In my personal dictionary, "carefree idler" is a term of praise. On a warm winter afternoon, half-closing the eyes, legs crossed, doing nothing at all, picking up a leisure book, reading and reading until, without noticing, one falls asleep, drool on half the face, the…

Mr. Yang Jiang, the wife of Mr. Qian Zhongshu, has passed away at the age of 105. A woman of both brilliant talent and gentle temperament, who was willing to live in poverty and solitude her whole life, has finally left this Saha world, becoming…