Far away

Qiu Yuanni's latest collection of essays. These 45 fluent, graceful essays, primarily written between 2009 and 2013, offer a snapshot of her life's journey. She says that for a fate so treacherous, "the only avenue of redemption is writing. I use words to gather up the corpse, burying it deep within the lines, piling it up into a tomb of words."

Articles written with the experience of life are always profound and moving.

This book describes the southern part of the Malaysian Peninsula where she taught, the ancient city of Malacca where she passed by, and China where she studied for her doctorate, etc. Compared to her hometown of Penang, these places she visited are far away.

She writes about ancient cities, riverbanks, and island towns. Familiar places take on an elegant life in her writing. These exquisite diction, classical spaces, and symbols, read between the lines, reveal a woman deeply drawn to Chinese aesthetics. Her narratives exude an understated, tranquil beauty. Each word is rich and vibrant, reflecting the spirit of her perceptive mind and unwavering devotion to her writing.

"Qiu Yuanni's essays, however, possess an unchanging gaze, a pure humanistic concern that resists the complex changes of the environment and stubbornly pursues the true nature of the human world."

"As a woman who has traveled extensively and studied extensively, her world is still vast, and she continues to write about the broader and more complex aspects of life. This is precisely the cultural breadth of this essay, which is full of tension. This breadth goes beyond the boundaries traditionally assigned to women and expands the freedom of modernity."

Liang Yongan, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the Department of Chinese Language and Literature at Fudan University, wrote the preface and recommended it.

Qiu Yuanni

A writer and painter from Penang, Malaysia, he holds a PhD in Modern and Contemporary Literature from Nanjing University, China. He previously served as a lecturer in the Chinese Department at Southern University and a researcher at the Asian Renaissance and Intercultural Studies Institute. He currently resides in Shanghai, China, where he is pursuing his second PhD at the Center for Chinese Classics Studies (Institute of Ancient Books) at Fudan University. He is the author of the essay collection "In the Pastureland," the literary criticism collections "Beauty and Sorrow, Gaze and Farewell: A Study of the Symbolic Implications of Nature in Shen Congwen's Novels," and "Poetic Conversion: A Study of Shen Congwen's Consciousness of Nature." In 2014, he was awarded the Jinfan Award by Hanjiang College. He has also won third prize in the National Prose Award from the "Selected Essays" magazine in mainland China, first prize in the National Jiaying Prose Award in Malaysia, second place in the Nanyang University Alumni Association National Micro-Fiction Writing Award, the Hsing Yun Literary Award for Excellence in Prose, the Ma Ming Bodhisattva Literary Award for Excellence in Prose, and the National Chinese Literature Prose Award from the Chinese Literary Association for Excellence. Her literary works have been included in anthologies such as Asian Chinese Micro-Fiction, Returning Geese: A Selection of Southeast Asian Chinese Women Writers, Contemporary Malaysian Micro-Fiction, Nostalgia: An ASEAN Anthology 2012, and Going Home: A Selection of Malaysian Chinese Micro-Fiction. Her academic papers have been published in international academic conferences and journals sponsored by China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Canada, South Korea, Malaysia, and other countries. She also wrote a column for the supplement of the Nanyang Siang Pau newspaper in Malaysia.

3 Preface: A Traveler's Emotional Feelings / Liang Yongan

21 Border Town Memories
24 Ancient Building Shadow
28 Riverside Nursery Rhymes
32 A Glimpse of the Ancient City
35 River City Journey
39 Island City Balcony
47 Winter Whispers
50 Remnants of the City Wall
53 Subway Cultural Wall Tour
56 The Whisper of an Old Soul
59 Summer Solstice, loofah flowers bloom
62 Matai Street Night
65 Book Hunting at the Midnight "Ghost Market"
68 Window View
71 Apartment Life
74 Strangers on Earth
81 The Reveries of a Solitary Walker
84 Between the Lightness of the Soul and the Heaviness of the Body
87 The moist veins on a dead leaf in autumn
89 In a tangled web of meaning
91 A clear sky
93 The Story of Bamboo Curtain
95 Between the Rainbow Shadow and the Slanting Sunlight
97 Half of the Scenery
99 Ruins whispering
101 Mirror Self-Description
105 Freeze the Flow of Time
108 Written beside the Xiamafang Stone Carvings
110 West Lake Wishing
112 Heart Lock
114 The Eternal Shadow
121 Slow
124 Desk Language
128 Wild Soul
130 Cold Rain
133 Far Away
135 Mobile
138 Dream Record
141 Whisper of Light and Shadow
143 Border Town Night
147 Sickly Gossip
155 Tropic of Cancer
158 Island Melancholy
162 Naked Night
167 Walking Along the River's Edge

175 Postscript