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He Xiangyang is a writer with six national honors for her accomplishment in literary research, criticism, and books. Her honors are closely associated with the way she pursues literary dreams. She has been on the road for a long while.

Treks along the Yellow River

Her biggest trek took place in the early summer of 2000. She backpacked westward along the Yellow River until she reached the Bayan Har Mountains in western China where Tibet and Qinghai meet and where the Yellow River trickles its start. Then she turned around and traveled eastward along the river again until she got to the Bohai Bay, the mouth of the Yellow River. The journey took her four months and numerous pairs of shoes. “From Bayan Har”, a book resulted from this long journey, was published in the spring of 2001.

It was not her first field study of the great river, arguably the very cradle of the Chinese civilization. Her first field study on the river had started two years before 2000. It is worth mentioning that such travels were not new in the history of Chinese culture. Some ancient scholars emphasized the importance of traveling across the country for experiences beyond books. Over the past decade, He Xiangyang has studied the Yellow River in terms of its reality, history, individuals, groups, tribes, and its evolution. Her writings are neither about landscapes nor merely about culture. They explore the history of the river, its meaning to the national essence as well as her emotions, meditations, gains and losses.

Her search for something great and significant in the soul of the motherland traces back to 1990. That year, she began exploring rural Shaanxi, Shanxi and Inner Mongolia and Hebei, the area that the river traverses. She did not know exactly what she wanted in the first few years, yet she sensed that there was something very important in this part of the country and that her mission was to find the answer. These journeys and researches resulted in two books “A Pilgrimage Story or On the Road” and “Wind over the Shoulders”.

In 1998 the answer she had got seemed to raise more questions as she began to focus on the Yellow River. The four-month journey in 2000 along the rural areas of the river gave her insight into the past.

Ambitious Projects

At present, He Xiangyang is working at her three ambitions. She is combing through culture and tradition in a bid to write about the history of Chinese ideology. She hopes to write about cultural giants spanning history from Confucius to Lu Xun. Her writing has progressed to Sima Qian, a great historian of the Han Dynasty (206BC-202AD). Her second project is to examine the Chinese revolution in a book of oral reminiscences by revolutionaries and veterans. Her third project is about a new effort to introduce western culture to China. She has completed a book on cultural personality, which is a national project.

On the Road

A friend recalls that He Xiangyang first encountered the charms of field study more than 10 years ago when she was attending a seminar in rural western Hunan Province. She disappeared from the seminar one afternoon. It turned out that she paid a visit to a rural family that afternoon and what she discovered through chatting with the people there filled a notebook. It was the first time she became truly aware of things beyond books, planting a seed for her addiction to the road.

Getting out of study and getting on the road has now become a theme of her literary pursuit. All her collections of essays, reviews and papers are associated with the concept of being on the road. It is the way she lives, sees, thinks and writes.□