Writing his own reality

Panicked and lost, he ultimately chose to go to a casual vocational college - which he had not even applied to - in a bid to keep reading and writing for another three years, shunning reality by immersing himself in the world of literature.

Absent from most classes, in the library he read fiction by Franz Kafka that set a spiritual backdrop for his writing, as well as Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde and William Faulkner, among others. He wrote too, composing poems, short stories and keeping diaries.

Despite his introverted nature, Peng studied marketing at college. After graduation, like his classmates, he landed a job as a salesman, traveling around to promote products, such as light boxes, grille lamps, wall switches, tiles or curtains, to retailers and personal customers.

Traveling through big and small cities across the Pearl River Delta, and Guizhou and Zhejiang provinces, Peng needed to handle agents and clients and, during the night, he would transform the absurdities and amusing things in life into stories about the love lives, work, failures, struggles and confusion of most ordinary young people.

He changed jobs frequently, with excuses such as "too boring" and "those products are not poetic", as the protagonist in one of his short stories told his girlfriend.

"I would really want to quit after one or two days in a new company. The products were not beautiful and the publicity of my employers was vulgar and unpleasant. But it might be my way to shun reality, because that's how reality looks," he says, pondering, "other people can adapt to it, why can't I?"