Words that changed the world
- Source: Global Times
- [09:55 August 26 2010]
- Comments
"I still remember a girl and the story Tokyo Love Story she wrote. It was so affecting," said the netizen Wanzi on kaixin001.com.
Some fans were curious enough to do some detective work and found out the current occupations of the award winners of the first competition. This added fuel to the fire on the Internet.
"I hadn't read any school composition like these. The styles, the topics and the ways of thinking were quite different from what we had been taught in class," said Du Ke, a fan of the contest.
Tokyo Love Story, written by Ding Yan, then a 14-year-old Shanghai girl, was the most popular story in the first year of the competition.
Tokyo Love Story, named after one of the most popular television series of the day, saw the young author writing in the first person, talking to herself: "I like using shampoo … I am a naughty girl who is always giggling." And she mentioned "sex," one of the most sensitive words in school education 12 years ago.
A new era in writing
The contest saw these young writers, for the first time, jumping out of the "eight-part essay" format and opening a new era in school composition writing, like the dawn shining onto the examination-oriented writing exercises and Chinese teaching in middle and high schools.
Things that could not be talked about in school writings appeared in these stories and, as a reader put it, the authors seemed like "restless young souls heading toward a narrow channel."
"The story I wrote for the contest was completely different from anything I had written in school, it was freer in style and subject matter," Chen Jiayong, a prizewinner in 1998, told the Global Times.
