April’s Grass, August’s Laurel

Memories and descriptions of childhood and youth from Gui Wenya’s works always exude a breath of fresh and green, just like April’s grass. In recent years, she has written about the nature and the inconstancy in human affection in the eyes of adults. These articles are still fresh and simple, but with a plus of a faint fragrance, just like August’s laurel.

Time flies. From the first moment of reading her works, 20 years have passed. People and books both grow old, a very natural thing. There is no need to sign and feel sad. It is uncommon to us that Gui Wenya always keeps a young and pure heart. As Lindgren said, "the child, that very curious and playful little girl", is still living in her heart and never been walking away.

Before she set foot in children''s literature, Gui Wenya had a 16-year-long period of time ofliterary writing practice and "literary preparation". With infinite love and respect to children''s literature and clear writing conscience, she entered the field of children''s literature when her personal life, art taste and language using ability grew into mature. For her, children''s literature writing and herlife cannot be separated, thus, her life seems to be the extension of her works. She once said: "In the journey of creating works, a writer also interprets the puzzle and confusion of his or her own life... through specific word presenting, personal life, experience, value orientation, and aesthetic feelings can thus become completed." She treats children''s literature as a huge thing in her life.

The most ideal children''s literature will have some of these qualities: the capacity of truth, goodness, and beauty; rich and wonderful imagination; a strong moral sense; positive personality and charm; high level of sensitivity and absorption for beauty of both classic and modern; clear, beautiful, and precise writing, and so on. In Gui Wenya’s works, they are glaring such beauty. She uses a warm heart to feel and guard everything; uses a pair of beautiful eyes to explore and look at the world; and uses pure and clear words to water her garden of literature. Every book of hers is a small world of truth, goodness and beauty. All her novels, stories, prose or travel notes are full of warmth and brightness. She said that children''s literature could never likeliterature, which gets everything off your chest and care nothing. Therefore, it is always "filter bitterness and bring children hope, faith, and happiness" in her work.

Thoughts Cat Series collects the best of Gui Wenya’s children''s fiction, prose, travel notes and so on. That wild girl of Erlang Bridge and Till Forever are full of childhood’s careless and innocent, melting with warmth and kindness of human nature. In You Can Hear It, she sees the earth on a perennial eternal spring just from a small dandelion and a piece of clover; She appreciates life and finds the secret of how lives quietly and poetically live on earth just from her long shadow cast by the morning light, and from little drops of memories of family. She dedicates more of her respect to those "settle down to do 30 minutes of meditation every day", even those "loners". She praises this beauty of loneliness: "people who love loneliness do not stir up trouble. His head has a wheel of rolling forward; he freely intoxicates in the wheel axel of imagination, and imagine satisfies him; of course, he also used to immerge into the home of memory, and the old times’ mixed feelings of sorrow and joy, which are like flying birds, flying far and far away, hiding in clouds high above; he also will ponder on wisdom words of books, from which gets inspiration and confidence again and again." We can say that all Gui Wenya’s children''s literature are working on "discovery of beauty". She believes: "although some people exaggerated that the world has been in the chaos, and we could not find a clean place as far as the eye can reach. However, in fact, there still are many eternal beauties that worth to pursue, and they also exist without the limit of time and space”. In her eyes, these qualities of beauty include being natural, serenity, peace, freedom, knowledge, truth, love, beauty, and so on. From her books, we can see her exploring and pursuing these qualities.

Everyone only lives once on the earth. Because the world is so big, what should we look for? Because life is so short, how can we hold it firmly, and try to make it extend and become richer? Gui Wenya tells us that we should start from looking for "beauty"! The world is not necessarily beautiful, but it cannot be without "beauty"; love life and let us start from our heart, walking through the journey of goodness and love, moral and justice, and entering into the world, being close to the earth, and then entering into literature and art. In her eyes, "whether the world is beautiful or not, it is completely built with your heart. The goodness is the big beauty. Without it, we cannot talk about beauty in the first place; only when you settle down, the world is quiet. We can learn it from See the World with Beautiful Eyes, Gui Wenya uses her own eyes and mind to find and feel the beauty that has been ignored, the human nature and the dignity that has been trodden down and treated haughtily.

As for "beauty”, Gui Wenya has her own strict standard. In her eyes, the world is not beautiful, beauty is “completely built with your own heart", “people who admire beauty are embracing an angel with wings; people who deviate from beauty will be struggling in the palm of a devil with horns on its head". Therefore, she argues that the basis of beauty is being natural, and being natural requires people to be sincere, composed, truly, not false, and not affected. “The natural feeling from the bottom of one’s heart is the beauty". People, who are sensitive to beauty, cannot be indifferent by ugliness. Facing a fur row with small heads of fox still on it, this beautiful seeker will be filled with righteous indignation and protest for those silent and innocent lives:" when the tip of a knife tears into the soft heart of a residence of animal kingdom, would human red beard really even not have a little feeling? "

Gui Wenya’s literary journey is a journey of seeking beauty, finding beauty, and embracing the beauty. The beauty of all creatures on the earth makes her solid, broad and vast; a kind of "the earth moral" that stands between sky and the earth attracts her to walk to her last sublime, towards ultimate beauty and goodness. The tireless walking and seeking perhaps cause her to lose a lot of stability, comfort, and pleasure; however, it is in the journey of spirit and soul of passionate seek, observations, insights, and founds that she harvested many great experience from pursuing dream and goodness, and completed countless poems of free and independent life. Only at this moment, she appreciated the infinite vitality and its rich lyricism of the earth, the sky, dawn, and dusk, and embraced the beauty beyond the world.

She used to cite sentences of Tagore’s poem to express sincere feelings and beliefs that she has harvested in the journey of roaming the world: “Some day I shall sing to thee in the sunrise of some other world, I have seen thee before in the light of the earth, in the love of man". She said, "We live in the world, and begin to enjoy the life it gave us". I believe, only people who can travel all over the world might have the world, and deeply love the world, including all the hardships and misery.