The novel The World Around Me traces the life of Zhou Wei from her earliest childhood to her adulthood, embedding her personal experiences within layers of allegory, memory, and symbolic episodes. At its core, it is a story about a girl raised in a fractured family, shaped by abandonment, bitterness, and survival, but told in a fragmented style where realism and imagination constantly interweave. The narrative begins in her childhood, where the “Cement Box” becomes the central metaphor. Zhou Wei grows up in a small, oppressive home with her mother Chen Xianglan, who resents the daughter as a thief of her youth and opportunities. Xianglan often speaks of her missed chances—jobs, life in the city, freedom—and projects the blame onto Zhou Wei, reminding her that her very birth prevented another life. At school, Zhou Wei once writes a sentence, “She could have not been my mother,” which her teacher deems “absurd,” but which encapsulates the daughter’s awareness of her mother’s resentment. Home is described as a “cement box,” filled with discarded objects obtained through Xianglan’s hustling. What appears free comes with invisible costs. The bitterness of poverty and confinement dominates the early atmosphere, with furniture and walls symbolizing suffocating traps. Zhou Wei learns silence as a form of survival, as any protest is turned against her.
This early domestic setting expands into the theme of abandonment. One night at a bus station, Xianglan deliberately leaves Zhou Wei alone to test or torment her, allowing the child to believe she has been deserted. The incident imprints deep insecurity: Zhou Wei grows up fearing rejection and believing that people can choose to “want” or “not want” others as easily as objects. Xianglan herself numbs her frustrations with sleeping pills and tranquilizers, which are metaphorically described as “white soldiers” waging war inside her body. The child witnesses this ongoing private war, collecting empty pill bottles as though they are tombstones. Zhou Wei’s childhood thus becomes nomadic, often displaced between relatives’ homes. Her mother deposits her with aunts, uncles, and grandparents, turning kinship into a constellation of temporary shelters. These fragments introduce the side-stories of relatives, each “planet” in the family galaxy carrying its own burdens and dramas.
One recurring motif is the cousin Jiawei, the model child who always smiles and fulfills adult expectations. His perfect public face makes him the “eternal smile” of the family until, as a teenager, he commits suicide by falling from a school building. His death shatters not only the family but also the myth of eternal brightness. The rupture spreads: Jiawei’s parents split, his mother loses her laughter, and his father remarries. Zhou Wei’s perception of kinship becomes one of collapse and substitution, where figures are replaced but never repaired. At the same time, her closest bonds emerge with cousins Jiahe and Jiale, with whom she shares summers of games, river play, and imaginative adventures. For them, life briefly feels like pure play—running, hiding, imitating television heroes, and even enacting mock rescue scenes. Yet these games turn dangerous when Zhou Wei falls ill after river play, burning with fever while relatives view her more as a burden than as family. The episode underscores her vulnerability and the precariousness of her belonging.
