Sansan: I am trying to make friends with anxiety after two-year full commitment into writing
In Shanghai, you rarely have the opportunity to intrude into someone’s genuine private space, especially when she is a writer. But when we hesitated about where to grab a drink on a Saturday night at 8 PM, Sansan eagerly suggested we could go to her place.
"I'll call my parents first; they’ll be so happy!" All the way, Sansan was excited and nervous, like an elementary school student inviting friends over for the first time. She mentioned that her mom was already folding blankets for her again and went on to explain that her room is very small.
The apartment is an irregularly shaped commercial unit, with rooms squeezed together like a tangram puzzle. The living room is crammed between the entrance dining area and two bedrooms, so if you leave a room to get water from the kitchen, you inevitably block the view of the TV playing the news in the living room. Sansan's bedroom looks like any space a girl who loves pretty things would have: moss-green wallpaper, cream-colored curtains, a freshly purchased Maltese dog plush rug under the desk, a gardenia-scented diffuser on the bedside table, and a fiddle leaf fig on the windowsill. On a large cabinet sits a newly bought copy of "Lu Xun's Diary," as Sansan plans to write a continuation of one of Lu Xun's unfinished long novels, conceptualizing a story set in the Tang Dynasty.
Despite having been writing for over ten years, having published four collections of short stories and received various awards recognized by the mainstream literary world, Sansan considers herself "unimportant" as a novelist. She is petite and sometimes enjoys wearing deep purple lipstick, with straight hair falling to her shoulders, hiding her small, oval face. Perhaps her easily concealed stature in a crowd gives her more opportunities to observe from the sidelines. Her friend Wang Suxin says, "Sansan knows everything that her friends know, yet she clumsily maintains her silence." Most of the time, she is a listener; when the atmosphere quiets down, she suddenly pops up with a deadpan joke. You can sense this rhythm in her novels, too.
Sansan and her parents moved into their home by the Suzhou River at the end of 2022. From her window, she can see the neon-lit Ferris wheel of Jing'an Joy City. This place was purchased after her parents sold several properties. For the older generation of Shanghainese who grew up in Huangpu District, living within walking distance to People’s Square is a lifelong dream. The house purchase was delayed for two years due to the pandemic, but property prices continued to rise steadily. Nonetheless, Sansan knows she is fortunate to have her own room in the heart of Shanghai.
The origin of her pen name, "Sansan," has many versions. One is that she is the third child of her parents; before her, they had two infants who did not survive. Thus, she was named "Shanshan," which sounds like "Sansan."
