Notes from a Hedgehog by Yan Lianke

Yan Lianke’s story “Plants, Rocks, Dirt, and Sky,” translated by Jeremy Tiang, appears in the magazine’s Fall 2025 issue Paris Review.

When an author is forbidden to publish his books in his own country but cannot live anywhere else, he finds himself argued and scolded, attacked and loved, forgotten but always remembered again, like a hedgehog who, for whatever reason, must crawl along human paths, surrounded by onlookers, kicked and pushed with sticks into the bushes, although there will certainly be some who consider this creature as important as life itself and gently swaddle it with their clothes to take him to an uninhabited part of the forest. But the hedgehog would crawl back to the path every time the sun rose.

Because the sun was shining on that forest path.

Because hedgehogs crave sunlight.

That’s how it is, cycles and repeats, repeats and cycles. Could the time come when a hedgehog dies on a sunlit path?

Since turning sixty, I have thought about death every day.

Every night, I took sleeping pills and thought about the inevitability of my death. The pills didn’t just curb my insomnia; more importantly, they helped me forget about death, so that I could wake up the next day, watch the sun rise slowly on the windowsill, sit by the brightly lit window, and pick up a pen to put my thoughts to paper. A hedgehog crawled once again onto the sunlit path. In this way, one day after my sixtieth birthday, I will accept the inevitability of death, just as I accept that the world may not gain someone after I am born and may not necessarily lose someone after I am gone. All this will give me more calm in the face of death. My inevitable departure feels in sync with something else in my life: working for three to five years to produce a book, not because it would be published in simplified Chinese, or in traditional characters for the Hong Kong or Taiwanese market, and certainly not so that it could be translated into multiple languages ​​and published around the world, but simply writing for the sake of writing, which has given me the freedom that I can tell this story, unfettered, to my son, and when he When he is old he can pass it on to his descendants. A long time after my death, when I am reduced to dust and even my coffin, my clothes, and my bones have disintegrated, when sunlight has infiltrated the forest and there is no longer any need to run around like a hedgehog in search of light, one of my descendants will quietly take out my manuscript and present it to the public. Then what will happen?

I imagine, at least, my descendants and some readers—or maybe just one reader—will read this novel, sigh, and mutter, “Ah, so our ancestors once thought and wrote like this.”

Purely for the sake of a sigh that will come at some unspecified time in the distant future, I dove into writing for the sake of writing. For more than two years I wrote every day, without pause, until I had completed a manuscript of more than three hundred thousand words. Looking at the ream of paper, I interrogated myself:

What kind of person are you?

What kind of writer are you?

In the end, I was a freak who couldn’t adjust to reality. This made me think about the strange qualities of my writing, the parts that people find difficult to accept. I make a living in the real world, but at the same time I am an eccentric who fights tirelessly for the oddity of my writing. I am not proud of this oddity, nor am I ashamed of it, just as the hedgehog does not let his ugliness and unpopularity prevent him from finding a path in the sunlit forest.

After finishing the novel I wrote for no reason, I took a short break before starting to revise it.

This novel is like a porcupine that crawls through the years in search of the sun, not only because it is covered in unsightly thorns, but also because deep in its soul there is a strange, damp and forest smell that makes it unbearable for others. But it is precisely these characteristics of hedgehogs that distinguish them as a species. Aren’t there novels which, because they are covered in thorns and have a strange smell, can be considered literature?

I live for this weirdness.

I write because of this strangeness and strange smell.

To make the aimless strangeness of my novel more intense and pure, I spent two years revising and trimming it, over and over again. When I feel tired, I will put down my pen and write a short story or two, so I can breathe a sigh of relief. These stories, from the characters to the plot, or even the style, have absolutely nothing to do with the novel. But in their way of thinking and spirit, they are just as strange and they smell just as strange. I wouldn’t dare walk away from this oddity. My plan is to produce more than ten short stories between periods of working on my novel; just like his novels, they would have been written with no purpose except the pursuit of eccentricity. These short stories will not be an extension or addition to the novel, but will reflect each other while in their respective spaces, in order to provide strange sights and smells to the reader’s hands. When the hedgehog finally finds the sun, he will return to give warmth and affection to the world.

“Plants, Rocks, Dirt, and Sky” is just the first story in the collection. This may not be the kind of story every reader will enjoy, either in terms of its language and narration, its characters and emotions, or its depiction of life’s progression and decline. It’s true, in the vast country of 1.4 billion people where I live, some despise it for its strangeness, just as they deride the smell of porcupines.

The world needs strange and disgusting writings to appear from time to time, even if the readers don’t like them, or the authors will disappear in this world. This strangeness is what allows literature to survive and develop.

Yan Lianke’s The Chinese Storya novel, to be published from Grove Atlantic in 2026, translated by Jeremy Tiang. This essay was also translated by Jeremy Tiang, a novelist, playwright, and translator of more than thirty Chinese books.