He is not a professor. He has no literary degree. For much of his life, Wang Jibing has been simply a man on a bike, weaving through city traffic with a bag of food strapped to his back. But he carries something else on those journeys: poems. When no paper is nearby, he writes them on the palms of his hands — composing lines at traffic lights, or in the few seconds an elevator takes to climb.
One difficult delivery — hours of searching the wrong buildings, 18 flights of stairs climbed, only to be berated by the customer — sent him home seething. Unable to contain it, he turned the feeling into a poem. It went viral. Something in it, the exhaustion and the dignity held intact despite everything, touched a nerve in millions of readers. That piece became the start of a larger mission: to write not just for himself, but for the millions of workers who share the same roads and pressures. His poetry collection Low Flight ultimately won China's most prestigious literary honor, the Lu Xun Literary Prize. "Not every pair of wings can fly straight into the clouds," he writes. "A flight close to the ground is still a flight."
Chen Hui has spent 18 years behind a general goods stall at a wet market. She does not write about grand events. She writes about what she sees every day: the fish seller beside her, whose fingers carry a permanent gray tint that no amount of scrubbing can remove; the elderly customer who arrives each week and quietly divides her pension into careful portions — a little for her grandson's sweets, a little set aside for medical needs, and a sum folded into an envelope for a daughter who married far away. In Chen Hui's hands, these small, overlooked details become literature. Her essay collection was shortlisted for the Lu Xun Literary Prize, a signal that such writing belongs not at the margins of literature, but at its very center.
Wang Liuyun cleans buildings for a living. She writes in the breaks between shifts — no formal training, no literary connections, no workshop or mentor. She has published four books. Her work The Weight of Dust takes the broom and the dustpan as its central images, finding in the most invisible kind of labor a language for patience, persistence, and the kind of quiet dignity that rarely makes the news.
Then there is Chen Nianxi, who descends thousands of meters underground each day to work in a coal mine. He writes on cardboard torn from empty explosive crates, in the dark, surrounded by rock. Even after being diagnosed with pneumoconiosis — the occupational disease that slowly fills a miner's lungs with dust — he has not stopped. His most-quoted line captures something essential: "For even in the humblest bone, there runs a river."
What connects these four people is not talent alone, but a refusal to accept that words belong only to those with the right education or background. Literature, they remind us simply by existing, grows wherever there is a life genuinely lived and honestly observed.
In Chinese, the pine tree — 松柏 — endures through the harshest winters without losing its color. It does not blossom dramatically or grow to spectacular heights. It simply stays, rooted and green, through everything. These writers are like that. They work the hardest shifts, live in the narrowest margins, and keep something alive inside — a line, an image, a small true observation — until a moment arrives to set it down.
"Every ordinary person running along the road holds a small light in their hands," Wang Jibing writes. "This light first illuminates us, and then slowly warms and brightens the entire world."