Born in the 1980s – Guo Jingming (2)

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Born in the 1980s – Guo Jingming (2)

By Hu Min (Shanghai Daily) 09:04, August 20, 2013

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It is a slice of Shanghai’s contemporary panorama seen through Guo’s eyes.

He says he hesitated at first about whether to direct the movie himself. Having already achieved a high level of success as a publisher, he was uncertain about starting something new.

“In film circles, I was nothing,” he admits. “Directing is the art of communicating with people.”

Guo was born in Zigong, a prefecture-level city in southwest China’s Sichuan Province, known for its salt beds, dinosaur fossils and lanterns. His father is an engineer at a state-owned enterprise; his mother works as a bank clerk.

Guo, encouraged by his mother, was an avid reader as a child. The martial arts fiction of Louis Cha (Jin Yong) and Gu Long (Xiong Yaohua) were among his favorite. In school, he showed a strong talent for writing.

When he was in junior high school, his poem “Loneliness,” which expressed his melancholy about school, was published in a national magazine. That whetted his appetite for writing.

Guo kept sending essays to magazines and literary websites. He published many of his works at Rong Shu Xia, an online literature platform, under the pseudonym Disiwei. His output began to gain recognition.

An accidental browse through a book comprising winning entries of the New Concept Writing competition prompted him to attend the third contest, a national writing contest sponsored by Mengya Magazine in Shanghai.

He entered the final round with his work “Script” and was invited to Shanghai. At age 18, he stepped alone into Shanghai’s train station, ready to conquer the world.

He won first prize in the competition with his work “If There Is No Sun Tomorrow.” A year later, his work “Our Last Song on Campus” won the first prize of the fourth New Concept Writing competition, and that became the turning point in his life.

Guo was taken by the razzle-dazzle of Shanghai and decided to stay in the city, where he enrolled in Shanghai University in 2002. But Shanghai also had its dark side.

In a city drunken on materialism, Guo was considered a bit of a poor country bumpkin. He didn’t have a hand-held game console as his classmates did. He was insulted by Metro staff when he didn’t know how to use the ticket gates, and he was snubbed by a sales clerk at a luxury shopping mall.

“I felt like a forgotten soul, and could not get along with my classmates,” he says.

Guo finally dropped out of university and vowed he would make something of himself and show Shanghai who he is.

In 2003, he published his debut novel “City of Fantasy.” It was an expanded version of a short story he wrote for Mengya Magazine. The novel sold 500,000 copies in the first few months and has been since sold more than 1.5 million copies. It also won the praise of literary heavyweights like Shanghai writer Ye Xin and Cao Wenxuan, a professor of literature at Peking University.

Since then, Guo published a string of novels, including “Never Flowers in Never Dream,” “Cry Me a Sad River,” “Rush to the Dead Summer,” the “Tiny Times” series and his latest series entitled “Jue Ji,” written to commemorate his 10-year writing career.

In 2004, he and five friends established a writing studio called “Island” and started publishing Island magazine. Two years later, he established Ke Ai Entertainment Company, and started publishing his “Zui” series. He became the youngster member of Chinese Writers’ Association a year later.

In 2010, he established the Shanghai Zui Culture Development Co, serving as chairman and general manager.

He topped the Chinese Writers Rich List three times — in 2007, 2008 and 2011 — and ranked fourth on the list last year with annual royalties of 14 million yuan. Last year, he ranked 70th in the China Celebrity List published in the Chinese edition of Forbes magazine.

Guo lives in a three-story vintage villa in Shanghai’s downtown Jing’an District, which he bought for more than 100 million yuan.

In 2009, he came under fire for showing off some of the luxurious items he owns in one of his publications. Materialism is a topic that should not be avoided when looking at modern life, he says.

He makes no apologies because he says he relies on himself.

“I sleep only three hours a day because of my work, and I haven’t had a vacation in seven years,” he says. “I deserve what I have. Every penny was earned through hard work.”

For a man who seems to have everything, what next?

“I want to write better novels, help my company thrive, and spend more time on things that really interest me,” he says.