Shen Congwen
As a child he disliked school. In his autobiography, he describes frequently cutting class. According to Shen, this educational experience formed the foundation of his later professional and emotional life, "Having learned to use my eyes to take in everything in this world, to live amid all life, I found school unspeakably boring." This school-of-life brand of personal education is central to the image of Shen Congwen. Mo Yan, in his Nobel lecture given after receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2012, compares himself to Shen, "I left school as a child, often went hungry, was constantly lonely, and had no books to read. But for those reasons, like the writer of a previous generation, Shen Congwen, I had an early start on reading the great book of life. My experience of going to the marketplace to listen to a storyteller was but one page of that book."