Chinese Journal of Literary Criticism

No.2, 2020

Go Back and Find Your “Relatives”: Comments on the New Work Life Is Like Ocean Written by Mai Jia

(Abstract)

He Ping

Life Is Like Ocean belongs to the “Going Back” series which was carefully created by Mai Jia after his work Point of the Sword. It forms a literary world with rich memories of childhood and hometown with other short stories in the same series, such as A Lifetime, Beast, The Jap, Hanquan Jesus and Double-Yolked Egg. The “colonel” is a hero who lives in the era of “I” with hidden disease and pain, and “I” is the viewer and listener of the “colonel’s” story, and also draws the nourishment of growth from “colonel’s” life. Life Is Like Ocean is not only a history of heroes becoming tragedies in the age of heroes, but also a history of heroes being harmed when they end up in the underworld.