The 2026 Watch Literary Award has just begun, with three months still to go before the longlist is announced. I think Zhou Jianing’s *Eternal Wandering Without Attachment* will definitely be submitted and will secure a spot on the longlist—maybe even the shortlist. If I’m right, it’s because I’ve spent years immersed in Watch Literary Award entries; if I’m wrong, consider this idle talk. An aging young writer born in the 1980s is making her final push for the Watch Literary Award. She’s a veteran from the New Concept era; back then, her short story collection made the longlist. It wouldn’t make sense for her latest novel to miss it this year. I opened it last night and finished it in one sitting. The reading was smooth and easy to get through. Only 130,000 words. For a mediocre novel, being short is its biggest virtue. This story is easy to read, but it’s utterly banal, dreadfully dull. It follows a group of so-called disillusioned 40-something Shanghainese, standing in the “present,” reminiscing about the “past”—their bleak youth, their disappointing present. Memories warp as different people tell them, and in the present, they gradually drift apart. The three protagonists were high school classmates, spending six years in an experimental class led by an idealistic math teacher who had nothing but ideals. After graduation, they stayed in touch, kept in touch with the teacher, and the narrator “I” even became friends with the teacher’s wife. Naturally, someone commits suicide. Naturally, there’s romance. Naturally, a funeral brings everyone together to revisit old times. That’s it. Nothing more. The novel’s structure is rigid: something happens in the present, then— Flashback to high school, memories unfold; a place is described in the present, then the narrative shifts to what it used to be like. A fixed perspective common in novels by native city dwellers. I personally found it incredibly dull. The author is no longer young. Can’t she move on from her prolonged adolescence? Born in 1982, forty-four years old, and still writing about high school. I feel that Zhou Jianing’s characters and stories lack socialization. It might appeal to kids, but I’m a middle-aged woman now. Clothes are divided into adult and children’s sizes, and I think literature should be too. This belongs on the kids’ table. Watching those characters wallow in self-pity over trivialities, I just want to say, “Are you all too well-fed?” I enjoy naming and shaming comparisons. Zhang Yiwei, for example, is far better. Her stories have a raw sense of real life. Middle-aged people in their forties have aging parents, young children, and midlife crises—there’s so much to write about. But Zhou Jianing keeps spinning her wheels in her comfort zone. I remember reading *The Landscape of Waves* or *Basic Beauty*—or both—but nothing stuck. Just murky Shanghai, vague young people, and mind-numbing trivialities. It’s so boring. How bored must she be to write over a hundred thousand words about forty-year-olds reminiscing about high school? I barely remember anything from my own high school days. And there’s another thing I can’t relate to: our lives have nothing in common. Her stories aren’t insightful enough to make them interesting. It’s just not interesting. To be interesting, you need to bring a certain level of perspective—she doesn’t. This is native Shanghainese literature. It’s a kind of Shanghai specialty. Other places (like Beijing) don’t have it. Beijing doesn’t have this kind of regional literature—someone growing up in Beijing and writing stories about being a Beijinger in Beijing. Shanghai has this tradition. It started with *The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai*, skipped the seventeen years after liberation, reemerged with *The Sinking of Great Shanghai* (which I watched earlier), then *The Song of Everlasting Sorrow*, *Blossoms*, and later younger female writers like Zhou Jianing, Zhang Yiwei, Teng Xiaolan, and Liu Liu. They all write about this: the native faction, the educated youth faction, and the southern cadres faction. Why Shanghai has it and Beijing doesn’t—I still haven’t figured out. To me, it’s novel but hard to relate to. Because in my family, everyone in every generation is always on the move. No one in my family has that experience: growing up in one city, finishing school, and staying to work there. A city where you have parents, relatives, classmates, friends. Friendship spans decades. I’ve seen friends whose families have lived in Beijing for three or four generations. They visit relatives during holidays, hang out with old school friends, drop by their parents’ place for dinner, and even live in the same neighborhood where they grew up. Zhou Jianing’s stories are all set in Shanghai; she writes Shanghai stories. To put it positively, she’s intimately connected with the city she writes about. To put it negatively, her world is too small—she only knows Shanghai. Making a big fuss in a snail’s shell, building a Krusty Krab out of Legos. But even SpongeBob can’t be watched forever, right?