Human Life in the City
A Brief Discussion of Zhou Daxin's Mansion 21

Abstract: At the end of the twentieth century, many vernacular novel writers in China moved from the countryside to cities, and Zhou Daxin was one of them. Mansion 21 is a long novel describing contemporary urban life written by Zhou Daxin between 1999 and 2001. In contrast to Act 20, which is intended to summarize the history of China in the twentieth century, Mansion 21 extends Zhou's literary interpretation of the tension between the modernity of Chinese urban life and traditions as it enters the twenty-first century. This paper analyzes Zhou's representation of the tension between modernity and tradition from three perspectives: the triple symbolism of the imagery of “Black Pheasant" in Mansion 21, the three urban landscapes from the first-person perspective, and the writing style based on the vernacular traditions, with a view to exploring the enlightenment of Zhou's literary interpretation for the current society.