On a sleepless night, I discovered “The Nights We Lay Awake,” a multi-chapter comic posted on Chinese artist Fu Kuang‘s official WeChat account. As I read through the lengthy chapters, I found myself riveted by his storytelling and the way that he faithfully traced the inconspicuous textures of everyday emotions. With each flick of my thumb, I found myself staring into the lives of different individuals.
我是在一个不眠的晚上，看到“匡扶摇”公众号里的漫画小说《人们参差入眠的晚上》的。他的画风有种日常的精妙感，手机屏滑过一个个人的脸，就一次次跌到不同人的生活里去——
I watched as a young boy raised by a single mom tried to hide his smoking habits, only to discover that his mother had been quietly cleaning the residue of his cigarette smoke that clung onto the AC vents.
I watched an old man dream of his own passing as he slept alongside his wife, and as his spirit left his body, he recalled a heated argument where she had said, “If you died, I wouldn’t shed a tear.” With that in mind, a peaceful passing in his sleep didn’t seem that bad, but upon spotting a pair of tickets for a show the next night, he changes his mind. “I guess I’ll stay with you a bit longer,” he says and returns to his body.
I watched a woman who’s been married for 17 years confront her husband over suspicions of his emotional infidelity. But the husband, as cold as over, simply rolls over, brushing off her comments. She reminds him that tomorrow is their wedding anniversary and sighs, “17 full years… I guess it’s pretty good that we haven’t divorced.”
Under Fu’s pen, the thoughts that keep us up at night are all brought to life in a graphic-novel format. There are no dramatic twists or grand climaxes in his stories. They simply chug along, with storylines that feel true to real life.
一个单亲家庭长大的男孩，背着家里人抽烟，却意外发现后妈把空调外机上的烟灰都擦了；
一个梦到自己去世的老头，看一眼身边熟睡的老伴，想起曾经吵架时她说出“你死的时候我一滴眼泪都不流”这样的气话，好像总算解脱了，就是掌心摩挲着明晚的演出票时，他又忽然有点心疼，“……就再陪你一会儿吧。”他的灵魂又躺回来，睡在老伴身边；
一个结婚十七年的妻子，她在床头隐晦地说着自己丈夫精神出轨的担心，而他就习惯性地闭口不谈，背过身去。在意识到明天是结婚纪念日之后，“十七年整了啊……”妻子说着，“没离就不错了噢。”
这就是我们参差入眠的晚上。匡扶把它们用箩筐细细筛了一遍，再笼统地画进了故事里。它絮絮叨叨，它不温不火，但它就是我们每个人都再熟悉不过的人生。
The masterful ways that Fu is able to craft stories around life’s mundane moments is precisely what jumpstarted his comic-art career. In 2017, his long-form comics were read by hundreds of thousands of WeChat users. And a year later, his debut graphic novel, Unanswerable, was published to widespread acclaim. The strong book sales took many by surprise, considering that the stories in the book were already available for free on his WeChat account. But for many readers, there was something special about holding his stories in a tangible format. Many in the publishing world hadn’t heard of Fu prior to his success, and to them, his fame seemed to happen overnight. People started asking, “Who is he?”
Fu previously worked full-time in the advertising industry. When he was 29 years old, the new real-estate regulations that rolled out in Beijing extinguished his dreams of buying a home in the Chinese capital. The upside was that he suddenly had a large amount of cash on hand. This financial safety net gave him the confidence he needed to quit his job and make comics full time.
There was just one big problem—Fu didn’t know how to draw at the time. He began attending illustration classes and quickly mastered the basics. His sketchpad began filling up with drawings of close friends, celebrities he saw on TV, his barber, and even passing strangers. Seeing the world anew through the lens of art was an addictive feeling.
这可能是匡扶最初火起来的原因——在 2017 年，他的好几条长篇漫画推文，创造了微信号百万级浏览量的记录。2018 年，匡扶出版了第一部漫画书《回答不了》，即使许多图文已在公众号读过，但很多人依然把纸质版收入囊中，一次次翻看他画里的生活。不少人对这样现象级的爆款充满好奇，匡扶是谁？
匡扶是从广告出身的创意人，29 岁那年，由于北京购房资格调整，匡扶买房计划被迫搁置，但多了一大笔闲钱，一段时间内可以不用工作了。他决定，做漫画。
但那时候的匡扶还不会画画。于是他去报了绘画班，上了几节课之后，匡扶出师了。他去画身边的朋友、热门电视剧里的演员、理发师、外来务工者……好像细致的观察会上瘾，匡扶就上瘾了。
His comics have a similarly addictive draw for readers. The familiarity that he so elegantly wields feels like a breath of fresh air within the culture of excess that suffocates today’s media. His characters are as grounded as they come, and the quotidian experiences they face are the same ones many of us do. In his stories, even topping up a near-empty bottle of body wash with water from the showerhead can seem significant in its utter relatability. There’s a feeling of universality to the lives Fu’s characters lead, one that goads readers to see what comes next.
In a YiXi Talk (China’s equivalent of TED talks), Fu said, “I think observation and contemplation of everyday life can reveal a plethora of details, and these details can speak to where a person is in their life.”
与此同时，看他漫画的读者也上瘾了。他的画创造了一种人们久违熟悉感。和大喜大悲的剧情不同，那些画里让人眉头一挑时刻，是我们生活中一同参与过的细碎小事——比如，往快用完的沐浴露瓶里加点水兑稀了继续用。这样的熟悉感让人情不自禁跟着他的故事读下去，以期在看下去的过程中，再一次和自己的生活片段迎面撞上。
在“一席”曾经的一场演讲中，匡扶是这么说的：“我觉得对生活的这些观察和思考可以得到很多细节，而细节可以表达人物的处境。”
Fu released his sophomoric graphic novel earlier this year. Leading up to its release, his WeChat account had been on hiatus for over six months. As a result, his comments sections were bombarded with questions about his absence. His explanation came in the form of a new post, simply titled, “But My Book is Out.”
But the leisurely pace with which Fu now updates his WeChat feed isn’t because he wants to bolster his book sales. It has more to do with his growing distaste at the speed the modern world operates at. Scurrying along at a hurried pace, he believes, is no way to truly experience life—only when we slow our steps can we have a frank conversation with our inner selves.
At the time of our interview, Fu shared some stats from his WeChat backend. “Every single day, there’s been an average of around a hundred people who dropped by my page to tap the ‘Please update’ button I installed; every unique individual clicked this button 1.37 times,” he laughs.
In this era of instant gratification and media overload, Fu’s devoted fanbase can feel like a strange phenomenon. What is it that everyone is looking forward to? Why do people find so much resonance with his works?”
2020 年，匡扶出了第二本漫画《纳闷集》。为了这本书，匡扶时隔半年才终于在公众号更新了一篇文，“但书出来了”，以作为对后台群众次次追问“你怎么还不更新？”的官方回答，算是隔空回复了读者这个问题——新故事没上线，但是大家可以买书了。
“匡扶摇”这个公众号更新之所以慢，我想就是因为作者本人他不愿意去快速感知这个世界。或者说，这个世界也是不可能被快速感知的，所思所想所感，都需要慢下来，才能和内在的自我，好好聊。
写这篇采访文的时候，和匡扶合作的朋友刚查了下后台的数据，“今年平均每天约有一百人来点‘催更按钮’，人均点击1.37 次。”在这个时代的潮流层层递进、后浪永远拍扁前浪的年代，“匡扶摇”这个公众号还能拥有一大批静候更新的忠实粉丝，有时候会让人倍感诧异：大家在等什么呢？这些故事为什么会被那么多人牵挂？
The answer goes back to the sense of familiarity he so adeptly wields. It’s a familiarity that goes beyond his depictions of everyday experiences but rather more emotional in nature, rooted in the melancholy and loneliness that city dwellers collectively face.
In one story, a character muses, “Is life just a cup of warm tea? Day after day, we just refill it with water.”
Another character relishes a recent memory, “I saw my teenage crush again in old age, and she accompanied me to the hospital. How romantic is that?”
In another story, a quote scribbled on the side of an eraser reads, “The whole point of a book is to put one’s loneliness to good use.”
Whether it be accepting life’s lukewarm routines, reveling in nostalgia over an old flame, or finding comfort in solitude, Fu’s relatable stories tug at readers’ heartstrings. His comics are all centered on the theme of personal exploration, and no matter how many different characters are introduced, readers can effortlessly place themselves in their shoes. Fu’s narratives can often feel like internal dialogues and reading them can unearth faint memories, unresolved feelings, unfulfilled dreams, along with tucked-away bits of old hurt.
也许还是因为匡扶带给人的那种“熟悉感”。它并不仅仅在于生活细节，而更是一种都市人对孤独感的普遍共情：
“生活是不是就是，一直在续着热水的茶，一天天过下去，就像一次次加开水。”——好像，也有过这样随遇而安的感受？
“人年少时爱慕过的人，到老年，能让她陪自己去医院检查身体。觉得人生多少还是有罗曼蒂克的啊。”——谁没有这样的幻想呢？
“书籍的全部意义在于使人善用自己的孤独。”——心底有一个隐秘开关，咔哒，又一次被碰到了。
匡扶笔下的故事，出发点是每个人的“自我”。所以无论他换多少个漫画主角，我们在阅读漫画故事的时候，都好像自己在和自己对话，“我”的故事、“我”的感受，以及“我”那些平时掩掩藏藏的小伤感和大幻想。
The opening chapter of his newest book and his longest story to date, “Eloping Grandma,” follows a grandma and granddaughter as they attempt to track down the grandma’s twin sister, who, as a teenager, had run away from home with her boyfriend. Every time they close in on her, she slips through their grasp. At the end of the story, they don’t quite find her, but there’s still a bittersweet sense of closure.
The slow burn of a story is in itself very much in line with the unhurried tempo of Fu’s creative process. “You need to meditate on new possibilities and sieve through the ideas you’ve already come up with,” he says. “This all takes time.”
作为全书耗时最长的一篇漫画，也是新书开篇之作《私奔的外婆》，讲述的是一个年逾花甲的女人为爱离家出走，而她的亲生妹妹和侄女一路追踪的故事。匡扶描绘了一个一波三折、再折三折的寻亲故事。他说画得慢，是慢在需要“不断思考得出新的可能性，和合理化已经想出来的那些可能性的过程。”他说自己不太是那种能一气呵成写完一篇的人，也许“定力不够”，也许是因为“肺活量事实上很一般，因为抽烟的缘故，前一阵试图憋气并计时最终只有一分二十秒，所以一口气画完其实很难哦。不过最近在尝试戒烟。”
Fu’s fictional characters are achingly human and plagued by what seems like constant troubles, but he says he hasn’t personally experienced all he’s drawn. His inspirations mainly came from observations. In fact, his own life has been rather uneventful, despite the success he’s found as an artist in the past three years. “I haven’t changed much, and there hasn’t been a lot of dramatic ups and downs,” he says. The placid life that he leads is a blessing to him, and it’s in part thanks to his parents, who, unlike many other Chinese parents, are a lot more open-minded. As a result, he hasn’t been pressured to buy a house, get married, or give them a grandchild. This peace has given him the freedom to pay closer attention to the world at hand.
As much as his art is about internal exploration, the external world fuels his creativity. “My main impetus for learning how to create art is to help people, to bring condensed forms of joy to people and fill their emptiness,” he says. This empathy with which he approaches his art is perhaps why it resonates with such a wide audience.
匡扶画里的人似乎都特别“食人间烟火”，日常零零碎碎的烦心也不少。但匡扶本人倒也并非悉数经历过来，比起“体验者”，他更像一个“观察者”。转行画画三年来，匡扶说自己“心态的变化似乎不大，多数时候个人也没有太多起伏”，父母也相对开明，催婚、催产、催小孩这样的问题，一直都没有太压迫他。
所以，所幸，他看。他看到了城市里我们儿时会捉的小小昆虫，看到了浴室里被爱人整理后放齐的拖鞋，看到了芸芸众生和大千世界……“尝试创作最大的帮助，是使人时不时收获到浓度很高快乐，觉得不再那么空虚。”匡扶说。也许这就是为什么他的画，会被更多人看到、感动到的原因吧。
The English title of Fu’s latest book, Puzzle, lacks the connotations of its official Chinese title Nàmèn Jí. A more exact translation of the Chinese title is perhaps something akin to “Diary of Vexation.”
“Deciding on the name was all chance,” he says. “It felt like there were a lot of parallels between the name and how I felt in my personal life.” Asking him to expand on this was futile, and his answers were vague at best, often trailing off into bouts of laughter and giggling. The most coherent answer he could offer was when he showed me his phone screen, explaining that he feels like the blushing emoji. Despite his knack for storytelling, Fu was surprisingly elusive when asked to offer straightforward answers, but perhaps ambiguity doesn’t always need to be resolved.
What are you puzzled by? What’s your place in this world? People tend to look inwards for answers to these types of questions, but why are the answers all that important? Maybe what matters most is being in the present moment.
The Chinese version of Puzzle is now available for purchase on Jingdong and Dangdang.
