Ordinary World (novel)
novel by Lu Yao
Ordinary World (Chinese: 平凡的世界; pinyin: Píngfán de Shìjiè) is a novel by Chinese author Lu Yao. It consists of three volumes with a total of 1.1 million Chinese characters. In 1991, it won the Mao Dun Literature Prize.
Plot
Volume 1
Written between 1982 and 1986, the narrative takes place between 1975 and 1978.
The story begins in the autumn of 1975, a year before the end of the Cultural Revolution, in Shaanxi province in China (the author's hometown). Shaoping Sun, an ordinary teenager from a village located on the Loess Plateau in northern Shaanxi, northwestern China, goes to the county of YuanXi to attend high school. His humble descent makes him shy and diffident. He falls in love with his classmate Hongmei Hao, a girl of upper-class descent. This is seen as problematic during the Cultural Revolution. Their relationship is revealed by their classmate Yuying Hou, and the abashed Hao has no choice but to end the liaison.
“Ordinary World (novel)” enters the record as novel by Lu Yao. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Ordinary, World and novel can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q11060677. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1991, 1982, 1986 and 1975.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ordinary World (novel)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.