On June 12, a Special Lecture of the Tsientang Lectures series was successfully held. The Institute of Literary Humanities at Tsientang Institute for Advanced Study (TIAS) invited the author Hua Yu to visit and engage in an in-depth conversation with Professor Xudong Zhang.

Titled "A River Flows Eastward", the conversation situated Hua Yu's literary journey within the broader historical context of China's reform and opening-up over the past forty years. From the utopian aspirations and formal experimentation of avant-garde writing in the 1980s, to the sedimentation of historical experience and the ethical narratives of To Live in the 1990s, to Brothers during the era of marketization, secularization, and the concentrated release of desire energy in the new century, and finally to Hua Yu's latest creative phase — a "chronicle of bastards" — his novels have continuously responded in different ways to shifting social structures and emotional states. From avant-garde writing to realist narrative, Hua Yu has always sought new forms of expression at the intersection of different historical experiences and literary forms. As the metaphor "A River Flows Eastward" suggests, literature moves with the times, and in its constant flow, it records reality and speaks to the human condition.

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