Borrowed Light: Entrusting Truth and Memory to Time, a Chinese literary work by the author Desolate Isle (Gan Liu), is currently undergoing the cataloging application process with the U.S. Library of Congress by Innovative Era Press (IEP). Having completed its comprehensive proofing and editing stages, the book is scheduled for global publication and release in the near future.
The genres spanning Borrowed Light encompass essays, journals, and poetry, yet its bedrock is firmly rooted in documentary reality. Having dedicated himself to non-fiction writing for many years, Desolate Isle only puts pen to paper after seeing things clearly, and only allows emotion to flow after verifying the reality—a habit that permeates every single sentence he writes. Consequently, there are no fictional characters or orchestrated plots within this book; there are only the people and events he personally experienced, witnessed, and contemplated, written down exactly as they were.
Over the past seven years, he navigated the ebbs and flows of the business world, trekked through the dust of life, and lived abroad as a traveler. Wherever his footsteps led, his pen followed—sometimes in moments of improvisation, other times in deep contemplation—capturing the true, vivid facets of the world onto the page. His writing traverses from the gradually drying river and the clear-cut bamboo grove of his hometown, to the dawn over nearby mountains and the purple mist on distant ridges from his urban home; from his father’s “failed life” to his mother’s sickbed; from the Zanda Earth Forest on the Tibetan Plateau to the redwoods of North America, and the ancient castles and bioluminescent bays of Puerto Rico. He has written of sacred mountains and foreign lands across the globe, yet the place where his pen carries the heaviest weight remains that waterless river of his hometown. The further he journeys, the deeper his backward glance becomes—this is the foundational hue of the entire book.
The title carries its own origin story. During the Mid-Autumn Festival of 2025, in a mountaintop coffee house in Da Lat, Vietnam, as the moon rose and the sun went down in the west, Desolate Isle wrote on a message board: “The fading afterglow is given to the moon for full display; passing on to other mountains, it warms all living beings.” He witnessed the sun passing its light to the moon to inherit, so that the light never truly extinguished, but merely continued to illuminate humanity in another form. This poem, Afterglow Given to the Moon, is included in his non-fiction work Us in a World Out of Order. The title of the present book was conceptualized from that very moment: preserving the fading glimmer for the cool moon, and preserving it for time.
These seven years happened to be a period of profound global transformation. Before they faded away, he recorded many things that were unfolding—and simultaneously dissolving—while they were still fresh in his memory. The book contains classical-style poetry, modern free verse, as well as unpretentious prose and journals. It reads smoothly, completely free of obscurity or barriers to entry. It is the book of one individual’s life, and also a corner piece of the larger mosaic pieced together by his numerous writings from the same era. Upon opening it, readers will find reflections of their own lives and of this shared epoch.
