Zhu Xinyan posts many videos documenting her daily life on Douyin. Photo: Screenshot from the Douyin account "Zhu Xinyan"

Videos shared by a 56-year-old woman on the Chinese social media platform Douyin have gone viral recently. The scenes she captures are unremarkable - by the kitchen window, at the stove, along neighborhood streets - but the short captions that accompany them are striking in their restraint and warmth. In just a few lines, they sketch everyday reality with a quiet, distinctive sense of poetry, People's Daily reported on Wednesday.

As of press time, her Douyin account, under the name "Zhu Xinyan" had attracted more than 500,000 followers, with her videos receiving 9.64 million likes in total.

People's Daily said that Zhu's writing bears the weight of time, carrying the texture and warmth of lived experience, and effortlessly touches something tender in the reader's heart.

For example, in one post about boiling eggs, Zhu writes: "A cracked shell doesn't mean the egg is ruined. It simply sheds a layer of restraint, allowing it to blend more easily into soup or porridge and take on a different flavor. Small accidents in life are never the end. As long as the core remains, warmth can always be coaxed out."

 "This kind of writing takes fifty years of life to achieve," one netizen wrote.

"Now I finally understand what teachers meant when they said it was okay not to master plain, unadorned description when you're young. You'll learn it naturally once you reach a certain age," another wrote.

From her captions, it can be inferred that Zhu was born in 1970 and grew up in the mountains of Southwest China's Guizhou Province. She was one of six siblings. Her mother worked the sloped fields with a hoe, planting corn, while her father, after being discharged from the army, was assigned a job. 

Recalling her childhood, Zhu wrote that life in the mountains was "wrapped in damp mountain mist - bitterness clung like moss on earthen slopes, soaking into daily life, yet carrying a faint warmth of firewood."
Life gave her a rough and unpolished past, yet she returns it with a gentle gaze and a clear-eyed understanding, People's Daily commented.

Global Times