My first encounter with young adult romance fiction came when I was thirteen. It was a Chinese novel called Summer of Foam, which I had bought with all of my monthly allowance. Mum saw the front cover — a lass and lad drawn anime-style, arms wrapped around each other in a circle of bubbles — and launched a series of interrogations. “Where did you get this? Is it from your friends? How many more do you have? Do you even know what it’s about? It’s about romance, ROMANCE! You shouldn’t be reading about this stuff at all!”

Which is why, months later, when I bought the Twilight series, I piggybacked off the marketing and told her it was Harry Potter 2.0, but with vampires.

As someone who was once part of the Chinese education system, which recognised academic performance as the monolithic definition of excellence, I sought great respite in reading something that wasn’t talking about literary devices or the area of a triangle or the height of some mountain I would never set foot on. There were new heights to be reached — among passages of hand-squeezing, moonlit dates and bubble-gum smooches.

Young adult romance novels, specifically those written in Chinese, fall under a category known as Qing Chun Teng Tong Wen Xue, which translates into “youth agony literature”. My favourite one was called A Farewell to Pluto, by Xia Mingyou. Its protagonist is a lonely schoolgirl named Shan Ying (literally, “single shadow”), who considers her fate parallel to that of Pluto — which, a few years before the book was released, was demoted to the status of dwarf planet. The odd one out. One day, a boy walks into her life, a beautiful relationship ensues, making her feel loved and “seen”.

Youth agony literature swept across high schools in China from the mid-2000s to early 2010s. While boys played Dota, girls read romance. When my best friend got caught reading a popular book called Devil’s Kiss at recess, the head teacher confiscated it and called her parents in. Following this incident, the principal announced that the school would ban these books for the “unimaginable harm” they inflicted on our studies and mental health.

We still found a way around. Instead of bringing the books home, we stored them in the space under our school desks. We exchanged copies and together devoured chapter after chapter in the bathroom. When school holidays were near and we had to clear out our desks, we sold them off to junior kids at low prices. The last resort was to tear off the cover and sandwich them in our piles of textbooks at home.

We read them like it was a clandestine activity. Looking back, it was us standing on the brink of childhood, attempting to build our own bridge to adolescence.

In youth agony literature, the plot typically revolves around the romantic entanglements between a girl and a boy of no more than twenty years of age. Their relationship trajectory is what the teenage me would call a “rocky road” — sweet, irresistible, but excruciating to witness. For instance, in Summer of Foam, the girl breaks up with her lover to marry her ultra-rich childhood friend who, in return, donates his kidney to save her bedridden brother. A Farewell to Pluto takes a milder and less melodramatic approach, where the prospect of a long-distance relationship causes Shan Ying to call things off with the boy who changed her life for the better.

The “agony” is also ascribable to the writing style, by which the authors conjure a persistent sense of frailness that lingers throughout the reading experience. A common technique is short, one-sentence paragraphs, laden with purple prose, letting the protagonist’s misery speak in its own voice. Here’s a translated excerpt of Shan Ying’s internal monologue from A Farewell to Pluto:

Before I met you, I’d always thought the word “love” equated to “miracle”.

The sky is so blue, it’s almost obscure. I close my eyes. The sea is all that is left.

The sounds of tides come rushing in from every direction. Miles below the sea level — tens of them, hundreds of them — darkness grows. A murky world where light cannot escape. Eventually all noises vanish in silence.

I open my eyes. Light is spanning across my desk, the floating dust is moving around slowly. Every breath is a sigh.

This excerpt is one of many that contributes naught to plot development. However, it exudes a sense of brokenness and scatteredness that works magically well on ultra-sensitive youth newly exposed to the finer aspects of their emotional range. Reading youth agony literature thus becomes a mechanism for seeking validation for these newfound emotions.

I was not exempt. In my unsophisticated world, I pictured myself to be the sophisticated, not-like-other-girls kind of girl. Shan Ying wasn’t just a single shadow: she was my shadow. We were a pair of weightless dandelions, deserving yet deprived of sympathy from the world, and the only way to rescue ourselves was to wait for some heart-throb to burst our little bubble.

The boyfriends in these books are cardboard cut-out princes. Their looks are flawless (“His lips are exquisite like cherry blossoms, his skin fine like porcelain.”). In textbook examples of chivalry, they dole out public displays of affection like they’re business cards (“He bent down and kissed her on the lips, right in front of the teacher!”). Their biggest flaw, if they have one, is a traumatic childhood or broken family, in a lackadaisical attempt to add depth to the character.

To some degree, our adults’ concerns were warranted. Stories like these adroitly play on the precariousness of the youth’s emotional state. They sketch out a version of love that works its way into the youth’s life like ecstasy, blurring the line between reality and daydream. Love becomes all about the thrill of touching your crush’s hand or going on a date in the tulip field where he better have planted the whole thing for you.

So, when my fourteen-year-old beau — whom, like the books, I kept as a secret from the world — didn’t buy me flowers on my birthday, I ghosted him for a week.

Between book bans and fantasising about my Prince Charming, I was one foot on the brake and the other on the accelerator, awkwardly deciding whether to turn left or right at the next intersection in life. I’d like to think I came out the other end unscathed. After all, youth agony literature only kept me company for about two years, until I pivoted to more serious and classic literature in a desire to feel “grown up”.

The other day, I saw a copy of Xia’s rather recent release, Love Is In Your Hands. Surprised it had made its way into an Australian library and feeling nostalgic, I decided to give it a read. The formula was familiar — fairy-floss prose, goosebump touches and whatnot. But there was something else. Behind the tokenistic rituals of romance, themes like self-love, resilience and courage shone through. At first, it seemed like Xia had moved on from the Pluto days and learnt to layer her writing, but then I wondered if everything I’d once read as a teen did in fact come in layers and I was simply too young to intuit it.

Being older now, it took away a lot of the thrill in reading this kind of fiction. I perused Love Is In Your Hands with one sharp eye on its educational value — be it a life lesson or doctrine — and the other on the way it deals with diction, structure and technique. Often I found my brows creasing up, then realised such books were like candy that had already expired the moment I chose to grow up.

Image: a detail from the cover of Xia Mingyou’s novel Masque