Literary youth

Born and raised in Hengnan county, Hengyang, Hunan province, Peng fell in love with ancient Chinese poetry when he was a child and literature has always been part of his life.

After he received his master's degree from the Department of Chinese Language and Literature of Peking University in 2009, Peng became an editor at the poetry magazine, with a monthly salary of around 2,000 yuan ($286).

He didn't even try to find a higher paying job, because working in literature was all he wanted. For 11 years, it's the only job he's ever done.

"I've thought of giving up, but then I realized that I couldn't bear to do anything else," Peng says.

Peng notes that poetry brings him company and comfort, especially when he is alone. "Watching TV or playing games will eventually bore me, but classical Chinese poems can offer a 'conversation' with souls from ancient times," Peng says.

"You can feel the joy, anger, sorrow and happiness, and you can always find a similar plight to your own among the poems, which can help bring comfort in tough times."

Peng also likes to read novels and histories. Recently he has immersed himself in books by prominent Sinologists, such as American historian Stephen Platt's Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War.

Peng used to write his own poems when he was in college, but stopped when he started working. In 2016 he published a book of his prose, under the theme "all the mocked dreams will make you shine one day".

He is now running a WeChat account writing about the stories and history of ancient Chinese poems and poets.

Some literature lovers pursue a professional route to become a professor of research or to teach, while Peng says he takes the more popular track－he started to take part in culturally-themed TV shows in 2013.

"Doing research is too rational for me, as I'm an emotional person," Peng explains.

In 2015, he won the Chinese Idiom Conference and Chinese Character Dictation Conference. He took five months to recite the whole Chinese Idiom Dictionary which collects more than 10,000 Chinese idioms.

"As a literary youth, the preparation for that competition gave me a chance to solidify the foundation of my Chinese. Without the competition I could never go through every single Chinese idiom," Peng says.

Having appeared in, and won, almost every culturally-themed TV show of the past decade, he now has a new goal－to join the talk show and debate competition, U Can U Bibi.

"I want to improve my language expression, and that talk show might be a good opportunity to do so," he says.