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It took me four days to catch up with Guan Shan, author of the recently released "Running All the Way: Listening to the Authentic Voice of Ordinary Chinese." When I finally found him, it was in a fast food restaurant near Jianguomen in downtown Beijing, two days before the Spring Festival. "Sorry, I am too busy these days," he said, explaining that he had been "running all the way," preparing promotional tours and being interviewed by about 50 local newspapers, radio and TV stations in Beijing and some nearby cities. I believed him. Minutes after the interview, Guan left to appear on a TV programme "Off the Shelf." At first sight, it is difficult to believe Guan's skinny 30-year-old frame can harbor so much energy. It is similarly difficult to believe that his small head with its childish face, decorated with a pair of small glasses, is filled with so many colorful dreams and fantasies. "I have been trying to make an unofficial historical document of our time, more vividly, a cross-section sample, focusing on people at the grassroots level," Guan explains. This document has been his mission for the past two years. In seeking raw materials for the book, Guan Shan traveled 46,000 kilometers, crossing the country on foot, between January 1, 1999 and December 31 of the same year. He walked across 78 cities, counties and townships throughout China conducting interviews with hundreds of ordinary Chinese. His book was published last month by Beijing-based Huayi Publishing House and is now on shelves across the country. The book, simply designed and bound, contains about 40 photos taken by Guan and 42 articles selected from stories told by about 200 interviewees. The stories are presented as they were told, in the common language of daily interaction. The oldest interviewee is 100-year-old Zhang Kebiao from Haining in Zhejiang Province and the youngest is Fu Xulin, an 18-year-old transient laborer working in Shenzhen, in South China. The stories are arranged in the order in which Guan heard them and serve as a mirror of his journey. All the personal data about interviewees is authentic, but Guan said some names had been changed. Guan's apartment in the western Beijing suburbs is a bit messy. The walls are decorated with souvenirs Guan collected during his trips around the country. Also hanging on the walls are numerous big photos of his girlfriend. Corners contain piles of CDs, VCDs and books. Guan said he may buy a spacious house with a mortgage in the future if he ever gets rich, but added: "I can't waste my time crouching in a stifling house. In essence, I like to live a vagrant's life. I'm just like a snail- my home is on my back." Guan claims he was "a born daydreamer" who developed extensive, and still largely unfulfilled, travel plans during his middle school years. He was possessed by the mystery of maps. He pored over all kinds of colorful maps with strange signs, marks and numbers. "In my primary school years in Xi'an, reading maps while dreaming of the big outside world was a major pastime for me," Guan recalled. But he wasn't only a dreamer. Guan showed some talent in writing poems and essays while in school, and he has since developed a passion for books. An interest in poetry and fiction partly explains why Guan chose to study drama in the Central Academy of Drama in 1989. During his stay at the university, Guan tried his hand at writing and directing short plays and mini-theatre dram as such as "Andorra." Guan once worked with Meng Jinghui, a vanguard stage drama director with the Central Experimental Theatre, on the well-received drama "Desire For Worldly Pleasures." It was not until 1997, four years after he earned some money working as a freelance writer for TV stations in Beijing and Guangzhou, that Guan made his first long journey to China's northwestern areas. He stayed for six months in Yuzhong County in Gansu Province, working as a volunteer teacher for the Shangzhuang Project Hope Primary School. "It was in that poverty-stricken small county that I began to get a close look at ordinary Chinese people," Guan said, describing the folks, both adults and children, who fought to live under harsh conditions. He realized then that "there was too much I knew nothing about." Later, he decided to visit more villages and more ordinary Chinese in all of the mainland's 30 provinces and regions. On the night of December 31, 1998, hours before he started the year-long escapade that formed the basis of his book, Guan wrote down the following words in his diary: "During my journey, I shall try my best to discover and capture, with my pen and tape-recorder, the liveliest common folk, their fresh language and attitudes towards life, their thoughts on destiny and most basic dreams and expectations, and their trivial happiness, sorrows and hardships. "At the end of it, I'll bring back whatever I've found as it is. I shall earnestly document everything I find happening on this vast land, which is, at the turn of the century, undergoing various, subtle changes, soon to be noticed by the whole world." When he first went on his lonely trip, Guan says he felt like "a convict on the way to the execution ground, wondering with fear what is waiting for him out there." During his adventure, Guan encountered robbery, landslides, attacks from wild animals and harmful insects, and suffered hunger, thirst and illness. But, he says: "I was always so lucky to meet kind-hearted folks whenever I needed help." His first interviewee was a dealer of sham certificates, wandering near the GuangZhou Railway Station. The journey sometimes became extremely exhausting and sometimes psychologically frustrating, too, especially when a well-planned interview turned out to be one that was hard to deal with, he recalls. For some time, he had to stop, doing temporary work to earn money to support his travels or waiting for friends to send him money from home. "I never thought of giving up and coming back home empty-handed. I have loved my way of life for so long and so much that I cannot drop it easily," Guan explains. More often than not, Guan admits, he met very friendly people, interviewed them and became a friend of theirs. His itinerary was flexible. On several occasions, he stayed in places longer than expected, trying to soak up as much as he could. Guan remembers clearly when he arrived in Nanchang, the capital of East China's Jiangxi Province. It was in early summer. He was invited to attend a call-in radio live show and soon became a local newsmaker. Hundreds of listeners came to see and talk to him and asked when his book would come out. "I realized so many people today are anxious to make their voices heard." The day he left the city, some of them came to see him off at the railway station very early in the morning. "Although we met only twice and I could not speak their names correctly, we felt like we had been old friends for years," Guan remembers. "That memory makes me cry. Today, I still keep in touch with these guys. Thinking of warm moments like that, I am convinced that everything I did was worth it." Inspired by American journalists such as Studs Terkel and adventurer-writers like Peter and Barbara Jenkins, Guan conducted unique interviews and made the book a collection of oral narrations by the interviewees. Pulitzer Prize winner Terkel is well-known for his books such as "American dreams: Lost and Found," "Working" and "My American Century." The Jenkins wrote "A Walk Across America." On the business card Guan had made for the trip are the words: "In this age of the 20th Century, in your own lifetime, what have you seen, what have you heard, what have you experienced, what have you got to tell? Save your story in this world before you leave. "Let us capture and record the voices once ignored or unheard for coming generations." When the narrators began talking, Guan just switched on the recorder and then listened carefully, sometimes taking notes. He did not interrupt the interviewees until they finished their stories. "To ensure the narrators' thoughts and languages flowed smoothly, I avoided any questions suggestive of my own opinion," Guan says. "I only asked about some jargon and local dialects that I did not understand." In Guan's view, everyone's personal history contributes in some way to the general history of mankind. "During my traveling, I learned from ordinary people at the grassroots level. The more I know of their lives, their feelings and thoughts, the more I love them. Their vivid stories and their unyielding will to live on always give me strength to keep running." Guan explains that these people do not belong to the few so-called "elites," high up there in the social echelon; they are the most ordinary folks - the obscure, the inarticulate majority, often ignored by historians and social critics. Guan claims they are the creators of history and the major power pushing human society ahead. His book won support from a host of renowned writers and veteran journalists. "Against a background of trashy romances and bizarre stories about the marginal figures in society, the young man's stories strike me as true, warm and sincere," gushed Tang Shizeng, a war correspondent with the Agency. Ah Lai, whose novel "When the Dust Settles" won the Fifth Mao Dun Literature Award in 2000, praised the book for "its ambitious effort to construct a panoramic view of Chinese society at the most complicated stage of its evolution." Guan said he will travel again in coming years, either along the same routes he once took or along new ones. This time, he will bring a digital video camera, in addition to a still camera, and a new tape-recorder. He plans to do more in-depth interviews focusing on more specific topics like local culture, history and education. He is planning to turn some of this work into a documentary film. After that, Guan says he wants to travel worldwide, starting perhaps from Paris. Linked with this desire is a hope that his book will be translated into foreign languages so more people "will be able to take a closer look at and have deeper insight into China and its people." Guan does not consider himself a writer, though he has published numerous poems, essays and lyrics for pop songs in recent years. Of all his artistic pursuits, Guan claims drama is still his major love. His favorite plays include masterpieces by the German playwright Brecht. Guan is saving up money for his next journey and learning German in the Goethe Institute Beijing Branch. He dreams of going to study drama in Europe and churn out his own masterpieces.