Never Sold, Only Kept: The Fanfic Notebook Listed for Sale After Its Owner's Death
A Chinese fan-fiction writer found the one-of-a-kind notebook she had mailed her best friend listed on a secondhand site — and, chasing the apparent betrayal, learned that her friend had died in August, leaving two daughters and debts, and had never once tried to sell the book herself. The listing was her husband's. The story has become the week's most-argued tale of friendship, fandom and marriage on Chinese social media.
The listing on the secondhand site was for one copy of a book that had never been for sale: a self-printed fan-fiction notebook, one of a hundred a Chinese writer had made of her 200,000-character story, and the single copy she had mailed to her best friend. Finding it listed, months after it arrived, looked like the last word on a friendship that had faded since high school. The tag that carried the story up Weibo's trending list this week — #朋友离世后我送的同人本被卖#, "after my friend passed away, the fanfic notebook I gave her was put up for sale" — promised exactly that kind of ending. What the writer found instead was a death, a marriage gone wrong, and proof that the friendship had outlasted her friend's life.
The two girls had loved the same pairing in the same fandom — the same "CP", in the vocabulary of Chinese fan circles — and the writer set her story down chapter by chapter in a physical notebook, handing each finished installment to her friend at once. What came back were changping (长评), long-form critical essays that fan communities treat as the highest tribute an ordinary reader can pay: over the life of the story the writer produced 200,000 characters, and her friend answered with 80,000 of her own. Years later, working a steady job, the writer posted the story online, found readers, and printed a hundred copies — tongrenben (同人本), the fan-made books that in China's fan-fiction economy are produced to be given, not sold. One went, naturally, to the friend.
By then the friendship was mostly a memory. The friend had moved to a distant city, married and had children; when the writer once passed through and arranged a meal, the friend's husband telephoned so insistently that the visit collapsed. They kept promising to meet properly "next time". The next time never came, and this autumn the writer came across the book she had mailed, listed on a secondhand site like any unwanted gift.
She had titled her account with a line already resigned to the worst — "perhaps love does have an expiration date" (也许爱确实是有时效的) — and her first messages to the friend went unanswered. Through mutual friends she finally got the answer she had not let herself imagine: the friend had died in August. The retelling and the author's own follow-up posts sketch the outline — an unhappy marriage, two daughters, a husband who scorned her and withheld child support, loans taken on to keep the household afloat, depression, and a death at the end of it. The account is the writer's own; it is the reason the story is being told at all.
The betrayal the internet had braced for inverted on contact with the facts. In her comments under the original post, the author explained that her friend had never sold the notebook — not at the end, when she was borrowing money from every direction, not once in all the years it sat with her. The listing was created after her death, most likely by the husband, the one person in the story who had never paid for her or the girls. "So your friendship hasn't expired," one commenter wrote. "She loved you until the end of her life." The retelling that carried the story drew more than 10,000 likes within a day, and its closing line is the one being passed around: the friendship was never betrayed — it was the marriage that killed her (原来友情的真心并没有被辜负，而所谓的爱情却杀了人).
Part of why the story spread is the contrast at its center: the friend who read every chapter wrote back 80,000 characters' worth of attention, while the man she had entrusted her life to would not pay child support. The rest is recognition — the drifting friendships of adult life, and a marriage's finances laid bare in a secondhand listing.
What happens to the notebook now — whether the listing survives the attention, and who, in a family that withheld child support, ends up keeping any proceeds — is the open question the story leaves. What is not open is the friendship's ledger: 200,000 characters given, 80,000 written back, a hundred copies printed, and a single copy kept, through every debt, to the end.