Young Chinese find freedom in de-clutter

Chen Ying was unhappy.

She was an elite graduate student with honors, but she felt stifled by academia. Her relationship with her mother was strained and she hated her wardrobe, full of clothes covered in chiffon and lace that she had bought to fit in with the crowd.

"I was living under a dark, dark cloud," the 26-year-old says.

That is, until last fall, when a thin book changed her life. It was Danshari, or "de-clutter", the series of self-help books by Japanese writer Hideko Yamashita. The series came to China in May.

Danshari asks the reader to shun clutter and stop storing unwanted stuff, in the hope of leading a life unhindered by things that stop you from following your passion. The first task is to clear one's living space.

Chen, who has since become a translator of the series, started with her bookshelves. She threw away hundreds of books ("Some of them I worked really hard to acquire as they were rare scholarly papers from abroad"), all the while asking herself - "Do I want this?"

After several days of cleaning, she was left with only about 100 books - none of them related to her field of study. She threw out all of her certificates of merit except for one that declared her an outstanding young writer.

"And I suddenly felt the pressure and depression lift from my shoulders," Chen recalls. "And I finally decided to drop out of school and pursue what I really loved all along, writing and translating."

When she settled to pursue her dream, her fraught relationship with her mother also eased. "I told her that I've studied all these years for her but now I'll do what I want. I hope she will stand by my choice."

Her mother did, and even started to take on some of Chen's advice on de-cluttering.