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1 Introduction

In contemporary Chinese literature, narratives centered on educators—ranging from rural schoolmasters to university professors—have emerged as a distinctive subgenre concerned with the psychological and professional lives of teachers (Fan & Xiao, 2018). Moving away from the romanticized portrayals of the scholarly vocation prevalent in earlier Chinese literary traditions, post-1990s fiction has increasingly adopted an ironic, critical, and often bleak perspective on academic life, exposing the hierarchical structures, market pressures, and institutional absurdities that shape the daily experience of educators (Hu & Wang, 2022). This critical shift mirrors broader socio-structural transformations within Chinese higher education: the commercialization of academic labor, the elevation of research productivity over teaching excellence, the widening prestige gap between STEM and humanities disciplines, and the intensification of publication pressures and contract-based employment (Cheng et al., 2023).

Within this corpus, a particularly striking thematic cluster concerns the psychological experience of occupational stigma, a perceived devaluation of one’s professional role relative to comparison groups (colleagues in privileged disciplines, administrators, private-sector professionals). Drawing on documentary sources, Ding (2024) has documented how Chinese EFL teachers experience what they describe as “invisible marginalization”: a sense that their pedagogical contributions are systematically ignored in institutional reward systems. Recent qualitative research by Wang and Zhang (2025) has extended this analysis to university teachers across disciplines in central China, finding that occupational stigma is not a matter of individual misperception but an accurate reflection of structural inequalities in funding allocation, promotion criteria, and research support. In Henan Province, a populous but resource-constrained region where humanities faculty face documented resource constraints, with per-capita research funding consistently below the national average (Chen et al., 2024; Wang & Zhang, 2025), these disparities are particularly acute. Crucially, occupational stigma can arise from multiple distinct sources. Drawing on social comparison theory and stigma research, we distinguish three triggers that appear repeatedly in the literary corpus: relative deprivation (unfavorable comparison to administrators, STEM colleagues, or private-sector peers in terms of resources or rewards), social stigma (public labeling that diminishes professional prestige, such as being called a “schoolmaster” or “pedantic”), and economic marginalization (income gaps that signal low vocational worth). Regardless of which trigger initiates the process, the psychological endpoint is identical: a global sense that one’s professional identity lacks value. This paper treats occupational stigma as the final common pathway through which these distinct social insults produce a shared pattern of psychological deterioration.

Surprisingly, despite the richness of educator-focused fiction as a literary genre, there has been no systematic study of how Chinese novelists have represented occupational stigma and its psychological consequences. This gap is especially pronounced in the case of Henan Province, which has produced a remarkable concentration of major contemporary writers: Liu Zhenyun (刘震云), Yan Lianke (阎连科), Li Peifu (李佩甫), and Zhou Daxin (周大新), among others. These writers, many of whom have personal experience as educators or have spent their careers observing academic institutions, have repeatedly returned to the figure of the teacher from rural schoolmasters to university professors as a vehicle for exploring broader questions of value, dignity, and survival in postsocialist China (Chen et al, 2020; Gong et al., 2023).

This paper addresses this gap by conducting a close literary reading of three representative texts by Henan authors. The analysis is guided by two complementary theoretical frameworks drawn from occupational psychology: the job demands-resources (JD-R) model (Bakker & Demerouti, 2017; Bakker & de Vries, 2021) and conservation of resources (COR) theory (Hobfoll, 2002). The JD-R model distinguishes between job demands, which refer to work elements that require continuous effort and incur personal costs, while job resources are factors that help fulfill work objectives, ease job pressure and facilitate personal development. COR theory posits that individuals strive to retain valued resources and that resource loss is disproportionately rapid and consequential, a “loss spiral” whereby initial losses beget further losses. When teachers perceive their profession as devalued, they experience a loss of psychological resources (self-efficacy, hope, optimism, resilience collectively termed “psychological capital) (Luthans et al., 2007), which in turn accelerates emotional exhaustion and cynicism (the core dimensions of burnout, Maslach et al., 2001), ultimately impairing their capacity to teach effectively (Han et al., 2020).

Crucially, this paper does not treat the JD-R and COR frameworks as empirical hypotheses to be tested against literary evidence. Rather, it uses them as interpretive heuristics—conceptual lenses that allow us to see patterns in literary representations that might otherwise remain invisible (Greenier et al., 2023). Consistent with recent work in cognitive narratology and literary psychology (Fairley, 2020; Feryok, 2024), I argue that narrative fiction has a distinctive capacity to represent psychological processes in their temporal and causal sequence, rendering visible the “chain mediation” processes that empirical psychology can typically measure only through indirect proxies. By tracing how occupational stigma, depleted psychological capital, burnout, and impaired performance are narrativized across these texts, this paper identifies a recurring narrative structure that I term sequential psychological realism.

The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 introduces the theoretical framework in more detail. Section 3 profiles the three literary texts and the authors’ Henan connections. Section 4 presents close readings organized around the four stages of the chain mediation pathway. Section 5 discusses the implications of these findings for the study of Chinese literature and for understanding the regional specificity of Henan educator narratives. Section 6 concludes with reflections on how literary analysis can contribute to broader conversations about teacher well-being and the value of humanities education.

2 Theoretical Framework

2.1 The Chain Mediation Model

The chain mediation model has been widely utilized in occupational health psychology to elucidate how workplace stressors affect employee outcomes through sequential psychological mechanisms (Bakker & de Vries, 2021). In the context of university teaching, the model posits that perceived job demands (such as role ambiguity, workload, or, relevant to this study, occupational stigma) first deplete personal resources (psychological capital), which then increase the risk of burnout, and burnout finally impairs job performance. Recent empirical studies in Chinese higher education have confirmed this chain pathway. Zhao et al. (2024b) found that job demands predict turnover intention through burnout and engagement in a chain mediation. Zhao et al. (2024a) reported that qualitative demands (including emotional and cognitive demands) have stronger negative effects on well-being than quantitative workload, and that this effect is mediated sequentially by psychological capital and burnout. Liu and Chang (2023) demonstrated that job crafting, a behavior enabled by psychological capital, mediates the relationship between job resources and engagement.

2.2 From Statistics to Stories

Narrative psychology and cognitive narratology have long argued that narrative is the default mode of human sense-making (Bruner, 1991; Sarbin, 1986). Where statistical analysis reveals correlations, narrative reveals how one thing leads to another. Contemporary Chinese educator narratives, I propose, offer a narratological instantiation of the chain mediation model. The four stages of the model correspond to recurring narrative elements:

1. Occupational stigma—characters articulate (or are focalized through) perceptions of professional devaluation relative to administrators, STEM colleagues, or market professionals.

2. Reduced psychological capital—characters suffer from weakened self-efficacy, faded hope, declining optimism and lost resilience.

3. Burnout—characters manifest emotional exhaustion, depersonalization and a reduced sense of personal accomplishment.

4. Impaired performance—characters’ teaching, mentoring, or scholarly work deteriorates observably.

The chain pathway, the fact that stage 2 is a necessary precursor to stage 3, and that stage 3 is the primary mechanism linking stage 2 to stage 4, is rendered in fiction through temporal ordering: the narrative shows the loss of confidence occurring before cynicism, and cynicism before vocational collapse (Derakhshan & Fathi, 2024).

3 Literary Texts and Authors’ Henan Contexts

3.1 Yan Lianke’s Elegy of Wind (《风雅颂》)

Yan Lianke, born in 1958 in Song County, Henan Province, is one of China’s most internationally celebrated contemporary writers, a recipient of the Kafka Prize whose name is frequently mentioned in connection with the Nobel Prize in Literature (Fang, 2018). An alumnus of Henan University’s Department of Political Education, Yan draws upon his firsthand experiences within the provincial academic hierarchy to inform his acute observations of academic hierarchies (Yan, 2008). Elegy of Wind (2008) was Yan’s first novel to focus directly on the intellectual class. Upon its publication, it generated intense controversy. Critics accused Yan of maliciously caricaturing Peking University, sparking a heated debate within the literary community about the “threshold of satire” and “authenticity in life”. The work faced restrictions on publication and dissemination. This paper reads the novel not as documentary realism but as “absurdist realism”, a deliberate exaggeration of institutional pathologies for critical effect. Our analysis focuses on the psychological plausibility of Yan’s character portrayal, not on the factual accuracy of its institutional setting.

The novel’s protagonist, Yang Ke (杨科), is a middle-aged literature professor at Qingyan University who has spent
five years writing a scholarly monograph on the Book of Songs (《诗经》), only to return home to find his wife in bed with the office director. This opening tableau, in which the professor’s academic labor is rendered functionally obsolete by institutional betrayal, establishes the core dynamic of occupational stigma that will drive Yang Ke’s subsequent psychological deterioration. Yan’s use of free indirect discourse allows the reader intimate access to Yang Ke’s gradual erosion of professional identity.

3.2 Liu Zhenyun’s Someone to Talk To (《一句顶一万句》) and the Tutor Figure

Liu Zhenyun, born in 1958 in Yanjin County, Henan Province, is a professor in the School of Liberal Arts at Renmin University of China and holds a bachelor’s degree from Peking University’s Department of Chinese Language and Literature (Liu, 2011). He was awarded the Mao Dun Literature Prize (China’s highest literary honor) in 2011 for Someone to Talk To. While the novel is ostensibly about ordinary village life in Henan, it contains three crucial portraits
of teacher figures, most notably Old Wang the Tutor (塾师老汪), which scholars have identified as a key locus for Liu’s
meditation on the psychology of the marginal educator (Zhang, 2018).

Justification for inclusion: While Someone to Talk To is not a “campus novel” in the contemporary sense, this paper includes Old Wang the Tutor within an expanded category of “Henan educator narratives”. Old Wang represents a historical antecedent to the contemporary university teacher, a traditional literatus whose professional identity collapses when the Confucian examination system (the institutional basis for his prestige) disintegrates. Liu’s portrait thus offers a diachronic perspective on occupational stigma, showing that the psychological trajectory from perceived devaluation to burnout is not unique to neoliberal academia but recurs across different institutional arrangements. The inclusion of this figure enriches our understanding of how Chinese literature has long grappled with the crisis of the educator’s social worth.

Unlike Yan’s university professor, Old Wang is a traditional tutor in a rural Henan village, a figure whose authority has been radically devalued by the collapse of the Confucian examination system. Liu uses Old Wang’s character to explore how professional devaluation unfolds across a whole life: from youthful scholarly ambition to middle-aged disillusionment to late-career resignation. Most revealingly, Liu provides a direct narrator’s commentary on Old Wang’s psychological state, explicitly linking his “inability to fit in” to his “hatred of teaching”.

3.3 Li Peifu’s The Book of Life (《生命册》)

Li Peifu, born in 1953 in Xuchang, Henan Province, is a Mao Dun Literature Prize laureate (2015) whose writing is deeply rooted in the Central Plains (Li, 2012). The Book of Life is the third volume of Li’s “Plain Trilogy”. The novel is narrated by a provincial university teacher who moves to Beijing to seek fortune after receiving increasingly burdensome requests from his village relatives. As the narrator becomes entangled in the market economy, Li forces the reader to ask: What happens to a teacher’s psychological capital when he perceives the world of business as more rewarding than the world of letters? The answer is a progressive erosion of self-efficacy, a loss of hope about achieving meaningful goals through teaching, and a deepening pessimism about the very value of education (Sun & Dapat, 2024).

4 Close Reading (Staging the Chain Mediation Pathway)

4.1 Occupational Stigma (The Perceived Devaluation of the Teaching Vocation)

In Yan Lianke’s Elegy of Wind, the occupational stigma of humanities faculty is established through a series of juxtapositions. Early in the novel, Yang Ke attends a university assembly where the vice-president announces a new round of research funding allocations. The sciences receive multimillion-yuan grants; the humanities receive nothing. Yang Ke thinks:

“我们中文系连买书的钱都没有，凭什么去和人家搞科研的争？” (Yan, 2008, p. 47)

(“Our Chinese department doesn’t even have money to buy books. How can we possibly compete with those science researchers?”)

The psychological mechanism here is upward social comparison in a context where the comparison dimension (research funding) is institutionalized as a measure of worth (Chen & Chao, 2021). Yang Ke’s perception is not merely subjective; it is objectively correct. Yet the effect is a deep sense of professional shame. He begins to avoid social gatherings with colleagues from other departments because being asked “What’s your research like?” induces immediate feelings of inadequacy. Ding and He (2022) have shown that such academic buoyancy deficits are directly associated with burnout among Chinese EFL teachers.

In Liu Zhenyun’s Someone to Talk To, the tutor Old Wang experiences occupational stigma through a different mechanism: theatrical public devaluation. Liu writes:

老汪在私塾里教书，东家对他客气，但村里人不把他当回事。有人当面叫他“教书匠”，背后叫他“酸腐”。老汪听见了，脸上没有任何表情，但他教书的劲头一天不如一天。 (Liu, 2011, p. 156)

(Tutor Old Wang taught in a private school; his employer treated him politely, but the villagers didn’t take him seriously. Someone called him a “schoolmaster” to his face, and behind his back called him “pedantic”. Old Wang heard this; there was no expression on his face, but his enthusiasm for teaching declined day by day.)

The phrase “教书匠” is a crucial linguistic marker of inferiority: it translates literally as “teaching craftsman”, a term that reduces the vocation to manual labor and strips it of intellectual prestige (Ergül Bayram & Eveyik-Aydın, 2023). Liu’s narrator notes the dissociation between external behavior (“no expression on his face”) and internal process (“enthusiasm declined”). This dissociation is the narrative equivalent of the psychological suppression that characterizes high-inferiority individuals who have learned not to show distress (Ding, 2024).

In Li Peifu’s The Book of Life, occupational stigma takes the form of income comparison. The narrator-teacher reflects:

我在大学里教书，一个月几千块钱。我那些中学同学，有的做生意，有的搞房地产，个个开好车住大房子。我算什么？一个穷教书的。 (Li, 2012, p. 203)

(I teach at the university, a few thousand yuan a month. My middle-school classmates, some go into business, some go into real estate every one of them drives a nice car and lives in a big house. What am I? A pathetic teacher.)

The narrator’s self-description “穷教书的” (a pathetic teacher) is nearly identical to the villager’s “教书匠”
in Liu’s novel, suggesting trans-authorial consistency in how occupational stigma is expressed linguistically. Yet the narrative triggers for this stigma differ across the three texts. Yan Lianke’s Yang Ke experiences relative deprivation through institutional comparison: he watches science departments receive millions in funding while his own department cannot afford books. Liu Zhenyun’s Old Wang suffers social stigma through public labeling: villagers call him a “schoolmaster” to his face and “pedantic” behind his back. Li Peifu’s narrator feels economic marginalization through income comparison: his middle-school classmates in business and real estate drive nice cars and live in big houses, while he earns a few thousand yuan a month. What makes these texts theoretically significant is that, despite these different triggers—institutional, social, and economic—all three funnel into the same psychological state: occupational stigma. In each case, the teacher arrives at an identical self-assessment: “I am worthless.” Across the three novels, occupational stigma thus operates as a final common pathway: a shared psychological destination reached from distinct starting points. All three texts locate the emotion not in the individual trigger but in the gap between the teacher’s actual social position and perceived entitlement based on education and effort (Peng et al., 2025).

4.2 Psychological Capital Depletion: The Loss of Self-Efficacy, Hope, Optimism, and Resilience

Occupational stigma in fiction is rarely a static state; rather, it is shown to do things to characters in particular, to deplete the four components of psychological capital (Luthans et al., 2007; Liu, 2025).

Self-efficacy depletion: Yan Lianke traces Yang Ke’s growing inability to perform his core professional task: teaching the Book of Songs. Early in the novel, Yang Ke delivers lectures with passion, and his students engage. As the novel progresses, his classes become mechanical:

杨科站在讲台上，讲着讲着就忘了自己在讲什么。他看着学生的脸，觉得他们也不在乎他讲什么。他讲“关关雎鸠”，可心里的声音在说：这有什么意义呢？ (Yan, 2008, p. 112)

(Yang Ke stood at the podium, lecturing, and as he lectured, he forgot what he was talking about. He looked at his students’ faces and felt that they didn’t care either. He lectured “Guan guan ju jiu”, but a voice inside him said: What is the point of this?)

The narrative technique here is internal focalization with free indirect discourse: the narrator is third-person but slides into Yang Ke’s own thoughts (“这有什么意义呢？”) without an explicit “he thought”. This technique allows the reader direct access to the erosion of self-efficacy as it happens, not as a retrospective report but as a present-tense experience (Bing et al., 2022).

Hope depletion: Liu Zhenyun’s Old Wang is marked by his complete inability to generate alternative pathways to meaningful professional accomplishment. Liu writes:

老汪年轻时也想做个大学问家，著书立说，名扬天下。可后来他发现，这条路是堵死的。他读的书越多，就越觉得自己什么都不是。 (Liu, 2011, p. 160)

(When Tutor Old Wang was young, he wanted to become a great scholar, to write books and become famous. But then he discovered that this path was blocked. The more books he read, the more he felt that he was nothing.)

Conservation of resources theory predicts that individuals who have lost valued goals (the goal of scholarly distinction) but cannot acquire new goals will experience “loss spirals” (Hobfoll, 2002). Liu’s text narrativizes exactly this: the more Old Wang reads (invests in scholarly identity), the more acutely he feels the gap between aspiration and possibility, accelerating his loss of hope (Fathi et al., 2023).

Optimism depletion: Yan Lianke’s Yang Ke exhibits a striking shift in attributional style. After failing to get his monograph published, he attributes the failure not to specific, changeable circumstances but to permanent, global features of his identity:

杨科想，不是我这本书写得不好，是我这个人不行。我这个人天生就不是做学问的材料。 (Yan, 2008, p. 178)

(Yang Ke thought: it’s not that this book is poorly written; it’s that I’m no good as a person. I’m just naturally not cut out for scholarship.)

This is the classic attributional pattern of low optimism: internal (“我这个人不行”), stable (“天生”), and global (“不是做学问的材料”) (Carroll et al., 2022). The narrative makes visible the shift from situation-specific disappointment to global self-devaluation, the very shift that empirical research has documented in burned-out teachers (Maslach et al., 2001).

Resilience depletion: In The Book of Life, Li Peifu’s narrator-teacher, after being cheated in a business venture, does not “bounce back” but instead retreats from teaching entirely:

我请了一个月的假，把自己关在出租屋里，不想见任何人。回来后，我发现我再也不是原来的我了。 (Li, 2012, p. 289)

(I took a month’s leave, locked myself in my rented room, didn’t want to see anyone. When I returned, I found I was no longer the person I had been.)

The narrative tracks the failure of resilience: the narrator does not recover after the setback. Importantly, Li does not moralize this failure; he presents it as a natural consequence of resource depletion (Chen et al., 2020). The teacher’s psychological capital has taken a permanent hit.

4.3 Burnout (Emotional Exhaustion, Depersonalization, and Reduced Accomplishment)

The three dimensions of burnout, emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment, appear with striking clarity across all three novels (Maslach et al., 2001; Tabuldin, 2025).

Emotional exhaustion: In Elegy of Wind, Yan Lianke offers a devastating portrait of a teacher who has nothing left to give:

杨科发现他不再关心学生了。学生写得好他不在乎，写得不好他也不在乎。他只想把课上完，然后回家睡觉。 (Yan, 2008, p. 203)

(Yang Ke found that he no longer cared about his students. He didn’t care if they wrote well; he didn’t care if they wrote badly. He just wanted to finish class and go home to sleep.)

The phrase “不再关心” (no longer cared) is the narrator’s judgment, but the source is Yang Ke’s own observation
of himself; he is not judging himself for feeling this way, merely reporting the change as a matter of fact (Ergüni & Coşkun, 2023).

Depersonalization: Liu Zhenyun’s Old Wang develops a cynical attitude toward his students, which Liu captures through direct dialogue:

学生问他问题，他说：“你们问这些有什么用？读了书也还是种地。” (Liu, 2011, p. 173)

(When students asked him questions, he said: “What’s the use of asking these things? Even if you study, you’ll still be working the land.”)

This is textbook depersonalization, a defensive detachment from those one is supposed to serve, developed to protect against the chronic emotional demands of teaching in an environment of low recognition (Gómez-Domínguez et al., 2022).

Reduced personal accomplishment: Li Peifu’s narrator-teacher, after failing to achieve either scholarly distinction or financial success, explicitly questions whether his professional life has amounted to anything:

我教了十几年书，到底教出了几个像样的学生？我写的那些论文，有谁看过？我这辈子，算是白过了。 (Li, 2012, p. 312)

(I’ve been teaching for over a decade. How many decent students have I actually produced? Who has ever read those papers I wrote? This life of mine it’s been a waste.)

The three sentences track the three dimensions: reduced sense of teaching efficacy (“有几个像样的学生”),
reduced sense of scholarly contribution (“有谁看过”), and the global conclusion (“白过了”). It is a micro-narrative
of burned-out self-assessment (Cordova et al., 2023).

4.4 Impaired Teaching Performance

The final stage of the chain, the behavioral consequence, is represented in each text as visible deterioration in the protagonist’s capacity to teach (Fathi et al., 2021).

In Yan Lianke’s novel, Yang Ke’s performance collapse is marked by student complaints:

系主任找杨科谈话，说有学生反映他上课“不知所云”。杨科听了，只是苦笑，没有辩解。 (Yan, 2008, p. 231)

(The department head called Yang Ke for a meeting, saying that students had complained that he was “incomprehensible” in class. Yang Ke just gave a bitter smile, made no excuse.)

The fact that Yang Ke offers no excuse is significant, as it shows that he has not only lost self-efficacy but also no longer believes defense is worthwhile (Wood & Quickfall, 2024).

In Liu Zhenyun’s Someone to Talk To, Old Wang’s teaching performance deteriorates through withdrawal:

老汪上课越来越敷衍，一本书念几句就算讲完了。东家客气地提醒他，他答应改，但第二天还是老样子。 (Liu, 2011, p. 181)

(Tutor Old Wang became more and more perfunctory in his teaching. He would read a few sentences from a book and call his lecture finished. His employer politely reminded him; he promised to change, but the next day it was the same.)

The cycle of promise and failure highlights how stable low psychological capital makes behavioral change almost impossible, and an accurate rendering of the loss-spiral logic (Han et al., 2020).

In The Book of Life, Li Peifu’s narrator-teacher’s performance is impaired through absence:

我请假的次数越来越多。有时候其实没什么事，只是不想去上课。想到要面对那些学生，就觉得累。 (Li, 2012, p. 334)

(I took leave more and more often. Sometimes there was no real reason I just didn’t want to go to class. Just thinking about facing those students made me tired.)

This is the final stage of burnout: avoidance not as a strategy but as a symptom. The narrator cannot be present because being present is emotionally unbearable a direct consequence of the cumulative resource losses traced across the previous pages (Qiu, 2024).

5 Discussion

Across the three close readings, a consistent narrative structure emerges that closely parallels the statistical chain mediation pathway. This parallelism is not coincidental: both empirical data and literary fiction capture the same underlying psychological reality, albeit with different methods and for different purposes (Feryok, 2024).

Theoretical literature in occupational psychology suggests that chain mediation, the sequential pathway from demand to resource depletion to burnout to performance, is particularly salient in professions characterized by high emotional labor, low organizational support, and ambiguous role definitions (Bakker & Demerouti, 2017). Teaching, especially in under-resourced regional contexts, exemplifies exactly these features (Dutton & Sotardi, 2023). The fact that three major Henan novelists constructed similar narrative sequences for their teacher characters suggests that the chain mediation pattern is not an artifact of my interpretive imposition but a compelling narrative pattern in how Chinese literary culture represents the psychology of academia under pressure (Gaeta González et al., 2023).

Importantly, while the antecedent stressors vary across the three novels, Yan emphasizes institutional resource disparity (relative deprivation), Liu emphasizes public shaming (social stigma), and Li emphasizes income gaps (economic marginalization), the psychological consequence (occupational stigma) remains constant. This pattern illustrates what systems theory terms equifinality: multiple distinct causal pathways leading to the same maladaptive outcome. The novels thus do not merely illustrate a single causal chain from trigger to burnout. Rather, they demonstrate how structurally different forms of professional devaluation, whether experienced as unfair funding allocation, public name-calling, or unfavorable salary comparison, all terminate in the erosion of teacher identity. For occupational psychology, this literary evidence suggests that interventions aimed at reducing occupational stigma need not address every possible trigger individually; disrupting any one pathway (e.g., reducing social stigma or mitigating relative deprivation) may interrupt the funnel into stigma.

Crucially, narrative fiction does more than merely illustrate psychological models; it adds dimensions that statistical analysis cannot capture (Ferradás et al., 2019). Through techniques such as internal focalization, free indirect discourse, and temporal compression, these novels allow readers to experience the chain pathway sequentially, to inhabit the protagonist’s perspective at each stage, to register the emotional texture of resource depletion and burnout, and to recognise that the progression from stigma to collapse is not inevitable a set of alternative narrative possibilities (a supportive department head, a student who expresses gratitude, a publication that finds an audience) are always implicitly present, making the tragedy contingent rather than necessary (Fairley, 2020).

This opens up a constructive dialogue between literary criticism and applied psychology. The texts examined here could serve not merely as diagnostic documents documenting the psychological state of Chinese university humanities teachers, but as resources for intervention (Fathi et al., 2024). Reading Yan Lianke’s Elegy of Wind in a teacher-training seminar might help early-career faculty recognize the early stages of a loss spiral before it becomes entrenched (Liu & Chang, 2023). And for educational administrators, the fictional representation of the chain pathway provides an affective and narrative supplement to quantitative data—a vicarious experience of what it feels like from the inside for a teacher to move from occupational stigma through resource depletion to burnout and impaired performance (Hlado & Harvankova, 2024).

6 Conclusion

This paper has examined representations of occupational stigma, psychological capital depletion, burnout, and impaired teaching performance in three works of contemporary Chinese educator narratives by Henan authors Yan Lianke, Liu Zhenyun, and Li Peifu. Using the JD-R model and COR theory as interpretive heuristics, the analysis identified a recurring narrative structure, a “chain mediation” across the four stages that closely parallels empirical findings from recent studies of university teacher psychology in Henan Province (Wang & Zhang, 2025; Wu & Cai, 2025). The novels render visible the psychological mechanisms that statistical models identify: how perceived professional devaluation erodes self-efficacy, hope, optimism, and resilience; how that resource depletion accelerates emotional exhaustion and cynicism; and how burnout, once entrenched, impairs the capacity to teach effectively (Zhao et al., 2024a).

Beyond confirming that psychological models can illuminate literary form, this paper has suggested that literary fiction can, in turn, enrich psychological understanding (Zhao et al., 2024b). Where statistics provide generalization and correlation, narrative provides temporal sequence, interiority, and the texture of lived experience (Bruner, 1991). The chain mediation model, rendered narratively, becomes not just an abstract explanatory framework but a felt reality, a sequence that readers can recognize in the fictional characters and, perhaps more troublingly, in themselves or in colleagues they have observed (Bai & Zheng, 2024).

The regional specificity of these texts matters. Henan Province’s structural disadvantages lower per-capita research funding, fewer international collaborations and less competitive salaries create a heightened pressure environment for university humanities faculty (Chen et al., 2024). The province’s major writers have responded to this pressure by producing some of the most psychologically acute educator-focused fiction in contemporary Chinese literature (Cheng et al., 2023). In giving voice to the “invisible marginalization” of teachers, these novelists perform a service that goes beyond aesthetics; they document a crisis in the value of teaching and learning under conditions of marketization and neoliberal academic management. Whether that documentation will lead to change remains to be seen. But at the very least, the literature insists that the crisis be seen.

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