Fang Fang's acts of resistance

New Statesman​

20 hours ago

Photo by David Levenson / Getty Images
The Running Flame is a gripping, heart-wrenching read. In this novel by the Chinese author Fang Fang, first published in the writer's home country in 2001 and now in English, we follow Yingzhi, a teenager from a rural village. When she unexpectedly gets pregnant, she enters into a marriage she wouldn't otherwise have chosen. Her husband, Guiqing, is a lazy, entitled man whose negligence of his adult responsibilities soon turns to sheer callousness towards Yingzhi.
Guiqing becomes violent. His parents have no sympathy for Yingzhi. Ever audacious, she argues with her in-laws about how society has changed since they were young: 'Haven't you heard that we have gender equality these days?' Later, when Guiqing is arrested on suspicion of raping another woman, it is Yingzhi who takes the blame: 'Guiqing left his wife at home to go screw around with some other woman. And you claim that isn't your fault!' her father-in-law says. 'It's your job to keep him happy… If my son picks up some dirty STD out there, I will hold you 100 per cent responsible!'
All this is framed by an opening chapter in which Yingzhi is waiting on death row for an as-yet undetermined crime. From then on, Fang Fang's narrative hurtles towards a shockingly violent end.
Wang Fang was born in Nanjing, eastern China, in 1955. Under her pen name Fang Fang she is the lauded yet controversial author of poetry, several novels and the online blog Wuhan Diary, which she wrote between January and March 2020 to document the lockdown in her city, then the centre of the Covid-19 outbreak. Her posts were quickly deleted by authorities, as she called for the end of internet censorship.
Set in the 1990s and based on interviews the author conducted with female death-row inmates, The Running Flame is a powerful reckoning with China's brutal patriarchy – which continues today, as shown in the case of the tennis player Peng Shuai, who disappeared in 2021 after accusing a senior politician of sexual assault. The book won four major literary awards in China.
Fang Fang's 2016 novel Soft Burial, also now available in English, received critical acclaim and prizes. Then, within the space of a few months, it was denounced and removed from bookshops. The novel's setting of China's violent Land Reform Campaign of the 1940s threatened premier Xi Jinping's propaganda drive of 'telling China's story well' – meaning not criticising the nation's past.
Soft Burial is a knottier tale than The Running Flame – though no less affecting. During the land reform campaign, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of land-owners and their families were killed by the Communist Party and the peasants they inspired under a movement to redistribute land. Our central character is Ding Zitao. When her son Qinglin moves her into a comfortable home for her retirement, she becomes psychologically ill, and he sets out to investigate the past she has always hidden.
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Ding Zitao was a member of a landlord family: when it became clear their lives were threatened by the campaign, her parents encouraged her to speak against them at a village denunciation meeting in order to save herself. Fang Fang does not spare us any details: Ding Zitao's relatives chose suicide instead of facing murder by their tenants, and she buried them herself before escaping alone. A soft burial, a character named Happy Lu tells us, 'is when you bury someone's body directly in the dirt without any casket or wrapping. The local elders say that someone who will die with lingering anger or regret and doesn't want to be reincarnated can decide to have a soft burial.'
This trauma haunts Ding Zitao for the rest of her life. 'The way they hid their past spoke to a deep mistrust they have harboured toward everyone around them,' Qinglin thinks as he uncovers the truth. The Chinese authorities feared Fang Fang's book because it revealed the horror of a time that remains unspoken, and because it encouraged that mistrust to fall on the government, rather than one's fellow citizens.
In California-based scholar Michael Berry's translations, the narratives of both books can feel stilted. In Soft Burial, the dialogue is at times contrived, resulting in scenes that are unnatural and lack nuance. But the style is superseded by the unflinching stories. Given the challenges facing Fang Fang at home, the widening of these books' audiences to include Anglophone readers is a matter of urgent resistance.
The Running Flame
by Fang Fang, translated by Michael Berry
Columbia University Press, 208pp, £16.99
Soft Burial
by Fang Fang, translated by Michael Berry
Columbia University Press, 416pp, £20
[See also: English literature's last stand]
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