MCLC: Fang Fang, periscope on history

[MCLC LIST]

MCLC LIST
Fang Fang, periscope on history
Source: China Daily (9/30/16)
A periscope on history
By Mei Jia (China Daily)
Author combines perspectives to shed light on difficult times, she tells Mei Jia.
Fang Fang has always been an outspoken voice among the established Chinese writers born in the 1950s.
In her works, she is straightforward in examining life's misery for people living at the bottom, and she is equally direct in criticism of unfairness she perceives in awarding literary prizes, even if that means trouble and even a lawsuit for herself.
"I need to fight for my right to criticize. Though it was just an accidental event ignited by two of my micro blog updates, I was involved and I decided to stay in the battle," says the 61-year-old Wuhan-based writer, who was in Beijing for her new book launch.
Such controversies and "energy-consuming headaches" forced Fang to stop working on her latest novel, Ruan Mai (Bare Burial), for a year before it was released by People's Literature Publishing House last month.
"Bare burial" is a phrase known to few Chinese, especially younger people. It means burying the dead directly in the earth without a coffin, or even without a shroud－an indecent act in the minds of traditional Chinese.
Fang first learned the phrase from a longtime friend whose mother has Alzheimer's disease but remembered an old horror. "Don't bury me barely," the woman kept telling her daughter, who bought a decent coffin when her mother was cremated.
Fang was struck by the words. "A folk tale goes that people being barely buried can't go to an afterlife. To me, a living person who refuses past memories is also barely buried in time and history."
Her new novel explores a forgotten past as its protagonists retrieve their family history. The lost memory from the era of land reform in early 1950s and its aftermath are topics not many contemporary writers would take on easily or eagerly.
Fang skillfully combines history with suspense in her storytelling, making the book hard to put down once begun.
The novel is about Ding Zitao, who loses her memory, and her son, Qinglin, an architecture graduate in the real estate business.
Ding works as a helper for richer families to raise her son. She shows great fear when Qinglin becomes better off and moves the family into a luxurious villa. The shock is so strong that she goes into a coma.
In parallel plotlines, Ding comes out of her coma and recovers her memory, while the son searches for the truth of his mother and father's past－from clues including his mother's scattered words and his father's diary.
It turns out that both his parents are children of landlords, whose family properties are confiscated during land reform. Then Ding's father-in-law tells all the family members to commit suicide, afraid of losing dignity as he faces the peasant uprising. But Ding does not die as her attempted suicide fails.
"The reform was a necessary move, as I show from stories of the retired Red Army general in the novel. It just went uncontrollably wild at certain phrases. And I found some people who experienced that were inclined to forget about the past," Fang says.
"I let people from different historic stances speak, and even to argue in my novel. I'm not judging from an overseeing perspective."
Qinglin, the son in Bare Burial, chooses to let go of the burdens of the past and to value the present, while a friend decides to record Qinglin's family history, only anonymously.
Liu Ting, a critic and editor with People's Literature magazine, says: "One of the biggest values of Fang's work is that she presents attitudes toward history from different groups and generations of people, making them sensible and reliable."
Fang says the landlord's estate in the novel is based on a property in western Hubei province.
Even Qinglin's discovery of his father's hidden diaries is based on a true story she herself experienced. She reads about her own family past in her father's recording of events from 1942-72.
Born as Wu Fang in Nanjing, Jiangsu province, in 1955, she moved with the family to Wuhan, Hubei province, when she was 2, beginning a lifelong obsession and love with the city that features prominently in her works.
Like the characters in the new novel, her family was classified as "having a bad social status" during the land reform, leading to hardships in her youth.
She worked at a job handling cargo for three years before she was recruited by Wuhan University in 1978. In her university days, she mainly wrote poems and novellas.
Later she became a professional writer and magazine editor.
She won the Lu Xun Literature Award in 2010, and many of her works have been translated into other languages.
"I usually write from noon to midnight. With writing, there's freedom rising from the words that enables you feel that you can talk freely to anybody and forget about any loneliness and trouble," she says.
The book paved the road for Fang Fang's literary success. The story is about a family of nine children living in a shanty at the edge of Wuhan city since the 1950s. Poverty exposes the dark sides of life at the bottom of society.
Li Baoli, a woman in Wuhan, finds the goddess of luck has left her alone after she buys an apartment that is said to have bad feng shui. Her husband betrays her and commits suicide, inspiring hatred from their son. Fang looks at hardships for a woman who struggles with life's misfortune. The story was turned into a film in 2012.
Besides the focus on reality, a part of Fang's works is about history, especially the past of Wuhan. Set in the 1926 battle during the Northern Expedition, Fang talks about friendship, faith, and the life and death of two young people.
Fang offers a pessimistic look at society in the story of Tu Ziqiang. With sup-port from the whole village, Tu gains a bachelor's degree in Wuhan and works diligently. When he is about to bring his parents to a better life in the city, his father has a sudden accident and dies, leaving his mother heart-broken and frail. Tumanages to comfort his mother well before he dies of exhaustion.
by denton.2 at osu.edu on October 4, 2016
You are subscribed to email updates from MCLC Resource Center  
To stop receiving these emails, click here.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.osu.edu/pipermail/mclc/attachments/20161004/c7bf3e1d/attachment-0001.html>