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Soft Burial: A Novel
Fang Fang’s Soft Burial begins with a mysterious, nameless protagonist. Decades earlier she was pulled out of a river in a state of near-death; upon regaining consciousness, she discovered that her entire memory had been erased. The narrative follows her journey through recovery as she takes a job as a housekeeper in the home of a powerful cadre, marries the doctor who saved her, and starts a family of her own. As the story unfolds, the protective cocoon of amnesia that her subconscious wove around her begins to give way, revealing glimpses of her previous life and the unspeakable trauma that she suffered.
Soft Burial is one of the most remarkable—and most controversial—recent works of Chinese literature. Part mystery, part historical fiction, and part social exposé, the novel intercuts different generations, regions, and time periods. First published in 2016, Soft Burial initially received critical acclaim but soon faced a wave of denunciations and was taken off the shelves of bookstores throughout China. Fang Fang challenged the unspoken rules that govern how Chinese writers portray the past by depicting the human costs of the Land Reform Campaign in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and she was attacked for expressing sympathy toward members of the “landlord class.” An intimate portrait of historical trauma and the psychological toll of repressed violence, Soft Burial is a landmark in contemporary Chinese fiction.
Soft Burial is one of the most remarkable—and most controversial—recent works of Chinese literature. Part mystery, part historical fiction, and part social exposé, the novel intercuts different generations, regions, and time periods. First published in 2016, Soft Burial initially received critical acclaim but soon faced a wave of denunciations and was taken off the shelves of bookstores throughout China. Fang Fang challenged the unspoken rules that govern how Chinese writers portray the past by depicting the human costs of the Land Reform Campaign in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and she was attacked for expressing sympathy toward members of the “landlord class.” An intimate portrait of historical trauma and the psychological toll of repressed violence, Soft Burial is a landmark in contemporary Chinese fiction.
409 pages, Kindle Edition
Published March 18, 2025
13 people are currently reading
439 people want to read
About the author
Fang Fang
240 books51 followersFang Fang graduated from the Department of Chinese Language and Literature, Wuhan University in 1982. She has published nearly seventy novels, novellas and essay collections. Many of her novels and novellas were published overseas in English, French, Japanese, Italian, Portuguese, Korean and other languages. Her representative works include the novels Chronicle of Wuni Lake and Water under the Time, and novellas The Scenery and Grandfather in the Heart of Father.
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August 15, 2025
Fang Fang reflects on the interplay between cultural and individual memory in China through the experiences of a widowed mother and her adult son. In the early 1950s Ding Zitao was pulled half-drowned from a river, although she recovered, she was unable to recall anything about herself, not even her original name. Now, many years later, a series of chance associations have stirred her recollections but plunged her into a semi-catatonic state in which she imagines herself travelling through 18 levels of hell each recreating the events that led to her displacement and amnesia. In Fang Fang’s reworking of traditional beliefs, Ding Zitao’s inner journey becomes both act of atonement and route to reconciliation and eventual rebirth. Her devoted son Qinglin oversees her day-to-day care gradually caught up in solving the mystery surrounding who his mother once was and where she came from.
Fang Fang’s controversial novel is loosely based on the life of a friend’s mother. It connects back to the Land Reform project in the early years of Mao’s ‘new’ China. A process of redistribution in which landowners were required to relinquish their assets to the common people but which also led to the violent deaths of at least a million – possibly as many as five million – people. Unlike some other Maoist initiatives, Land Reform has been viewed as largely positive within China, so Fang Fang’s approach, her emphasis on the possible human cost is unusual. Western novels centred on cultural amnesia within China - intent on illuminating brutal episodes from Mao’s regime - have been criticized for their orientalist tropes in particular the idea of Chinese citizens as essentially an ignorant mass, without agency and unaware of their country’s true history – a viewpoint which uncoincidentally valorises Western democracies. However, Fang Fang’s book was conceived in China for a Chinese readership. So, although notions of collective and personal amnesia loom large in Fang Fang’s narrative, her perspective is rather different.
Fang Fang acknowledges the deliberate reshaping, even erasure, of what doesn’t suit a desired narrative but focuses on the varying attitudes of groups or individuals to the past. Qinglin is torn between a focus on the present, particularly achieving material success, and wanting to find out about his family’s origins. He’s uncertain there’s any real benefit in unearthing likely traumatic events. Even if he reassembles the fragments of his mother’s former life, what will that achieve? Similarly, representatives of his mother’s generation have opted not to talk about what happened to them during the Land Reform years because they don’t wish to burden their children or grandchildren or because they’re still grappling with a type of survivor guilt. In addition, many of Qinglin’s peers and their offspring are simply not that interested in China’s history, particularly its more negative chapters. But Qinglin’s background in architecture links him to an architecture professor who’s fascinated by the deserted mansions once inhabited by wealthy landowners: interested in their potential as an archive, in what their design reveals about social and cultural shifts. His research combines site visits with compiling oral histories from surrounding areas. This brings him to Eastern Sichuan and locations that may be relevant to Qinglin’s mother. Qinglin travels with the professor encountering those who chose not to examine the rights-and-wrongs of the Land Reform years; those who view the harsh treatment of landowners and their families as shameful; and those who believe that the ends more than justified the devastating means.
Fang Fang’s title emphasizes aspects of her plot and her own stance on history, “…when people die and their bodies are buried under the earth without the protection of coffins, this burial is called a ‘soft burial’; as for the living, when they seal off their past, cut off their roots, reject their memories, either consciously or subconsciously, their lives are soft buried in time.” It’s significant that in many regions a ‘soft burial’ offers no possibility of reincarnation, of working towards a more enlightened future. Fang Fang’s style’s simple and direct. But her narrative’s peppered with intriguing allusions to Chinese art, literature and myth, and the intricate structure moves between characters, shifting backwards and forwards in time. This was one of those books that crept up on me. At first, I wasn’t that invested but as I read I found it increasingly gripping, quiet yet powerful and thought-provoking. Translated by Michael Berry.
Thanks to Netgalley and publisher Weatherhead Books on Asia for an ARC
Fang Fang’s controversial novel is loosely based on the life of a friend’s mother. It connects back to the Land Reform project in the early years of Mao’s ‘new’ China. A process of redistribution in which landowners were required to relinquish their assets to the common people but which also led to the violent deaths of at least a million – possibly as many as five million – people. Unlike some other Maoist initiatives, Land Reform has been viewed as largely positive within China, so Fang Fang’s approach, her emphasis on the possible human cost is unusual. Western novels centred on cultural amnesia within China - intent on illuminating brutal episodes from Mao’s regime - have been criticized for their orientalist tropes in particular the idea of Chinese citizens as essentially an ignorant mass, without agency and unaware of their country’s true history – a viewpoint which uncoincidentally valorises Western democracies. However, Fang Fang’s book was conceived in China for a Chinese readership. So, although notions of collective and personal amnesia loom large in Fang Fang’s narrative, her perspective is rather different.
Fang Fang acknowledges the deliberate reshaping, even erasure, of what doesn’t suit a desired narrative but focuses on the varying attitudes of groups or individuals to the past. Qinglin is torn between a focus on the present, particularly achieving material success, and wanting to find out about his family’s origins. He’s uncertain there’s any real benefit in unearthing likely traumatic events. Even if he reassembles the fragments of his mother’s former life, what will that achieve? Similarly, representatives of his mother’s generation have opted not to talk about what happened to them during the Land Reform years because they don’t wish to burden their children or grandchildren or because they’re still grappling with a type of survivor guilt. In addition, many of Qinglin’s peers and their offspring are simply not that interested in China’s history, particularly its more negative chapters. But Qinglin’s background in architecture links him to an architecture professor who’s fascinated by the deserted mansions once inhabited by wealthy landowners: interested in their potential as an archive, in what their design reveals about social and cultural shifts. His research combines site visits with compiling oral histories from surrounding areas. This brings him to Eastern Sichuan and locations that may be relevant to Qinglin’s mother. Qinglin travels with the professor encountering those who chose not to examine the rights-and-wrongs of the Land Reform years; those who view the harsh treatment of landowners and their families as shameful; and those who believe that the ends more than justified the devastating means.
Fang Fang’s title emphasizes aspects of her plot and her own stance on history, “…when people die and their bodies are buried under the earth without the protection of coffins, this burial is called a ‘soft burial’; as for the living, when they seal off their past, cut off their roots, reject their memories, either consciously or subconsciously, their lives are soft buried in time.” It’s significant that in many regions a ‘soft burial’ offers no possibility of reincarnation, of working towards a more enlightened future. Fang Fang’s style’s simple and direct. But her narrative’s peppered with intriguing allusions to Chinese art, literature and myth, and the intricate structure moves between characters, shifting backwards and forwards in time. This was one of those books that crept up on me. At first, I wasn’t that invested but as I read I found it increasingly gripping, quiet yet powerful and thought-provoking. Translated by Michael Berry.
Thanks to Netgalley and publisher Weatherhead Books on Asia for an ARC
April 7, 2025
Soft Burial by Fang Fang has a very interesting publication history, which partially explains why it is available to English-speaking readers at all. Written by an author lauded by Chinese national-level literary prizes and enthusiastically received in China upon publication, it does not seem like the sort of novel Western publishers would pick up, as they are normally primarily interested in 'rebel' or 'opposition' minded authors coming from authoritarian countries. Some genre authors, such as Cixin Liu of The Three Body Problem fame, manager to escape this trend (despite his active support for the Uyghur genocide), but literary authors tend to be subjected to more scrutiny. However, the response to Soft Burial in China did a 180, and the book is now banned. Fang Fang did not help her case by publishing Wuhan Diaries chronicling her experiences of Chinese Covid lockdowns on Chinese social media, which made her better-known around the world. Although this might have attracted the attention of Western publishers by putting her into a more familiar 'opposition' mould, she herself denies being anti-CCP or anti-China in any way.
All of this provides valuable context for understanding this book. Innovative in structure, it follows familiar beats of many a diaspora difficult 20th century history family saga, whilst offering something more substantial and interesting precisely because it was written by a Chinese author for a Chinese audience, rather than for literary Oxfam-safari export. The story follows a young woman who is saved from a river in the early 1950s. She does not remember anything about herself or her past, and she lives with deep anxiety for her whole life. In a couple of pages we speed run to the early 2000s, when her son, a newly successful office worker in the booming economy of 90s China, buys her a beautiful villa. Setting foot in such a sumptuous environment is enough to completely derail her mentally as she remembers her past as a landlord's daughter during the Land Reform years.
Enemies of the people, class enemies, counter-revolutionaries - labels which killed, maimed and ruined the fates of millions of people, creating overwhelming multi-generational trauma. These concepts rear their ugly heads in the form of 'foreign agents' or 'traitors of the Motherland' today. I am not from China, but the underlying conflict Fang Fang is trying to address - how should we remember mass classicide and how can we ever work through the collective and individual trauma classicide campaigns created - is as relevant for my country of birth as it is for China, so this one really hit home. The protagonist's journey through the hell of her memories is absolutely harrowing. We travel with her back in time, from the last thing she remembers - burying her whole family who have just committed mass suicide to avoid a mob struggle session - all the way through the build up of the pressure on rural landlords. Her narrative is juxtaposed with the story of her son's encounter with an elderly commissar in the 2000s, who sort of presents the other side of the story. In a way, the son's story is more central than the mother's, as it hinges on the question of whether he should dig deeper, whether he should try to find out what happened to his family, and what sort of outcomes that could bring.
The overarching narrative is intentionally far-fetched and full of coincidences. One of the characters labels it as a soap opera or a TV drama, emphasising that the story and the specific characters are used as archetypes serving the exploration of the key themes of memory. Fang Fang is less interested in whether any of the violence was justified, which explains some narrative decisions. A book more interested in discussing the Land Reform movement itself would have found a way to give more of a voice to non-landlords and those participating in the struggling sessions on the other side. A repetition of one of the struggling scenes from a different perspective would have driven the point home, as would a point of view of one of the servants (Little Tea is truly the most side-lined character in this story). I can also understand that most Chinese cultural production, if it did talk about this period at all, has already focused on the peasants and how 'evil' the landlords were, and Fang Fang's expressed purpose was to uncover the trauma inflicted upon the millions of victims in this particular event. I think she did a good job of avoiding romanticising the landlords whilst still preserving their humanity and invoking our sympathy - literally nobody deserves to be treated like this. All of the 'past' storyline characters are three-dimensional human beings, who often displayed the prejudices of their class upbringing. Fang Fang is a master of detail: the protagonist, who we have met as a traumatised woman full of humility, comes across quite differently in her pre-amnesia chapters. For example, in a throwaway line, she thinks of her adopted stepbrother as always relegated to a servant class because he was not born into the family, despite his familial status as an adopted son. She still has the space to think that way after she has just buried her entire family and she is reliant on this man to save her and her child. This kind of character work is a far cry from the saintly hagiographies of someone like Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai in The Mountains Sing. I was somewhat disapproved by Fang Fang reducing the destruction of the Lu family to an interpersonal conflict, but I understand that she was trying to show that in many cases the specific victims were not picked because they were particularly exploitative, but because local rivalries and politics shaped their fates.
Nevertheless, it is a captivating and somewhat theatrical family saga that embraces its own artificial narrative and characterisation. As a family saga, it is reminiscent but more compelling than many similar books I've read. If you enjoyed How We Disappeared or Pachinko, you might like this. However, the family narrative is not the main point of this book, a discussion of private and public memory is.
Did she succeed in writing a novel about memory? I am not sure. I feel like some of the discussions of memory lacked nuance in favour of hammering a clear conflict - is it better to remember or to forget - rather than discussing how exactly we remember or how we forget. It was also interesting to see the 'present-day' storyline being set in the early 2000s, represented as a neutral time 'after' the events, full of hope and opportunities to discuss and remember. 2025 feels very different to 2005 in that regard. 'Enemies of the people' are back, both in terms of rhetoric and legal persecutions, and memory is policed more than ever since the supposed end of the Cold War, making the 'present' Fang Fang wrote into almost a utopia.
All of this provides valuable context for understanding this book. Innovative in structure, it follows familiar beats of many a diaspora difficult 20th century history family saga, whilst offering something more substantial and interesting precisely because it was written by a Chinese author for a Chinese audience, rather than for literary Oxfam-safari export. The story follows a young woman who is saved from a river in the early 1950s. She does not remember anything about herself or her past, and she lives with deep anxiety for her whole life. In a couple of pages we speed run to the early 2000s, when her son, a newly successful office worker in the booming economy of 90s China, buys her a beautiful villa. Setting foot in such a sumptuous environment is enough to completely derail her mentally as she remembers her past as a landlord's daughter during the Land Reform years.
Enemies of the people, class enemies, counter-revolutionaries - labels which killed, maimed and ruined the fates of millions of people, creating overwhelming multi-generational trauma. These concepts rear their ugly heads in the form of 'foreign agents' or 'traitors of the Motherland' today. I am not from China, but the underlying conflict Fang Fang is trying to address - how should we remember mass classicide and how can we ever work through the collective and individual trauma classicide campaigns created - is as relevant for my country of birth as it is for China, so this one really hit home. The protagonist's journey through the hell of her memories is absolutely harrowing. We travel with her back in time, from the last thing she remembers - burying her whole family who have just committed mass suicide to avoid a mob struggle session - all the way through the build up of the pressure on rural landlords. Her narrative is juxtaposed with the story of her son's encounter with an elderly commissar in the 2000s, who sort of presents the other side of the story. In a way, the son's story is more central than the mother's, as it hinges on the question of whether he should dig deeper, whether he should try to find out what happened to his family, and what sort of outcomes that could bring.
The overarching narrative is intentionally far-fetched and full of coincidences. One of the characters labels it as a soap opera or a TV drama, emphasising that the story and the specific characters are used as archetypes serving the exploration of the key themes of memory. Fang Fang is less interested in whether any of the violence was justified, which explains some narrative decisions. A book more interested in discussing the Land Reform movement itself would have found a way to give more of a voice to non-landlords and those participating in the struggling sessions on the other side. A repetition of one of the struggling scenes from a different perspective would have driven the point home, as would a point of view of one of the servants (Little Tea is truly the most side-lined character in this story). I can also understand that most Chinese cultural production, if it did talk about this period at all, has already focused on the peasants and how 'evil' the landlords were, and Fang Fang's expressed purpose was to uncover the trauma inflicted upon the millions of victims in this particular event. I think she did a good job of avoiding romanticising the landlords whilst still preserving their humanity and invoking our sympathy - literally nobody deserves to be treated like this. All of the 'past' storyline characters are three-dimensional human beings, who often displayed the prejudices of their class upbringing. Fang Fang is a master of detail: the protagonist, who we have met as a traumatised woman full of humility, comes across quite differently in her pre-amnesia chapters. For example, in a throwaway line, she thinks of her adopted stepbrother as always relegated to a servant class because he was not born into the family, despite his familial status as an adopted son. She still has the space to think that way after she has just buried her entire family and she is reliant on this man to save her and her child. This kind of character work is a far cry from the saintly hagiographies of someone like Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai in The Mountains Sing. I was somewhat disapproved by Fang Fang reducing the destruction of the Lu family to an interpersonal conflict, but I understand that she was trying to show that in many cases the specific victims were not picked because they were particularly exploitative, but because local rivalries and politics shaped their fates.
Nevertheless, it is a captivating and somewhat theatrical family saga that embraces its own artificial narrative and characterisation. As a family saga, it is reminiscent but more compelling than many similar books I've read. If you enjoyed How We Disappeared or Pachinko, you might like this. However, the family narrative is not the main point of this book, a discussion of private and public memory is.
Did she succeed in writing a novel about memory? I am not sure. I feel like some of the discussions of memory lacked nuance in favour of hammering a clear conflict - is it better to remember or to forget - rather than discussing how exactly we remember or how we forget. It was also interesting to see the 'present-day' storyline being set in the early 2000s, represented as a neutral time 'after' the events, full of hope and opportunities to discuss and remember. 2025 feels very different to 2005 in that regard. 'Enemies of the people' are back, both in terms of rhetoric and legal persecutions, and memory is policed more than ever since the supposed end of the Cold War, making the 'present' Fang Fang wrote into almost a utopia.
December 26, 2024
“The greatest thing that we are innately equipped with as humans is the ability to forget.”
Soft Burial is one of the most interesting historical fiction novels I’ve ever read. It takes place during the 1950s and continues into the early 2000s in China, a time period and location that isn’t a very popular choice. The translator's introduction explains that Fang Fang is a well known author in China, some of her work even being a regular part of the school curriculum. Soft Burial was published in 2016, and positively received by most. “Most” does not include the Chinese government, because the book was banned due to its themes, which could be considered anti-communist to an extent. The book follows several characters: An elderly woman, her son and an ex revolutionary. The characters’ stories intertwine and all come together slowly. The elderly woman, Ding Zitao, suffers from amnesia after being saved from drowning. She suddenly falls into some sort of coma-like state after her son shows her the new house he bought for her, seemingly caused by something unknown from her past. The novel then follows her son as he tries his best to help her, trying to uncover his mother’s past in the hope he’ll find something that might wake her up. He finds some journals that belonged to his father who died when he was young, and travels to try and find people who knew his mother or father.
“To be put into the earth without a coffin and have your body placed directly into the dirt is one kind of soft burial; but when the living insist on consciously or unconsciously cutting themselves off from what happened, covering up the past, abandoning history, and refusing to remember, this is another form of soft burial committed over the passage of time. And once the past has been committed to a soft burial, it will likely lie there generation after generation, forgotten for all eternity.”
Soft Burial was a term I’d never heard before picking up this book, but it hasn’t left my mind since I finished reading it.
One of my favourite things in books is when different characters who at first seem to be completely unrelated start to come together and make everything make sense. This is so well done here.
The translation felt a little wonky at times. The language felt stiff at times and completely too descriptive at others. I think this might be a case of it being hard to translate some sentences into English because certain words might not have direct translations. It didn’t bother me much overall and the positives definitely outweigh the negatives.
This is a book about history. A story inspired by what the author heard firsthand from people who lived through it. It’s a book about trauma, and how hard some people try to forget their past, either consciously or not. Most of all it’s a story about humanity.
Soft Burial is one of the most interesting historical fiction novels I’ve ever read. It takes place during the 1950s and continues into the early 2000s in China, a time period and location that isn’t a very popular choice. The translator's introduction explains that Fang Fang is a well known author in China, some of her work even being a regular part of the school curriculum. Soft Burial was published in 2016, and positively received by most. “Most” does not include the Chinese government, because the book was banned due to its themes, which could be considered anti-communist to an extent. The book follows several characters: An elderly woman, her son and an ex revolutionary. The characters’ stories intertwine and all come together slowly. The elderly woman, Ding Zitao, suffers from amnesia after being saved from drowning. She suddenly falls into some sort of coma-like state after her son shows her the new house he bought for her, seemingly caused by something unknown from her past. The novel then follows her son as he tries his best to help her, trying to uncover his mother’s past in the hope he’ll find something that might wake her up. He finds some journals that belonged to his father who died when he was young, and travels to try and find people who knew his mother or father.
“To be put into the earth without a coffin and have your body placed directly into the dirt is one kind of soft burial; but when the living insist on consciously or unconsciously cutting themselves off from what happened, covering up the past, abandoning history, and refusing to remember, this is another form of soft burial committed over the passage of time. And once the past has been committed to a soft burial, it will likely lie there generation after generation, forgotten for all eternity.”
Soft Burial was a term I’d never heard before picking up this book, but it hasn’t left my mind since I finished reading it.
One of my favourite things in books is when different characters who at first seem to be completely unrelated start to come together and make everything make sense. This is so well done here.
The translation felt a little wonky at times. The language felt stiff at times and completely too descriptive at others. I think this might be a case of it being hard to translate some sentences into English because certain words might not have direct translations. It didn’t bother me much overall and the positives definitely outweigh the negatives.
This is a book about history. A story inspired by what the author heard firsthand from people who lived through it. It’s a book about trauma, and how hard some people try to forget their past, either consciously or not. Most of all it’s a story about humanity.
May 26, 2025
A beautiful and poignant novel about the impact of 'New China's. Both the story and the translation were stunning. I couldn't put the book down. The themes of memory, family, trauma and history were well thought out, and laid out without blame or shame. These were the times, the circumstances and the choices people made to survive.
November 12, 2025
[ 4.5/5 stars ]
A mysterious and (initially) nameless protagonist is pulled out of a river in a state of near-death. After regaining consciousness, she suffers from amnesia.
Set against the Land Reform campaign (1940s China) - the story follows a cast of characters whose inner struggles are delivered in the form of character study at times. This is about historical (and intergenerational) trauma that cannot be suppressed, about survival amidst political unrest. Defying black-and-white portrayals, Fang does a sharp social and political commentary, challenging stereotypes and political supremacy through threads of Chinese history and politics woven into the story. Wealth, root, status, loyalty, self-sacrifice and dignity bear the evidence of the political and historical erasure, and reading this is mostly painful.
The pages are emotionally laden and while the mystery can feel formulaic, this doesn't detract from its overall relevance. As "Forgetting is not always a form of betrayal. Sometimes forgetting is a form of survival.", ultimately, this book pierces reflection on the question "do we stay silent or interrogate the past?"
Banned in China, SOFT BURIAL (tr. Michael Berry) is the kind of narrative that should be told. This book is a raw depiction of a Chinese contemporary society who refuse to stay silence and speak the truth. I hope everyone reads this important modern Chinese literature.
[ I received a complimentary copy from the publisher - Columbia University Press . All opinions are my own ]
A mysterious and (initially) nameless protagonist is pulled out of a river in a state of near-death. After regaining consciousness, she suffers from amnesia.
Set against the Land Reform campaign (1940s China) - the story follows a cast of characters whose inner struggles are delivered in the form of character study at times. This is about historical (and intergenerational) trauma that cannot be suppressed, about survival amidst political unrest. Defying black-and-white portrayals, Fang does a sharp social and political commentary, challenging stereotypes and political supremacy through threads of Chinese history and politics woven into the story. Wealth, root, status, loyalty, self-sacrifice and dignity bear the evidence of the political and historical erasure, and reading this is mostly painful.
The pages are emotionally laden and while the mystery can feel formulaic, this doesn't detract from its overall relevance. As "Forgetting is not always a form of betrayal. Sometimes forgetting is a form of survival.", ultimately, this book pierces reflection on the question "do we stay silent or interrogate the past?"
Banned in China, SOFT BURIAL (tr. Michael Berry) is the kind of narrative that should be told. This book is a raw depiction of a Chinese contemporary society who refuse to stay silence and speak the truth. I hope everyone reads this important modern Chinese literature.
[ I received a complimentary copy from the publisher - Columbia University Press . All opinions are my own ]
March 21, 2025
According to this novel, a soft burial is when a person is buried without a coffin, directly in the ground. There are implications: their soul never really rests, and they cannot be reincarnated. The translator’s introduction also introduces readers to the concept of mingzhe baoshen: “Put your own safety before matters of principle,” also understood as “Keep your mouth shut and stay out of trouble.”
*Soft Burial* probes the absences and silences that are part of traumatic memories. It deals with the period of Land Reform in China—after the Second Sino-Japanese War, and before the Cultural Revolution. In a coda, Fang Fang explains that although this is fiction, it is based in large part on the experiences of one woman—her friend’s mother—but also on the experiences of the generation of Fang Fang’s grandparents: people who were accused of being “evil landowners” in denunciation meetings and “struggled against,” or punished for it. The translator’s introduction also reveals that *Soft Burial* has itself suffered one, being removed from shelves in China and denunciated—for its inquiry into what must remain undiscussed and forgotten.
The structure of *Soft Burial* is intriguing: it unspools backwards through time as it reveals what happened to Ding Zitao, the main character of the novel. Ding Zitao is approaching the end of her long and complicated life that has been separated into two distinct parts by repressed trauma from terrible violence, the trauma that led to her profound amnesia. That amnesia can be considered a form of mingzhe baoshen, something that many other characters in the novel choose—including Din Zitao’s son, Qinglin.
*Soft Burial* is a moving and searing portrayal of the terrible costs of the Land Reform Campaign and its ripple effects in the lives of these characters—Ding Zitao, her families past and present, landowners and villagers in Eastern Sichuan, as well as party officials. Fang Fang is subtle, not making accusations, but the outcome for all of the people involved speaks for itself.
“History is not the past,” Baldwin said. “It is the present.” This is true of this novel. Although Fang Fang has used fiction to talk about the events of the Land Reform Campaign, the soft banning of her novel shows how sensitive those in power still are to the implications of those events, and how they may reflect on the image of the ruling party.
"To be put into the earth without a coffin and have your body placed directly into the dirt is one kind of soft burial; but when the living insist on consciously or unconsciously cutting themselves off from what happened, covering up the past, abandoning history, and refusing to remember, this is another form of soft burial committed over the passage of time. And once the past has been committed to a soft burial, it will likely lie there generation after generation, forgotten for all eternity. —Fang Fang"
A beautiful, if difficult read. Highly recommended for its portrayal of the silenced history. Many thanks to Columbia University Press and NetGalley for early access to a DRC.
*Soft Burial* probes the absences and silences that are part of traumatic memories. It deals with the period of Land Reform in China—after the Second Sino-Japanese War, and before the Cultural Revolution. In a coda, Fang Fang explains that although this is fiction, it is based in large part on the experiences of one woman—her friend’s mother—but also on the experiences of the generation of Fang Fang’s grandparents: people who were accused of being “evil landowners” in denunciation meetings and “struggled against,” or punished for it. The translator’s introduction also reveals that *Soft Burial* has itself suffered one, being removed from shelves in China and denunciated—for its inquiry into what must remain undiscussed and forgotten.
The structure of *Soft Burial* is intriguing: it unspools backwards through time as it reveals what happened to Ding Zitao, the main character of the novel. Ding Zitao is approaching the end of her long and complicated life that has been separated into two distinct parts by repressed trauma from terrible violence, the trauma that led to her profound amnesia. That amnesia can be considered a form of mingzhe baoshen, something that many other characters in the novel choose—including Din Zitao’s son, Qinglin.
*Soft Burial* is a moving and searing portrayal of the terrible costs of the Land Reform Campaign and its ripple effects in the lives of these characters—Ding Zitao, her families past and present, landowners and villagers in Eastern Sichuan, as well as party officials. Fang Fang is subtle, not making accusations, but the outcome for all of the people involved speaks for itself.
“History is not the past,” Baldwin said. “It is the present.” This is true of this novel. Although Fang Fang has used fiction to talk about the events of the Land Reform Campaign, the soft banning of her novel shows how sensitive those in power still are to the implications of those events, and how they may reflect on the image of the ruling party.
"To be put into the earth without a coffin and have your body placed directly into the dirt is one kind of soft burial; but when the living insist on consciously or unconsciously cutting themselves off from what happened, covering up the past, abandoning history, and refusing to remember, this is another form of soft burial committed over the passage of time. And once the past has been committed to a soft burial, it will likely lie there generation after generation, forgotten for all eternity. —Fang Fang"
A beautiful, if difficult read. Highly recommended for its portrayal of the silenced history. Many thanks to Columbia University Press and NetGalley for early access to a DRC.
January 18, 2025
Arc provided free of charge by #Netgalley
Soft Burial is a historical fiction novel that weaves in a mystery. Ding Zitao is pulled from a river after nearly drowning, and when she regains consciousness in the hospital, she finds herself with total amnesia. No one knows how she ended up in that situation, and no family members come forward. Dr. Wu, who treats her, gives her the name Ding Zitao. As she starts a new life, she grapples with anxiety and depression, though she can't quite pinpoint the reason. She suspects she has endured significant trauma but chooses to bury her past and live a quiet life.
As she ages, memories begin to resurface, and while she appears to be in a vegetative state, she is internally revisiting the traumas of her earlier years. At the same time, her son embarks on a quest to uncover the secrets of his parents' past, hoping to understand his own origins. However, some truths are too painful to confront, and we all face the choice of whether to remember or to embrace the comfort of a peaceful existence.
Upon its release in 2016, Soft Burial was quickly banned in China. The novel depicts the brutal realities of the land reform movement in post-WWII Maoist China and the generational trauma it inflicted. As the Chinese Communist Party aggressively pursues reforms, 50 million property owners are labeled as landlords, leading to the execution of 2 million private owners, imprisonment of 10 million, and the rest sent to labor camps. All private property is seized by the state.
Fang Fang delivers a compelling narrative that explores the impact of these sweeping reforms on individuals and society as a whole. The mystery aspect adds an engaging twist to the story. While the writing is solid, some parts feel a bit flat and lack inspiration. The development of secondary characters could be stronger, and the portrayal of Qinglin falls short. However, the final 200 pages, where we delve into Ding Zitao's story, are masterfully crafted.
Fang Fang delves into the theme of generational trauma, highlighting its lasting effects. She dives , history, and repressed memories, exploring how these turbulent past events shape contemporary China. She critiques the choice to forget, which is not only enforced by the state but also embraced by individuals who choose to ignore it. Yet, she raises the question of whether confronting these memories might be too painful and overwhelming for us. I found this new release really engaging and enjoyed it a lot.
Soft Burial is a historical fiction novel that weaves in a mystery. Ding Zitao is pulled from a river after nearly drowning, and when she regains consciousness in the hospital, she finds herself with total amnesia. No one knows how she ended up in that situation, and no family members come forward. Dr. Wu, who treats her, gives her the name Ding Zitao. As she starts a new life, she grapples with anxiety and depression, though she can't quite pinpoint the reason. She suspects she has endured significant trauma but chooses to bury her past and live a quiet life.
As she ages, memories begin to resurface, and while she appears to be in a vegetative state, she is internally revisiting the traumas of her earlier years. At the same time, her son embarks on a quest to uncover the secrets of his parents' past, hoping to understand his own origins. However, some truths are too painful to confront, and we all face the choice of whether to remember or to embrace the comfort of a peaceful existence.
Upon its release in 2016, Soft Burial was quickly banned in China. The novel depicts the brutal realities of the land reform movement in post-WWII Maoist China and the generational trauma it inflicted. As the Chinese Communist Party aggressively pursues reforms, 50 million property owners are labeled as landlords, leading to the execution of 2 million private owners, imprisonment of 10 million, and the rest sent to labor camps. All private property is seized by the state.
Fang Fang delivers a compelling narrative that explores the impact of these sweeping reforms on individuals and society as a whole. The mystery aspect adds an engaging twist to the story. While the writing is solid, some parts feel a bit flat and lack inspiration. The development of secondary characters could be stronger, and the portrayal of Qinglin falls short. However, the final 200 pages, where we delve into Ding Zitao's story, are masterfully crafted.
Fang Fang delves into the theme of generational trauma, highlighting its lasting effects. She dives , history, and repressed memories, exploring how these turbulent past events shape contemporary China. She critiques the choice to forget, which is not only enforced by the state but also embraced by individuals who choose to ignore it. Yet, she raises the question of whether confronting these memories might be too painful and overwhelming for us. I found this new release really engaging and enjoyed it a lot.
August 22, 2025
Real Rating: 4.75* of five
The Publisher Says: Fang Fang’s Soft Burial begins with a mysterious, nameless protagonist. Decades earlier she was pulled out of a river in a state of near-death; upon regaining consciousness, she discovered that her entire memory had been erased.
The narrative follows her journey through recovery as she takes a job as a housekeeper in the home of a powerful cadre, marries the doctor who saved her, and starts a family of her own. As the story unfolds, the protective cocoon of amnesia that her subconscious wove around her begins to give way, revealing glimpses of her previous life and the unspeakable trauma that she suffered.
Soft Burial is one of the most remarkable—and most controversial—recent works of Chinese literature. Part mystery, part historical fiction, and part social exposé, the novel intercuts different generations, regions, and time periods. First published in 2016, Soft Burial initially received critical acclaim but soon faced a wave of denunciations and was taken off the shelves of bookstores throughout China. Fang Fang challenged the unspoken rules that govern how Chinese writers portray the past by depicting the human costs of the Land Reform Campaign in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and she was attacked for expressing sympathy toward members of the “landlord class.”
An intimate portrait of historical trauma and the psychological toll of repressed violence, Soft Burial is a landmark in contemporary Chinese fiction.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: Your mother was a woman of mystery; so was mine; but I'll bet cash money neither of us had a mother who was a total mystery to herself. Ding Zitao's very identity, her name, her memories...all gone in a process she does not remember but that defines her and forms all her memories ever made after.
Amnesia robs a person of their core, denies them access to their story, causes an insecurity of self that can't be overstated as a devastation. It's not soap-opera-plot simple. It's more akin to dementia, an acquired loss that eats one from the inside out.
This deeply personal violence stands in for what we, in the West, often think of as the Chinese cultural amnesia for what happened during Mao Zedong's rule. (Arrogant of us to assume that we can know this, or that it is the experience of billion people.) The events that gave Ding Zitao the lifelong unmooring from her Self are rooted in the early days of reform in the new People's Republic of China.
In the course of living a long life, Ding Zitao comes through many troublesome personal problems and troubling cultural events. All of the deeds, the ideas, the detritus of relationships and the people that die, a whole and fragmented life goes into the making of an old person. Qinglin, as her son, does what I'd hope was his best to comprehend his old-woman mother's roots. He feels her pain of not knowing herself as his own pain of never fully knowing her. He doesn't...can't...blame her; she had no control over the amnesia that robbed her.
In the course of discovering the roots of what happened to Ding Zitao that made this form of living suicide a better way to be than whatever the alternative was, Qinling confronts China's national past, its cultural reformation, and its procrustean demands in service of ideology...in the fractured, stolen mind of his mother.
We're told this is a story with its roots in a real person known to Fang Fang. Writing and publishing this brutal, honest, unsparing account of the personal damage done in the course of creating the People's Republic of China caused much ferment and discourse inside the country. "To every birth its blood" is an African saying that only sits well with people when the blood is not personalized or particularized; we do not like knowing who exactly did the bleeding, or from where, but that is impossible in this story. As it has made its way around the world it has reminded each reader that the great sweep of history was less the sweep of a broom than a scythe as it happened.
This novel takes its time with you, the reader, spending lingering moments focused on discomfiting facts and events. I'm impressed that Fang Fang was ready and able to be in these moments until they resolved their meanings in their details, while not giving in to prurient pain-gazing for the frisson of safety readers crave.
It got as close to five stars as such an honest account of history can without it being one's own history being told.
Excellent and necessary reading for those whose lives have, or bid fair to, lead them into violent tumultuous change.
The Publisher Says: Fang Fang’s Soft Burial begins with a mysterious, nameless protagonist. Decades earlier she was pulled out of a river in a state of near-death; upon regaining consciousness, she discovered that her entire memory had been erased.
The narrative follows her journey through recovery as she takes a job as a housekeeper in the home of a powerful cadre, marries the doctor who saved her, and starts a family of her own. As the story unfolds, the protective cocoon of amnesia that her subconscious wove around her begins to give way, revealing glimpses of her previous life and the unspeakable trauma that she suffered.
Soft Burial is one of the most remarkable—and most controversial—recent works of Chinese literature. Part mystery, part historical fiction, and part social exposé, the novel intercuts different generations, regions, and time periods. First published in 2016, Soft Burial initially received critical acclaim but soon faced a wave of denunciations and was taken off the shelves of bookstores throughout China. Fang Fang challenged the unspoken rules that govern how Chinese writers portray the past by depicting the human costs of the Land Reform Campaign in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and she was attacked for expressing sympathy toward members of the “landlord class.”
An intimate portrait of historical trauma and the psychological toll of repressed violence, Soft Burial is a landmark in contemporary Chinese fiction.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: Your mother was a woman of mystery; so was mine; but I'll bet cash money neither of us had a mother who was a total mystery to herself. Ding Zitao's very identity, her name, her memories...all gone in a process she does not remember but that defines her and forms all her memories ever made after.
Amnesia robs a person of their core, denies them access to their story, causes an insecurity of self that can't be overstated as a devastation. It's not soap-opera-plot simple. It's more akin to dementia, an acquired loss that eats one from the inside out.
This deeply personal violence stands in for what we, in the West, often think of as the Chinese cultural amnesia for what happened during Mao Zedong's rule. (Arrogant of us to assume that we can know this, or that it is the experience of billion people.) The events that gave Ding Zitao the lifelong unmooring from her Self are rooted in the early days of reform in the new People's Republic of China.
In the course of living a long life, Ding Zitao comes through many troublesome personal problems and troubling cultural events. All of the deeds, the ideas, the detritus of relationships and the people that die, a whole and fragmented life goes into the making of an old person. Qinglin, as her son, does what I'd hope was his best to comprehend his old-woman mother's roots. He feels her pain of not knowing herself as his own pain of never fully knowing her. He doesn't...can't...blame her; she had no control over the amnesia that robbed her.
In the course of discovering the roots of what happened to Ding Zitao that made this form of living suicide a better way to be than whatever the alternative was, Qinling confronts China's national past, its cultural reformation, and its procrustean demands in service of ideology...in the fractured, stolen mind of his mother.
We're told this is a story with its roots in a real person known to Fang Fang. Writing and publishing this brutal, honest, unsparing account of the personal damage done in the course of creating the People's Republic of China caused much ferment and discourse inside the country. "To every birth its blood" is an African saying that only sits well with people when the blood is not personalized or particularized; we do not like knowing who exactly did the bleeding, or from where, but that is impossible in this story. As it has made its way around the world it has reminded each reader that the great sweep of history was less the sweep of a broom than a scythe as it happened.
This novel takes its time with you, the reader, spending lingering moments focused on discomfiting facts and events. I'm impressed that Fang Fang was ready and able to be in these moments until they resolved their meanings in their details, while not giving in to prurient pain-gazing for the frisson of safety readers crave.
It got as close to five stars as such an honest account of history can without it being one's own history being told.
Excellent and necessary reading for those whose lives have, or bid fair to, lead them into violent tumultuous change.
July 15, 2025
"There are a lot of people who feel that when in time of major historical turmoil there is a transition of political power, this is a necessary process we must go through to stabilize the country. But I think we can all ask ourselves, Was it really necessary for them to use such brutality?" —Fang Fang, Soft Burial
Before China’s Communist Party oversaw the exercises in mass murder at Tiananmen Square, during the ten years of the Cultural Revolution, and the four years’ famine of Mao’s Great Leap Forward, there was the Land Reform Movement of 1947-1952. During this five-year period, property held by landlords was to be redistributed among the peasants who tilled the soil for them. On paper, the transfer sounds like a simple idea: Divide a landlord’s holdings by the number of families that worked for him. Many landlords had supported Mao’s revolutionary forces by providing arms (or the money to buy arms) and paid far more in taxes than they were required to. For these acts of benefice, some landlords received letters from the new government attesting to their goodness at helping the cause.
However, a letter often was not good enough for peasants with personal grudges against their landlords, grudges that helped stir up local sentiment against wealthy families during “struggle sessions” (which reappeared during the Cultural Revolution), which could last for days. What could have been enacted through a fairly benign process quickly grew uncontrollable by even government officials. Wealthy families (and sometimes their servants) were brought to struggle sessions where they were denounced for their wealth (including denouncements from family members to save their own necks) and complaints against the family for slights real and imagined, followed by beatings, torture, and, finally, execution.
Soft Burial begins during China’s Land Reform Movement. As the story opens, the body of a young woman is discovered floating in a river. Bruised from head to toe and at first assumed dead, the body is tended to by a physician, a Dr. Wu, who discovers that she is still alive. Eventually, the woman awakens, but with no memory of how she ended up in the river or even what her name is. Dr. Wu tells her that some things are best forgotten. And so, she doesn’t pursue the matter.
At the hospital, while recuperating, she remains quiet but industrious, asking to take on extra tasks that may be available. When Dr. Wu first encounters her, she speaks only the words “ding zi” (nails); he adds another syllable, tao (not the Buddhist tao—that’s a different character with a slightly different pronunciation), and names her Ding Zitao.
She and Dr. Wu eventually marry and have a son, named Qinglin. Ding Zitao devotes her life to raising Qinglin, even working as a maid for other families after Dr. Wu dies prematurely, to ensure that Qinglin will be able to attend college; they live just above the poverty line. When Qinglin reaches mid-career as an architect, he builds a villa for his mother to spend her remaining days in, instead of the poverty that has consumed the last thirty years of her life, as a way of thanking her for the many sacrifices she made to ensure his success.
When Qinglin takes his mother to her new home, she begins experiencing a series of short but emotionally devastating images and phrases from her past, which she has long forgotten, that for the reader lack context but which immediately make Ding Zitao break into a cold sweat and pass out.
His mother receiving round-the-clock care at home, Qinglin takes up an offer from a former roommate in college, Long Zhongyong, to visit Eastern Sichuan. Long Zhongyong is an academic in architecture working on a project to document old, abandoned compounds formerly owned by landlords. During the trip, Qinglin makes inadvertent discoveries about his parents while Ding Zitao, in her hellish stupor, relives them.
I think every nation has those citizens who wish to forget everything and those who want to remember to learn, and Fang Fang does well at acknowledging that fact and in presenting each side's rationale their position. The U.S. certainly has its share of citizens who resent being reminded of the many cruelties and deaths enacted in the name of We the People. Like Fang Fang, I think it's better that nation's face up to their history, difficult though that may be.
That's what Ding Zitao's does while she's in a coma—goes through the eighteen stages of Buddhist hell—in which she faces both what she suffered and what she inflicted on others—so that she can finally have a burial with a casket, and thus a peaceful spirit that can rest.
For more of my reviews, please see https://www.thebookbeat.com/backroom/...
Before China’s Communist Party oversaw the exercises in mass murder at Tiananmen Square, during the ten years of the Cultural Revolution, and the four years’ famine of Mao’s Great Leap Forward, there was the Land Reform Movement of 1947-1952. During this five-year period, property held by landlords was to be redistributed among the peasants who tilled the soil for them. On paper, the transfer sounds like a simple idea: Divide a landlord’s holdings by the number of families that worked for him. Many landlords had supported Mao’s revolutionary forces by providing arms (or the money to buy arms) and paid far more in taxes than they were required to. For these acts of benefice, some landlords received letters from the new government attesting to their goodness at helping the cause.
However, a letter often was not good enough for peasants with personal grudges against their landlords, grudges that helped stir up local sentiment against wealthy families during “struggle sessions” (which reappeared during the Cultural Revolution), which could last for days. What could have been enacted through a fairly benign process quickly grew uncontrollable by even government officials. Wealthy families (and sometimes their servants) were brought to struggle sessions where they were denounced for their wealth (including denouncements from family members to save their own necks) and complaints against the family for slights real and imagined, followed by beatings, torture, and, finally, execution.
Soft Burial begins during China’s Land Reform Movement. As the story opens, the body of a young woman is discovered floating in a river. Bruised from head to toe and at first assumed dead, the body is tended to by a physician, a Dr. Wu, who discovers that she is still alive. Eventually, the woman awakens, but with no memory of how she ended up in the river or even what her name is. Dr. Wu tells her that some things are best forgotten. And so, she doesn’t pursue the matter.
At the hospital, while recuperating, she remains quiet but industrious, asking to take on extra tasks that may be available. When Dr. Wu first encounters her, she speaks only the words “ding zi” (nails); he adds another syllable, tao (not the Buddhist tao—that’s a different character with a slightly different pronunciation), and names her Ding Zitao.
She and Dr. Wu eventually marry and have a son, named Qinglin. Ding Zitao devotes her life to raising Qinglin, even working as a maid for other families after Dr. Wu dies prematurely, to ensure that Qinglin will be able to attend college; they live just above the poverty line. When Qinglin reaches mid-career as an architect, he builds a villa for his mother to spend her remaining days in, instead of the poverty that has consumed the last thirty years of her life, as a way of thanking her for the many sacrifices she made to ensure his success.
When Qinglin takes his mother to her new home, she begins experiencing a series of short but emotionally devastating images and phrases from her past, which she has long forgotten, that for the reader lack context but which immediately make Ding Zitao break into a cold sweat and pass out.
His mother receiving round-the-clock care at home, Qinglin takes up an offer from a former roommate in college, Long Zhongyong, to visit Eastern Sichuan. Long Zhongyong is an academic in architecture working on a project to document old, abandoned compounds formerly owned by landlords. During the trip, Qinglin makes inadvertent discoveries about his parents while Ding Zitao, in her hellish stupor, relives them.
I think every nation has those citizens who wish to forget everything and those who want to remember to learn, and Fang Fang does well at acknowledging that fact and in presenting each side's rationale their position. The U.S. certainly has its share of citizens who resent being reminded of the many cruelties and deaths enacted in the name of We the People. Like Fang Fang, I think it's better that nation's face up to their history, difficult though that may be.
That's what Ding Zitao's does while she's in a coma—goes through the eighteen stages of Buddhist hell—in which she faces both what she suffered and what she inflicted on others—so that she can finally have a burial with a casket, and thus a peaceful spirit that can rest.
For more of my reviews, please see https://www.thebookbeat.com/backroom/...
December 30, 2024
Throw this novel right up there with *Detention, Pathologic* & all those other phenomenal novels where memory is an impossibility in & fuel for the darkness—I’m just now realizing how many of them I read this year, from *Austerlitz* to *Season of Migration to the North* to *Napalm in the Heart…*and on and on.
Unlike the others, though, memory / the truth does not set anyone free and the main characters don’t find a way to get around memory (yes, I’m counting the ending of *Season of Migration* here because it’s still an *action*). I feel like it’s a uniquely Chinese thing to be like “actually remembering things can be really bad for you” and actually mean it (or give the possibility of meaning it), since even books like Austerlitz (in which, spoiler alert, we end with Austerlitz continuing on his fruitless search for his father, with the sense that he will never be able to stop searching—but that search is framed as necessary to him as a person even as it is futile, and no one’s out there telling him not to look).
Plus, this novel does a great job of throwing memory into question (even as it ‘exposes’ the truth in reverse over its course) and rooting memory in the earth itself as a metonymy for ethical & historical crisis—in family ties to land (in terms of property ownership as a vehicle for personal connections), in the way land contested holds material family grudges and wealth, in the very act of burial (itself a manifestation of memory via spiritual ‘rightness’ and rest; the ability to reincarnate, the ultimate triumph(?) over memory; and of course your literal body in the earth, and whether the earth can subsume you or not, and (more depressingly) whether people can enact their rage on your body or not). You get this peeling back of memory / family ties of the main families at the heart of the novel in a way that is narrated in reverse chronological order and in a seemingly neutral way…that’s then subtly thrown into question when you realize the ascension through memory is treated also like a video game’s levels (and video games / the technological, information-based/factual reality mechanisms & youthful questioning of the older folks in the book—many of whom talk in a way that’s so familiar it might as well be its own genre of speech, one that can be pulled apart and treated ironically under Fang Fang’s careful attention. Political optimism and pessimism abound and merge).
And this is not even to get into the amazing attention to houses and physical/material conditions as a site / trigger of memory (and the ways in which the nouveau riche, which grew out of families that came out on the right side of the Cultural Revolution, now mirror the landed gentry who were denounced and often murdered during that revolution—down to their relationships with their ‘servants’). And the way you have to question the war heroes’ narration of themselves, and how characters speak to each other knowing they need to be saying the right things to each other. And the tragedy of loose ends, e.g. Old Qi never getting to know that Wu Jiaming was once his cousin! And the fact that memory (via people) is literally dying! And of the unclear “bandits” who plague the region that the Communists need to push back (no one even calls them Nationalists. Are they even Nationalists? Are they an imaginary bogeyman?)! And the multiple ways in which the word ‘bury’ is used!
And on top of that, this novel is just an incredibly compelling and suspenseful read! Can’t fucking wait to read it in Chinese. And to get Jenna’s thoughts on it :)
Unlike the others, though, memory / the truth does not set anyone free and the main characters don’t find a way to get around memory (yes, I’m counting the ending of *Season of Migration* here because it’s still an *action*). I feel like it’s a uniquely Chinese thing to be like “actually remembering things can be really bad for you” and actually mean it (or give the possibility of meaning it), since even books like Austerlitz (in which, spoiler alert, we end with Austerlitz continuing on his fruitless search for his father, with the sense that he will never be able to stop searching—but that search is framed as necessary to him as a person even as it is futile, and no one’s out there telling him not to look).
Plus, this novel does a great job of throwing memory into question (even as it ‘exposes’ the truth in reverse over its course) and rooting memory in the earth itself as a metonymy for ethical & historical crisis—in family ties to land (in terms of property ownership as a vehicle for personal connections), in the way land contested holds material family grudges and wealth, in the very act of burial (itself a manifestation of memory via spiritual ‘rightness’ and rest; the ability to reincarnate, the ultimate triumph(?) over memory; and of course your literal body in the earth, and whether the earth can subsume you or not, and (more depressingly) whether people can enact their rage on your body or not). You get this peeling back of memory / family ties of the main families at the heart of the novel in a way that is narrated in reverse chronological order and in a seemingly neutral way…that’s then subtly thrown into question when you realize the ascension through memory is treated also like a video game’s levels (and video games / the technological, information-based/factual reality mechanisms & youthful questioning of the older folks in the book—many of whom talk in a way that’s so familiar it might as well be its own genre of speech, one that can be pulled apart and treated ironically under Fang Fang’s careful attention. Political optimism and pessimism abound and merge).
And this is not even to get into the amazing attention to houses and physical/material conditions as a site / trigger of memory (and the ways in which the nouveau riche, which grew out of families that came out on the right side of the Cultural Revolution, now mirror the landed gentry who were denounced and often murdered during that revolution—down to their relationships with their ‘servants’). And the way you have to question the war heroes’ narration of themselves, and how characters speak to each other knowing they need to be saying the right things to each other. And the tragedy of loose ends, e.g. Old Qi never getting to know that Wu Jiaming was once his cousin! And the fact that memory (via people) is literally dying! And of the unclear “bandits” who plague the region that the Communists need to push back (no one even calls them Nationalists. Are they even Nationalists? Are they an imaginary bogeyman?)! And the multiple ways in which the word ‘bury’ is used!
And on top of that, this novel is just an incredibly compelling and suspenseful read! Can’t fucking wait to read it in Chinese. And to get Jenna’s thoughts on it :)
December 2, 2024
In Soft Burial by Fang Fang, the story of Ding Zitao's life unfolds slowly, as discovered both by her son and by herself as she emerges from the state of amnesia she's been in for most of her adult life. Ding Zitao was a causality of the Land Reform Movement and subsequently lost her memory. Just as Ding Zitao has no memory from before she was found near-dead and then married the doctor who saved her, the Chinese people as portrayed in the book have collectively repressed their own memories and knowledge of the Land Reform Movement. As Ding Zitao recollects her scattered memories, her son Qinglin independently pieces together what clues he can of his parent's backgrounds. Soft Burial is about the choices people make to forget or remember painful events, and how those choices affect those around them.
While a well-known writer in China, this is one of Fang Fang's few books to be translated into english. The translator Michael Berry begins this edition with an introduction which gives much-needed context into the historical and political landscape of the author and the book's publication in China. His depiction of the dramatic censorship of Soft Burial makes for an effective hook to give the book a read.
My thoughts
I'm admittedly not a big fan of so-called literary novels, which I would classify Soft Burial as, but the story still intrigued me. I found myself turning to Wikipedia to learn more about the historical events that are significant plot points, particularly the Land Reform Movement. I view this not as a failing of the book to provide context but more of igniting my own interest in the subject. I haven't studied Chinese history, but I wonder how familiar these events are even to a Chinese reader. The younger characters frequently make it clear that they have no understanding of these events. Coupled with the censorship of this book, it seems that these events don't get taught much in Chinese schools. In that way, I suppose a Western reader is on even footing with the original audience.
As I have no knowledge of Chinese and haven't read the original text, I think any attempt at a review of the translation itself would be flawed. That being said, certain phrases jumped out at me as probable literal translations that came across as clunky in English. I suppose it's just a translation style that readers familiar with the original text may appreciate more. However, I appreciate the work in translating such a notorious text to make it available to a new audience.
A major theme of Soft Burial is the censorship or remembrance of history. In exploring the events of the book, Fang Fang makes a statement on the value of preserving history--and so does the reader in choosing to read this book.
I think that lovers of literature and history will enjoy Fang Fang's book and this glimpse at the elusiveness of personal and collective memory.
While a well-known writer in China, this is one of Fang Fang's few books to be translated into english. The translator Michael Berry begins this edition with an introduction which gives much-needed context into the historical and political landscape of the author and the book's publication in China. His depiction of the dramatic censorship of Soft Burial makes for an effective hook to give the book a read.
My thoughts
I'm admittedly not a big fan of so-called literary novels, which I would classify Soft Burial as, but the story still intrigued me. I found myself turning to Wikipedia to learn more about the historical events that are significant plot points, particularly the Land Reform Movement. I view this not as a failing of the book to provide context but more of igniting my own interest in the subject. I haven't studied Chinese history, but I wonder how familiar these events are even to a Chinese reader. The younger characters frequently make it clear that they have no understanding of these events. Coupled with the censorship of this book, it seems that these events don't get taught much in Chinese schools. In that way, I suppose a Western reader is on even footing with the original audience.
As I have no knowledge of Chinese and haven't read the original text, I think any attempt at a review of the translation itself would be flawed. That being said, certain phrases jumped out at me as probable literal translations that came across as clunky in English. I suppose it's just a translation style that readers familiar with the original text may appreciate more. However, I appreciate the work in translating such a notorious text to make it available to a new audience.
A major theme of Soft Burial is the censorship or remembrance of history. In exploring the events of the book, Fang Fang makes a statement on the value of preserving history--and so does the reader in choosing to read this book.
I think that lovers of literature and history will enjoy Fang Fang's book and this glimpse at the elusiveness of personal and collective memory.
December 6, 2024
Soft Burial by Fang Fang is an illuminating book which spans time periods, with a focal point being China’s Land Reform Movement of the 1940s-1950s. Fang Fang based descriptions of the Land Reform Movement on the experiences of her friend’s relatives and her own family history, and the book is largely a work of historical fiction, although much of the story takes place in the more modern day in the perspective of the protagonist’s son Qinglin, as he begins to unravel some of his family’s buried history.
The novel begins with a nameless protagonist reflecting on life and her deceased husband. Dr. Wu had saved her life after she was pulled from a river, and she had no recollection of her life before that point. Dr. Wu encouraged her to leave the past alone as he felt it could be dangerous. After a few years she married Dr. Wu, had her son Qinglin, and built a new life without ever recalling her old one. Dr. Wu also had a complicated past which he chose to keep secret, and so Qinglin grew up without knowing the stories of either of his parents. However, after his father’s death, Qinglin learns a bit about his past, and then has to choose how deep into it he wants to dig.
Soft burial means to be put directly into the earth without a coffin. However, through the novel it becomes clear that it can also mean to bury the past, as the protagonist buried her own past, and her son has to make decisions on whether to dig into the past or let it lie. In China, Land Reform Movement seems to have largely been given a soft burial, according to Fang Fang’s experiences, as many landlords and their descendants who survived through the period did not wish to speak of their traumatizing experiences. Even the government of China seemed keen to bury the movement, as Soft Burial became banned in China for the way it portrayed the Land Reform Movement.
Anybody with a moderate interest in Chinese history should enjoy this book, as I enjoyed it with little to no background on China during this time period. This is definitely a book which is not designed to make you feel good or sugarcoat life, but it feels like an important book which isn’t afraid to remember the darker parts of history.
The novel begins with a nameless protagonist reflecting on life and her deceased husband. Dr. Wu had saved her life after she was pulled from a river, and she had no recollection of her life before that point. Dr. Wu encouraged her to leave the past alone as he felt it could be dangerous. After a few years she married Dr. Wu, had her son Qinglin, and built a new life without ever recalling her old one. Dr. Wu also had a complicated past which he chose to keep secret, and so Qinglin grew up without knowing the stories of either of his parents. However, after his father’s death, Qinglin learns a bit about his past, and then has to choose how deep into it he wants to dig.
Soft burial means to be put directly into the earth without a coffin. However, through the novel it becomes clear that it can also mean to bury the past, as the protagonist buried her own past, and her son has to make decisions on whether to dig into the past or let it lie. In China, Land Reform Movement seems to have largely been given a soft burial, according to Fang Fang’s experiences, as many landlords and their descendants who survived through the period did not wish to speak of their traumatizing experiences. Even the government of China seemed keen to bury the movement, as Soft Burial became banned in China for the way it portrayed the Land Reform Movement.
Anybody with a moderate interest in Chinese history should enjoy this book, as I enjoyed it with little to no background on China during this time period. This is definitely a book which is not designed to make you feel good or sugarcoat life, but it feels like an important book which isn’t afraid to remember the darker parts of history.
July 28, 2025
i feel broken open, this novel is transformative and weighty yet fast paced and readable - a page turner with some element of mystery and plot twists and backstory to unravel, yet so so unspeakably heavy
i really appreciate that this book didnt feel so black and white about the time period - you can see how individual peoples actions hurt each other and themselves, but how those actions are also encouraged by their surroundings and customs. and it doesnt depict the cultural revolution as this terrible thing that suddenly came about out of nowhere but instead provides historical and individual context for it. the story is myopic, about a single woman and a single family, and doesnt dramatize things for an outside reader. and also I liked the contrast between the mother's story and the son's, how both mother and son have been shielded fro literally unspeakable trauma but can't escape it and deal with it in their own ways. it also feels cathartic - life has always been full of suffering, even before the cultural revolution, and will continue to be - with new regimes and paradigm shifts we create new pains and challenges.
i found it particularly powerful reading this after visiting my grandma and seeing her refusal to dwell on the past or anything negative and how that is echoed in modern-day china, and also contextualized by Peter Hesslers chronicles of everyday chinese people and how their attitudes toward life are inevitably shaped by the weight of the events that happened to the generations that raised them (and also how I heard about this book). like, of course Im going to look out for myself and try to get ahead because thats the only way Ive been taught to survive. and its kind of funny to think that you take people who carry this type of pain, let them study in the united states, and basically eventually create the socioeconomic conditions that lead to hyper competitive high schools.
i think fang fang should get a nobel prize... please...when 🙏 I also feel very grateful for Berry's very high quality translation and hope to be able to read the original at some point.
i really appreciate that this book didnt feel so black and white about the time period - you can see how individual peoples actions hurt each other and themselves, but how those actions are also encouraged by their surroundings and customs. and it doesnt depict the cultural revolution as this terrible thing that suddenly came about out of nowhere but instead provides historical and individual context for it. the story is myopic, about a single woman and a single family, and doesnt dramatize things for an outside reader. and also I liked the contrast between the mother's story and the son's, how both mother and son have been shielded fro literally unspeakable trauma but can't escape it and deal with it in their own ways. it also feels cathartic - life has always been full of suffering, even before the cultural revolution, and will continue to be - with new regimes and paradigm shifts we create new pains and challenges.
i found it particularly powerful reading this after visiting my grandma and seeing her refusal to dwell on the past or anything negative and how that is echoed in modern-day china, and also contextualized by Peter Hesslers chronicles of everyday chinese people and how their attitudes toward life are inevitably shaped by the weight of the events that happened to the generations that raised them (and also how I heard about this book). like, of course Im going to look out for myself and try to get ahead because thats the only way Ive been taught to survive. and its kind of funny to think that you take people who carry this type of pain, let them study in the united states, and basically eventually create the socioeconomic conditions that lead to hyper competitive high schools.
i think fang fang should get a nobel prize... please...when 🙏 I also feel very grateful for Berry's very high quality translation and hope to be able to read the original at some point.
March 21, 2025
Rating: 3.75-4.25/5 ⭐
#BookReview:
✨Thank you to Columbia University Press and #NetGalley for this #ARC! This review was voluntarily written by me. This book is a part of the Weatherhead Books on Asia series.
✨Sincerely speaking, #SoftBurial is truly a heavy read for me. It is really difficult to articulate my thoughts in this review due to a lot of factors.
✨This book is a book that you have to devour slowly and makes you think with both your heart and mind.
✨This story is painfully slow around the first three-fifths of the story but getting faster and hard-hitting at some parts nearing the end. This is due to revelations in the last two-fifths of the book.
✨The backdrop of this book is the Land Reform Movement in China in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s. So, nearly all events and characters here (especially old ones) have stories during the movement.
✨The main theme is soft burial. There are several definitions for this term that are described in this book, but to my understanding, soft burial is about ignoring or forgetting or leaving the painful history at the back of their mind, especially for those who lived during that era.
✨Hence, the main question of this book is if we get to know about a painful event or history, how will we react to this?
✨If anyone asked me this question, I’m still not sure what my answer is.
✨Spoiler alert: If I am a normal person, I may choose the protagonist's son's decision. However, the researcher in me may follow his friend’s way by recording the history but in an academic-like way. Well, the truth has many sides right?
✨Despite sometimes quite lengthy descriptions, I like how the authors weaved all these characters together via their stories plus the ways she introduced the past to readers.
✨Yet, I’m still regretful (spoiler alert!) that only us, the readers that managed to patch everything up at the end instead of the son’s himself. Well…
✨In conclusion, I recommend this book for any literary fiction, historical and/or translated fiction fans that want to have a read that makes you think about a movement/event and its outcomes. Who’s badly affected and who’s gained advantage from it?
#BookReview:
✨Thank you to Columbia University Press and #NetGalley for this #ARC! This review was voluntarily written by me. This book is a part of the Weatherhead Books on Asia series.
✨Sincerely speaking, #SoftBurial is truly a heavy read for me. It is really difficult to articulate my thoughts in this review due to a lot of factors.
✨This book is a book that you have to devour slowly and makes you think with both your heart and mind.
✨This story is painfully slow around the first three-fifths of the story but getting faster and hard-hitting at some parts nearing the end. This is due to revelations in the last two-fifths of the book.
✨The backdrop of this book is the Land Reform Movement in China in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s. So, nearly all events and characters here (especially old ones) have stories during the movement.
✨The main theme is soft burial. There are several definitions for this term that are described in this book, but to my understanding, soft burial is about ignoring or forgetting or leaving the painful history at the back of their mind, especially for those who lived during that era.
✨Hence, the main question of this book is if we get to know about a painful event or history, how will we react to this?
✨If anyone asked me this question, I’m still not sure what my answer is.
✨Spoiler alert: If I am a normal person, I may choose the protagonist's son's decision. However, the researcher in me may follow his friend’s way by recording the history but in an academic-like way. Well, the truth has many sides right?
✨Despite sometimes quite lengthy descriptions, I like how the authors weaved all these characters together via their stories plus the ways she introduced the past to readers.
✨Yet, I’m still regretful (spoiler alert!) that only us, the readers that managed to patch everything up at the end instead of the son’s himself. Well…
✨In conclusion, I recommend this book for any literary fiction, historical and/or translated fiction fans that want to have a read that makes you think about a movement/event and its outcomes. Who’s badly affected and who’s gained advantage from it?
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 19, 2025
Soft Burial – the process of placing a deceased one directly into the ground without a coffin. The novel and the events that unfold, performs a thought experiment – fictionalizing the politics through the perspective of a respectable clan who owned tea estates. This fictional family’s days leading to their “purge” where peasants, villagers rebelled and revolted against the upper classmen (beating, looting etc.), offers a nuance to the process where a good idea can have catastrophic impact when not implemented correctly. As this idea, this thought process, questioned the execution of such practices, the book came under severe scrutiny and heavy criticism. Though it was released to an almost universal critical acclaim, it soon became taboo and the bookstores across the country took the book down, enforcing the ban that came upon it.
The irony is this – many people post reforms and cultural revolution adopted to be silent for the sake of safety and existing peacefully and all those who once praised the book, were quiet when the book was torn apart as harmful in sentiments. This criticism isn’t unique to just one geography – this is universal in nature. While in some places more people show support to opposing voices, many remain quiet without supporting or opposing anything.
Fang Fang uses this idea and ties it to the families and descendants decades later, the generational trauma that they carry and the silence across the subject that makes working through it even more difficult.
As a work of fiction, Soft Burial goes far by emotionally connecting people from all sides of conflict and telling their stories instead of reducing events to a historical account.
Thank you to Netgalley and Columbia University Press for providing me with a free copy of this e-book in exchange for an honest review.
The irony is this – many people post reforms and cultural revolution adopted to be silent for the sake of safety and existing peacefully and all those who once praised the book, were quiet when the book was torn apart as harmful in sentiments. This criticism isn’t unique to just one geography – this is universal in nature. While in some places more people show support to opposing voices, many remain quiet without supporting or opposing anything.
Fang Fang uses this idea and ties it to the families and descendants decades later, the generational trauma that they carry and the silence across the subject that makes working through it even more difficult.
As a work of fiction, Soft Burial goes far by emotionally connecting people from all sides of conflict and telling their stories instead of reducing events to a historical account.
Thank you to Netgalley and Columbia University Press for providing me with a free copy of this e-book in exchange for an honest review.
June 1, 2025
wahhh soft burial is so raw, visceral, truly heartbreaking. So fucking gut wrenching learning more about the land reform movement. Reading about the communist party period made me understand my family's mental illness/intergenerational trauma better. The conversation between Qinglin and Zhongyong on the decision to remember or forget the past is so poignant. I appreciate the balanced approach Fang Fang takes to writing about class struggle + such a dark chapter of history. I love the nuance given to each character that represents a different POV from landlord to peasant to military commissioner to servant. I like that I have conflicted feelings about so many characters, it feels real because people are friggin complicated and things are not black and white! The translation is so vivid and entrancing, I do really wish they had kept the Chinese familial terms. The references to "Mom" really killed me/took me out of the story but I still love this book so much, enough to write more than a sentence for a review!
March 19, 2025
Soft Burial draws on the brutal and deadly land reform movement of Maoist China which caused the deaths of many labelled as being landlords even if the supported the communist movement and the subsequent lasting trauma from it, through the lens of the son of couple Ding Zitao and Dr. Wu uncovering the traumatic past through his dad's diary notebooks made during the time and his mother's strange ramblings before she enters a vegetative state after moving into a new home and ultimately left with the choice to learn his parents true pasts or to leave it dead and buried.
An interesting read and observation on society and how China especially has an uncomfortable history of censorship and self censorship as a means to forget and keep the peace.
Thank you for the e-ARC Columbia University Press & Netgalley in exchange for my review, I really enjoyed Fang Fang and Berry's translated work.
An interesting read and observation on society and how China especially has an uncomfortable history of censorship and self censorship as a means to forget and keep the peace.
Thank you for the e-ARC Columbia University Press & Netgalley in exchange for my review, I really enjoyed Fang Fang and Berry's translated work.
July 1, 2025
Translated by Michael Berry, Funérailles Molles (2016) by Chinese novelist Fang Fang (a pen name of Wang Fang), has been released in English as Soft Burial (2025). A literary fiction tale that spans decades of one family’s history to reveal the mysteries of their unspoken past. It begins with a nameless, near death, woman being rescued from a river and suffering amnesia. Years late after her death, her son Qinglin discovers his father’s diaries from 1952 until 1998 and is shocked to learn of the tragedy that underpins his parents’ family history that they failed to ever acknowledge. A historic fiction tale with horrific unspoken events, set against the backdrop of major Chinese events, is an elegantly narrated story with is a four star read rating. As always, the opinions herein are totally my own, freely given and without any inducement. With thanks to Columbia University Press and the author for an uncorrected advanced review copy for review purposes.
March 14, 2025
This novel was slow to start but the last third was gripping and kept me up really late.
We follow Qinlin after his father's death, as he tries to uncover his father's secrets and his mother, Zing, who had always been a mysterious figure but has suddenly fallen into a vegetative state just after moving in with him. We learned already at the start of the novel that his father, a doctor, saved her when villagers found her injured and nearly drowned with complete amnesia, possibly brought by the trauma of the Land Reforms but Qinlin is trying to find out more - who was her family, where did she come from? What happened to her and does she still have living relatives?
We also follow a few other families linked to them so at times it can be confusing to keep up with multiple characters sharing the same last name, and the timelines are all interwoven, but even if it took a while for the story to get going, I ended up finding it really interesting and I am glad I didn't give up. The translation could have been better overall, it was decent but felt very repetitive within paragraphs at times.
Free ARC sent by Netgalley.
We follow Qinlin after his father's death, as he tries to uncover his father's secrets and his mother, Zing, who had always been a mysterious figure but has suddenly fallen into a vegetative state just after moving in with him. We learned already at the start of the novel that his father, a doctor, saved her when villagers found her injured and nearly drowned with complete amnesia, possibly brought by the trauma of the Land Reforms but Qinlin is trying to find out more - who was her family, where did she come from? What happened to her and does she still have living relatives?
We also follow a few other families linked to them so at times it can be confusing to keep up with multiple characters sharing the same last name, and the timelines are all interwoven, but even if it took a while for the story to get going, I ended up finding it really interesting and I am glad I didn't give up. The translation could have been better overall, it was decent but felt very repetitive within paragraphs at times.
Free ARC sent by Netgalley.
March 17, 2025
A literary fiction novel in lots of short chapters. Like "All the Light we cannot see", this novel has chapters which flick between narrators and time periods but which gradually come together. The narrative starts in the present day before moving back to the events of the land reform and the violent purging of landlords in some districts in kangaroo courts. The survivors of these purges carry the trauma with them into the present. As a survival mechanism, they've chosen not to remember them (give them a soft burial). By writing about them, Fang Fang has chosen to remember and the very act of doing so has seen her book banned in China.
I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.
I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.
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June 28, 2025Soft Burial is a rare treatment of the brutal land reform campaign in post-revolutionary China. It's almost a 19th century novel in its reliance on coincidence to drive the plot -- everyone turns out to be some kind of long-lost relation or connection -- and almost an anti-social realist novel in its reluctance to deal with any of its characters as mere specimens of a class (there are hardly any bad landlords). The latter is not necessarily a flaw, just an observation, though it's worth noting the local Communist Party is also carefully let off the hook.
Maybe as a guilt-laden second-generation immigrant I'm a sucker for historical novels about Asian people suffering (see: To Live, Red Sorghum, Pachinko) but in spite of Soft Burial's flaws I still found it moving.
Maybe as a guilt-laden second-generation immigrant I'm a sucker for historical novels about Asian people suffering (see: To Live, Red Sorghum, Pachinko) but in spite of Soft Burial's flaws I still found it moving.
December 18, 2024
Both a mystery and a historical novel, Fang Fang's story follows the experience of a woman who is pulled out of the river and suffers amnesia. But how did she end up there in the first place?
The nuances of the tale are revealed gradually, some of it in the context of the controversial Land Reform campaign in the post World War 2 period in China. The politics of the time and the intricacies of social change are well described through the life of one woman.
This one is worth a read. It gets 3. 5 stars.
I received a free copy of this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review
The nuances of the tale are revealed gradually, some of it in the context of the controversial Land Reform campaign in the post World War 2 period in China. The politics of the time and the intricacies of social change are well described through the life of one woman.
This one is worth a read. It gets 3. 5 stars.
I received a free copy of this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review
July 5, 2025
Soft Burial focuses on the tragedy of a landowning family who were victims of the class war in the early years of the People’s Republic of China. It’s the story of the daughter who survived with amnesia and her son who sought to find out who she was. The novel offers a window into an important aspect of Chinese history in the 20th century. The process of discovery is central to the novel and it does build up toward a suspenseful climax.
May 14, 2025
It's a perfect blend of historical fiction and mysteries, an in-depth, compassionate voice exploring nuances social exploitation. A powerful intriguing commentary that describes psychological layers of China's Land Reform Campaign. Exquisitely researched and narrated with love. A gripping contemporary fiction novel can be reading anyday.
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October 29, 2025This is a tough read- the characters and the dialogue are sooo not western and fang fangs influences aren’t as well. However, the story is really smartly built, and satisfying and unsatisfying in the right places. As well, the setting is so unique, I had no idea about literally any of this. I’d recommend reading this, but knowing while going in that it’s like reading your first novel
November 19, 2024
I have not had a chance to read Wuhan Diaries but after reading this novel I think I should. a really interesting and well-written novel about the land reform campaign and the cultural revolution.. 5 stars. tysm for the arc.
November 11, 2025
Such an interesting story about a forgotten historical period in china! I love how it was an intertwining of true accounts from people in the authors life. Such a beautiful and fascinating book:)) i give it a 4.5 stars
December 12, 2025
Found it really difficult to follow at the beginning because of sudden unexplained timeline jumps with new characters. About halfway through though, it was a lot easier to connect the dots on what was going on, and I found the historical parts really fascinating.
April 21, 2025
4.25🌟
Very interesting but after halfway through it felt a tad too slow.
Very interesting but after halfway through it felt a tad too slow.
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