A novel can be a whole world made of language. It may be entirely invented or modeled on reality, but once you enter it, you are living somewhere else for a while. That is one reason Chinese fiction rewards reading beyond a single book: each novel opens a different region, generation, and social texture. The books below are worth seeking out not because they form a neat canon, but because each leaves a distinct afterimage.
Ordinary Lives in a Changing Country: Ordinary World by Lu Yao
Lu Yao's novel is a warm realist tribute to ordinary workers. Set in China from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, it centers on two brothers, Sun Shaoan and Sun Shaoping, and draws a wide gallery of ordinary people from different walks of life. Labor and love, setbacks and pursuit, pain and joy, daily routine and large social conflict are woven together. Through these lives the book traces the difficult, winding road ordinary people traveled during a period of immense historical change. Its enduring appeal lies in the claim that the inner world of a commonplace person deserves attention, even if the world would rather follow the meals and trivia of a third-rate film actor.
Irony Among Wartime Intellectuals: Fortress Besieged by Qian Zhongshu
During the War of Resistance, a fresh group of intellectuals came to the fore. Qian Zhongshu turns them into fiction with a comic, satirical eye, so that the novel reads as a modern history of Chinese scholars, or a new The Scholars. Its humor targets the pretensions and compromises of intellectuals in a particular environment; the wit is sharp, but the social observation is just as important.
A Dreamlike Xiangxi: Border Town by Shen Congwen
Shen Congwen sets this short, beautiful novel in Xiangxi. Its pure love story has a fairy-tale quality, and although the book is not long, it brings human goodness and love into full view. The place and the feeling linger long after the plot.
Youth, Memory, and Growth: Cries in the Drizzle by Yu Hua
Yu Hua's most accomplished artistic work is also his most personal. Its core themes are the ones he handles best: youth, memory, and growth. It sums up his early avant-garde writing while opening the door to his later realism, and it carries the strengths of both periods.
A Chinese One Hundred Years of Solitude: One Sentence Is Ten Thousand Sentences by Liu Zhenyun
Liu Zhenyun's novel is built in two parts, Out of Yanjin and Return to Yanjin. The first follows a lonely, helpless farmer whose wife has run off with another man; he loses the adopted daughter who was the only person he could really talk to, and leaves Yanjin to find her. The second follows the adopted daughter's son, who goes to Yanjin after his own wife runs off with someone else. The two searches echo across a century. Often described as a Chinese One Hundred Years of Solitude, the book is concerned with loneliness and friendship, and with the way people fail to reach one another even when they talk.
Occupied Beijing, Four Generations: Four Generations Under One Roof by Lao She
Lao She's long novel began serialization in Saodang Bao on November 10, 1944. It deals with ordinary people in Japanese-occupied Beijing and with the war itself. In three parts, it follows the four generations of the Qi family as its main line, while the residents of Xiaoyangjuan hutong stand for different classes and characters. Their daily struggles and matters of life and death make the novel a broad portrait of a city under occupation.
Reform and Restlessness: Turbulence by Jia Pingwa
Jia Pingwa's Turbulence looks at problems exposed in the early days of reform and opening up, and at the social mood of the time. It is the first book in his Shangzhou series and helped establish his standing as a major writer. The novel caused a sensation on publication and won the Mobil Pegasus Literature Award; in September 2018 it was selected as one of the forty most influential novels of the reform era.
Endurance and Loss: To Live by Yu Hua
Yu Hua's novel tells the life of Xu Fugui and the changes and suffering that overtake his family. One by one his relatives leave him, until the aged Fugui is left with only an old ox for company. The story is stark and painful, and it has been widely recognized: it won the top prize of Italy's Grinzane Cavour Literary Award in 1998 and the third World Chinese Bing Xin Literature Award in 2002. In March 2004 Yu Hua himself received the French Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
A Plain as Microcosm: White Deer Plain by Chen Zhongshi
Chen Zhongshi's representative novel uses Bailu Village on the White Deer Plain in Guanzhong as a microcosm. It follows Bai Jiaxuan and Lu Zilin, the grievances between their families across three generations, and the lives of the next generation, including Bai Xiaowen, Lu Zhaohai, and Hei Wa. Times change, yet clan rules and family-status thinking do not necessarily change with them in poor country places, and the novel spins a series of stories from that tension. Its television adaptation is also worth watching.
Six Rebirths: Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out by Mo Yan
Mo Yan's novel begins with a landlord who is unjustly killed. He passes through the six paths of reincarnation as a donkey, an ox, a pig, a dog, and a monkey before finally being reborn as a big-headed infant with an incurable congenital illness, perhaps because he forgot to drink the soup of forgetfulness. The infant talks endlessly about his previous lives. Through this cycle of birth and death, the novel presents the resilience, optimism, and tenacity of farmers.
These novels have little in common in style, yet each opens a distinct world. Read together, they offer not a single picture of China but many: city and country, war and reform, intellectual wit and rural endurance, private memory and public upheaval.