FANG FANG's PAGE: SOFT BURIAL: A Novel, the great sweep of History made personal; THE RUNNING FLAME, the intimate violence of one as lens for the pain of billions

THE RUNNING FLAME
FANG FANG (tr. Michael Berry)
Columbia University Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$19.99 ebook, available now

China Books Review 2025 presents the second annual Award for Outstanding Literature from or on China or the Sinophone World, the Baifang Schell Book Prize, as a finalist!

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: “She knew that if she didn’t say her piece, that flame would never be extinguished; even after death, it would continue raging.”

The Running Flame opens with its protagonist in prison awaiting execution, desperate to give an account of her life. Yingzhi, a girl from the countryside, sees opportunity in the liberal trends sweeping across China. After high school, she joins a song-and-dance troupe, which allows her to travel and opens her eyes to new people and places. But an unplanned pregnancy brings an abrupt end to all her youthful dreams.

Trapped in a bad marriage, Yingzhi is driven to desperate measures—and eventually a shocking act of violence.

Fang Fang’s explosive short novel inspired widespread social debate in China upon its publication in 2001. In exploring the difficulties of one woman shackled by patriarchal tradition against the backdrop of radical social change, The Running Flame bears witness to widespread experiences of gendered violence and inequality. Fang Fang evocatively captures both the heady feeling of possibility in China’s roaring 1990s and its dark underside, as economic reform unleashed social dislocation in towns and villages. The novel draws loosely from interviews the author conducted with female death row inmates in a Chinese prison.

Equal parts social critique and domestic horror, The Running Flame is a gripping, propulsive narrative that shines a light on the struggles of poor women in China’s countryside.

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My Review: It is a short novel, on the blurry edge between novel and novella in length; definitely complex enough to merit the "novel" label. YingZhi is a woman driven to the end of her endurance, across a long enough period to see changes in the laws that do not touch her...until she finally snaps.

It's notable that her story *is* a story because she does what is, across most cultures, the prerogative of men to do to women. Her snap, in a man, would not merit a novel, novella, or anything more than a tutting notice on a newspaper's "local crimes" section.

While writing this story, I wonder if the estimable Fang Fang, quite a cultural touchstone in Chinese literary circles, thought of that. In one sense, reading this story humanizes...particularizes...the motive that drove her violence while at the same time reinforcing the abnormality of a woman taking violence into her own hands to dole out on a man.

We're trained, culturally, to see women as victims in every narrative. Even this one. YingZhi dares to want a home of her own, dares to seek personal validation in an art that excludes her husband, dares to be a tiny bit her own person...and suffers for it.

We know this story is based on a factual event and that Fang Fang spoke at length with the woman whose snap provided the base of the tale. Does no one anywhere see that this real person's story told from death row, reinforces the transgression she committed as illegal, yet not the endless provocations to it as immoral?

Am I the crazy one? Is this dark, forbidding shadow not bothering anyone else?

I got more and more appalled by YingZhi's awful life of feeling utterly powerless and slighted for wanting to be her own person. As we spend time "listening" to her unburben herself, I got more and more drenched in the fear and outrage at her culturally enforced voicelessness. As a gay man (a loathed minority in China as well), I could relate to YingZhi's inability to bring happiness the way she wanted and needed to experience it into being.

This is a powerful story told in a style that suited my inner ear. It did not, I'm sorry to say, have scope enough to bring others to clarity in the story being told...too short...but as a deep dive into a woman at the precipice of her end, it was excellent, it was honest about its emotional representation, and it was deeply moving.

A half-star off for choosing to shorten, therefore foreshorten, a story with a lot of scope for even further reflection.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

SOFT BURIAL: A Novel
FANG FANG (tr. Michael Berry)
Columbia University Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$24.95 ebook, available now

China Books Review 2025 presents the second annual Award for Outstanding Literature from or on China or the Sinophone World, the Baifang Schell Book Prize, as a finalist!

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.

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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.

MEMES TO MOVEMENTS: How the World's Most Viral Media Is Changing Social Protest and Power, slightly dated but very trenchant

MEMES TO MOVEMENTS: How the World's Most Viral Media Is Changing Social Protest and Power
AN XIAO MINA
Beacon Press
$24.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A global exploration of internet memes as agents of pop culture, politics, protest, and propaganda on- and offline, and how they will save or destroy us all.

Memes are the street art of the social web. Using social media-driven movements as her guide, technologist and digital media scholar An Xiao Mina unpacks the mechanics of memes and how they operate to reinforce, amplify, and shape today's politics. She finds that the "silly" stuff of meme culture—the photo remixes, the selfies, the YouTube songs, and the pun-tastic hashtags—are fundamentally intertwined with how we find and affirm one another, direct attention to human rights and social justice issues, build narratives, and make culture. Mina finds parallels, for example, between a photo of Black Lives Matter protestors in Ferguson, Missouri, raising their hands in a gesture of resistance and one from eight thousand miles away, in Hong Kong, of Umbrella Movement activists raising yellow umbrellas as they fight for voting rights. She shows how a viral video of then presidential nominee Donald Trump laid the groundwork for pink pussyhats, a meme come to life as the widely recognized symbol for the international Women's March.

Crucially, Mina reveals how, in parts of the world where public dissent is downright dangerous, memes can belie contentious political opinions that would incur drastic consequences if expressed outright. Activists in China evade censorship by critiquing their government with grass mud horse pictures online. Meanwhile, governments and hate groups are also beginning to utilize memes to spread propaganda, xenophobia, and misinformation. Botnets and state-sponsored agents spread them to confuse and distract internet communities. On the long, winding road from innocuous cat photos, internet memes have become a central practice for political contention and civic engagement.

Memes to Movements unveils the transformative power of memes, for better and for worse. At a time when our movements are growing more complex and open-ended—when governments are learning to wield the internet as effectively as protestors—Mina brings a fresh and sharply innovative take to the media discourse.

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My Review: Definition of a meme, via Wikipedia:

A meme (/miːm/; MEEM) is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme.[4] A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices, that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme.

Which has given rise to the Internet meme, again via Wikipedia:

An Internet meme, or simply meme (/miːm/, MEEM), is a cultural item (such as an idea, behavior, or style) that is spread via the Internet, often through social media platforms. Internet memes can take various forms, such as images, videos, GIFs, and various other viral sensations. Characteristics of memes include their susceptibility to parody, their use of intertextuality, their propagation in a viral pattern, and their evolution over time.

I doubt a lot of my readers are unfamiliar with the concept of a meme, in its initial formulatiion by Richard Dawkins, or in its new sense from the internet. It pays not to be caught out by omitting the definitions, partial though they may be. There will always be someone who wants to invalidate any information that offers context for judging modern information culture.

The meme machine is decades old at this point, and a book six years old is going to miss some modern context...the internet moves very fast and seldom stays in one lane even when it isn't moving at top speed. That is clear, and undeniable, but it in no way invalidates the author's thesis that the internet and social media have a large, possibly growing, influence on how much and what kind of attention we pay to different cultural memes on the internet as well as in real life. There are examples of internet-inspired real life actions, eg The Arab Springs of the teens, so her thesis is that governments began to use countermemes to spread doubt, dissension, and overwhelmed apathy among internet users. The hashtag culture that looks for its own people via searching hashtags on Twitter (still refuse to call it X), and the multivarious pretenders to its throne, to find those whose views align with their own, and whose voices they wish to amplify by reposting or remixing their memes, has proven distractable and cooptable. This was at an earlier phase when the author was writing the book, and thus gets comparatively little play. I would have been more satisfied had there been illustrative memes in the text, but it had, I feel sure, pragmatic reasons like copyright clearances and the sheer exposure to malicious actors challenging the book. In other words, a species of the self-censorship the author discusses, as a consequence of state-sponsored botfarms etc. etc. that act in search of diluting messages they do not like.

That being more of a reason for the publisher to bring out a second edition, one including climate denial in its evolving, still spreading, form, than for you to skip reading it. I encourage you to get your eyes on the author's trenchant, intelligent analysis of the intersection between meme culture and personal resistance to oppression and totalitarian ambitions and actions.