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Shortlisted, 2025 Baifang Schell Book Prize, China Books Review
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.
A riveting read and an illuminating one.
Fang Fang’s Soft Burial beautifully evokes the intergenerational trauma stemming from the Land Reform Movement in the late 1940s and early 1950s. This is a fantastic novel, an excellent translation, and an important contribution to modern Chinese literature and world literature.
— Levi S. Gibbs, author of Song King: Connecting People, Places, and Past in Contemporary China
Fang Fang is a powerful voice in contemporary Chinese literature, recognized for her steadfast attention to the underdogs of society. Through poignant and compassionate storytelling, she delves into the depths of the human condition, challenging readers to confront difficult truths with empathy and understanding.
— Zhang Ling, author of Where Waters Meet
Soft Burial questions the value of information and the ways in which it is delivered and received, acknowledging the pain of the past yet quietly suggesting that remembrance is critical to an honest civilization.
Soft Burial is an absorbing look at an important period of modern Chinese history, with Fang poking her finger into an open wound, determined to make the reader reexamine what they think they know.
Soft Burial’s force arises from its insistently interconnected threads. Lives that form a unity never fully glimpse the ways they have been knotted together... The subject is the individual self molded, remolded, surviving, or being consumed by cataclysmic change.
The Chinese authorities feared Fang Fang’s book because it revealed the horror of a time that remains unspoken, and because it encouraged that mistrust to fall on the government, rather than one’s fellow citizens.
Fang Fang makes no direct demands upon our sense of duty or morality—she is far too down-to-earth for that—but across these works, the implicit imperative to record and to remember is impossible to ignore.
These new translations represent fresh chances to confront the failures of the past, and afford those who lived through unspeakable horrors the most basic of dignities: that they be remembered.
Stand as novelistic testaments to key moments in modern China's development.
Fang Fang is the pen name of Wang Fang, one of contemporary China’s most celebrated writers. Her books in English include The Running Flame, also translated by Michael Berry. Fang Fang’s account of the COVID-19 lockdown in her hometown, Wuhan Diary, was translated into twenty languages and garnered critical acclaim from major media outlets around the world.
Michael Berry is professor of contemporary Chinese cultural studies and director of the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. A Guggenheim Fellow, he is the author of several books, including Jia Zhangke on Jia Zhangke (2022) and Translation, Disinformation, and Wuhan Diary (2022). He is also the translator of numerous books, including Fang Fang’s Wuhan Diary: Dispatches from a Quarantined City (2020).