The last century of China’s history is replete with intense warfare, frequent political movements, and appalling tragedies, which have become the theme of many literary and artistic works. But the Land Reform Movement in the early 1950s, one of the deadliest episodes in the country’s recent history, is little touched upon in Chinese literature, probably due to the taboos attached to it and the traumas left behind in the people who survived.
According to the official discourse, the movement aimed at ending feudal landownership and changing the fate of the exploited tenants. However, it was not a simple land redistribution operation, but also a disruption of the structure of society, as the goal was to eliminate landowners and village chiefs so that the Party could have control over the peasants. Mass murder of landlords by tenants was encouraged during the movement, and the estimated number of casualties was in the millions.
The novel Soft Burial 《軟埋》, written by Fang Fang 方方 and published by the People’s Literature Publishing House in 2016, is one of the rare works that tackles the sensitive subject of Land Reform from the perspective of the “enemies” in the movement – the landowners. The inspiration for the book came from the story of the mother of Fang Fang’s friend: her biggest fear was being buried directly in the ground – a “soft burial”. As the body is flexible without the protection of a coffin, it was believed that the dead buried in this way could never be reincarnated.
The story in Soft Burial begins with veiled allusions to the painful facts that an old woman, Ding Zitao, has chosen to erase from her memory, so as not to suffer the repeated trauma of recalling them. The narrative unfolds with her son’s attempts to find out about this buried part of her life.
The novel has frequent transitions between past and present, and the structure of the narrative is complex, with two interwoven story lines of the heroine’s two lives: Hu Daiyun lost her memory in 1952 after the tragic deaths of all her family members in the agrarian reform and her near drowning in the river; she was saved by Wu, a doctor whose family suffered similar miseries and who gave her the name of Ding Zitao. She became Wu’s wife after a few years and had some relatively peaceful time before he was killed in an accident. Having become old, Ding Zitao suddenly sees the past resurface violently and relives, step by step, the tragedies that had previously disappeared from her memory. Meanwhile her son strives to reconstruct them – until the moment when he gives up.
The book was initially well received upon publication in 2016 for its vivid portrayal of this dark period in history, the struggles of the people, and the tableau of society in eastern Sichuan from the 1950s onwards.
In 2017, it was crowned with the Lu Yao Prize, one of the most prestigious literary awards in China, for its “high degree of integration between criticality and literariness”. Then, all of a sudden, it became the target of sharp attacks from the ultra-leftist fringe, who held sessions of public accusations labelling Soft Burial as “a huge poisonous weed”. As a result, the book was reportedly taken off retail bookshelves.
However, it continued to circulate, sparking keen interest and receiving positive comments from many readers. In January 2020, France’s Prix Émile Guimet de littérature asiatique (Émile Guimet Prize for Asian Literature) was awarded to Fang Fang for Soft Burial, translated by Brigitte Duzan as Funérailles molles and published by L’Asiathèque in 2019. The book is currently available to readers worldwide in only two editions: the one available in Taiwan and the one available in France.
Faced with ferocious attacks by ultra-conservatives, Fang Fang insisted on the significance of writing the story, and saw herself not as a critic of certain political campaigns, but as an author who was obligated to remember when everyone else chooses amnesia. She elaborated on the notion of the book title in the afterword: “Alas, 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.”
Fang Fang’s commitment to truth and remembrance continued in 2020, when the coronavirus outbreak rocked Wuhan, Fang Fang’s native city. In total lockdown, she posted daily records of her feelings and observations on social media, which attracted millions of readers and became known as the “Wuhan Diary”. The English version translated by Michael Berry, Wuhan Diary: Dispatches from a Quarantined City, was released in May.
Not very different from the Soft Burial controversy, the first-person account of this unprecedented catastrophe became the new object of attacks from the ultra-left faction and zealous nationalists, who accused Fang Fang of siding with the West and undermining the image of the country. She was seen as the enemy by the authorities, and her books, including new works and reprints, have since been shunned by Chinese publishers. People cheered the disappearance of the unwelcome voice and took great pride in the country’s effective tackling of the pandemic compared with the rest of the world. Memories of those panic-stricken days became vague and distant; consciously or unconsciously, they were “soft buried”.
Then in January 2021, exactly a year after the outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, residents of several cities in northeastern China raised an uproar on the Internet over food and medicine shortages due to the extremely strict lockdowns implemented by local governments to control small and recurrent outbreaks. People complained about being trapped in their homes without supplies for over a week, and desperately appealed to the government to distribute necessities. Amid the overwhelming distress and anxiety that looked all too familiar, the memories of Wuhan were suddenly refreshed. Except that, as one commentator wailed on Weibo, “This time, we have no more Fang Fang to write it down and speak up for us!”