A Review of Three Chinese Fictions, One Written in Tibetan

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Sam Sacks, Mountains of Cruelty. families. Wall Street Journal, June 21, 2025, at page C10.
https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture ... ng-dondrup-00ef7ef1

Note:
(a) This is book review on
(i) Tsering Döndrup (translated by Christopher Peacock), The Red Wind Howls; A novel. Columbia University Press, June 2025;
(ii) Yu Hua (translated by Todd Foley), City of Fiction, A novel of love and violence in a time of change. Europa Editions (2005- ; based in New York City), Apr 8, 2025
, which is translated from
余华, 文城. 北京十月文艺出版社, 2021 (林祥福, 纪小美, a fictional town named Xizhen 溪镇);
(iii) Shuang Xuetao (translated by Jeremy Tiang), Hunter Granta Magazine Editions, July 1, 2025 (yes, a future date)
, which was translated from
双雪涛, 猎人. 北京日报出版社, 2019.

(b) Granta
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granta
(table: quarterly; "was founded in 1889[4] by students at Cambridge University * * * The title was taken from the River Granta, the medieval name for the [now called River] Cam,[5] the river that runs through the city but [Granta] is now used only for that river's upper reaches")
(c) "Mr Shuang's fiction about his hometown [Shenyang] is credited with kick-starting a movement of rust-belt realism known as the Dongbei Renaissance."  东北文艺复兴
(d) The WSJ review carries a photo whose caption reads: "UPRISING  Tibetans surrendered to Chinese troops in front of the Dalai Lama's Potala Palace in Lhasa, in 1959

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Censored in China, Tsering Döndrup’s vivid and excoriating “The Red Wind Howls” recounts the decadeslong Communist clampdown in Amdo, a multiethnic region of northeastern Tibet roughly the size of France. The story begins in the late 1950s, immediately after the civilian massacres perpetrated by the People’s Liberation Army during what has come to be known as the Amdo uprising but which the characters in this novel call simply the Harrowing Day. It ends with the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, by which time Tibetan society has not been transformed so much as nearly eliminated.

Mr. Döndrup, who writes in Tibetan, divides the novel into two parts. The first follows the 10-year sentence being served by the lama Alak Drong at a brutal re-education camp alongside other so-called class enemies from the clans of nomadic Tibetan Buddhists. The second part chronicles the fate of the camp’s survivors during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), when all traditional customs are violently proscribed and the people are brought to starvation by the government requirement that they plant crops that cannot grow in Amdo’s mountainous altitude.

In an acid-etched translation by Christopher Peacock, the whole book is memorable, but it is the first section that makes “The Red Wind Howls” a contemporary world-literature classic. With the vigorous anger and precise detail that calls to mind Varlam Shalamov’s remembrances of life in the Siberian Gulag, Mr. Döndrup depicts the horrors of the Chinese prison camp: the struggle sessions, the culture of “backstabbing and informing,” the ritualized torture and the many other daily punishments and deprivations that turn even the strongest prisoners into mindless “labor machines.”

As in all totalitarian regimes, the rules imposed by the party cadres are Kafkaesque in their absurdity. For instance, suicide is commonplace among the prisoners, but because it is outlawed in Buddhism the nomads succumb to it far less. This fact is marshaled as evidence of their lingering religious faith, and for the crime of not killing themselves they are re-educated even more harshly.

Lest the novel be taken for anti-Chinese propaganda, it should be said that the portrayal of the Tibetans is far from idealized. Mr. Döndrup’s “The Handsome Monk and Other Stories” (2019) satirized the corruption of the monastic order and here Alak Drong is a spoiled and callow religious ruler who earns our sympathy only due to the torments he endures.

But if the novel is undeluded about human frailty, it is respectful of Buddhist teachings, which hold that “death and impermanence are matters of a moment.” Karma is a bitter theme, at least as it applies to political power. Some Tibetans seize the main chance by embracing Communism. Zealous to prove their loyalty, they tend to be the cruelest party officials. But in time they are inevitably denounced and destroyed and replaced by some more eager collaborator. The wheel turns and no one escapes it.

The Chinese writer Yu Hua’s “City of Fiction” is set during China’s Warlord Era, a chaotic period in the 1910s and ’20s when the country was ruled by regional strongmen with private militias. In an unfussy translation by Todd Foley, the novel centers on Lin Xiangfu, who appears with his infant daughter in the town of Xizhen in search of his runaway wife. Rescued by the villagers from a snowstorm, he decides to stay. There he plies his trade as a woodworker and becomes a respected figure in the community. But Xizhen is targeted by bandits led by a particularly wicked specimen called One-Ax Zhang. The bulk of “City of Fiction” relates the desperate struggle Lin Xiangfu and his neighbors wage against the bloodthirsty gang.

Mr. Yu is a writer of melodramas par excellence. His most famous work is the historical saga “To Live” (1993), which recounts the downfall and gradual redemption of a landowner’s prodigal son from the Chinese Civil War in the 1930s and ’40s through the upheavals of collectivization and the Cultural Revolution. The novel foregrounds its operatic personal tragedies over its political critiques, which helped it get past the Communist Party’s censors. (In contrast, Zhang Yimou’s gorgeous and perhaps less historically fuzzy 1994 film adaptation was banned.)

“City of Fiction,” though baggier, possesses many of the qualities of “To Live”: It features an errant but doggedly heroic protagonist, a lot of admirably humble village folk, crude humor, natural disasters, heartbreak and hopeful consolations. With the addition of sword fights and gruesome violence, you have a book that reads like a 19th-century serial or feuilleton—a tale of adventure, romance and good versus evil.

The writer Shuang Xuetao is from the northeastern Chinese city Shenyang, a onetime industrial hub that collapsed in the 1990s after the country shifted from a planned economy to one based on marketization, causing factories to move south. Mr. Shuang’s fiction about his hometown is credited with kick-starting a movement of rust-belt realism known as the Dongbei Renaissance. His story collection “Hunter” still has plenty of gritty urban ennui, but it also now incorporates elements of magic realism and fantasy.

The fusion is at its uncanny best in “Heart,” in which a young man riding with his dying father in the back of an ambulance passes into a bizarre highway limbo between life and death. The Hitchcockian title story concerns an actor cast to play a sharpshooter in a film whose disciplined preparations transform his ordinary surroundings into someplace malign and dangerous. Such eerie artistic projections are frequent. A blocked science-fiction author in “Premonition” meets the sort of alien he might dream up; a sociopathic killer in “Up at Night” seems to materialize from the psyche of a crime writer.

Though there’s nothing new in the coupling of the mundane and the fantastic—see, for example, everything by Haruki Murakami—these stories feel fresh and invigorating, and Jeremy Tiang’s translation is noticeably good. At age 41—extremely young in writer years—Mr. Shuang is imaginative and versatile, someone who will be worth keeping up with.