Two estranged childhood friends, Li Jiaqi and Cheng Gong, talk through the night. Snow falls silently outside and the body of an old man lies in another room. We are on a university campus in Jinan, the capital of Shandong province. We do not know exactly why the conversation is so important that Jiaqi sought out Gong after an absence of 18 years, but we do know that a dark secret links their two families, that its effects have ricocheted across three generations and that Jiaqi is determined that tonight it will be laid to rest. “We’ll talk all night if we have to,” she writes. “And then the secret will be left behind.”
Zhang Yueran is one of China’s most celebrated contemporary authors. Still in her 30s, she has found success both with short fiction and with a series of elegantly constructed novels that return frequently to the state of the family in China: absent fathers, stepmother relationships and the vicissitudes of close, sibling-like friendships between only children. The party state has disrupted Chinese families for decades and it shows: in the 1950s the creation of people’s communes threatened to integrate the family into the collective; in the 60s, children saw parents denounced and humiliated in the Cultural Revolution; in the 80s and 90s urbanisation split millions, as children were left behind with grandparents while their parents became migrant workers, and a brutally enforced one-child policy meant no siblings, aunts, uncles or cousins.
The aftermath of the Cultural Revolution produced its own genre, known as scar literature, in which Chinese writers discharged the weight of violence, suffering and in some cases guilt accrued during Mao’s last decade of chaos. Zhang comes from a much later generation, people with no direct experience of the Cultural Revolution but who live, nevertheless, in its long shadow.
Cocoon is artfully told: as in an epistolatory novel, the two protagonists take turns to relate episodes from their linked histories. The families are acting out their lives in the cage created by the policies of a one-party state that is only occasionally directly referenced: Jiaqi, we learn, is the child of a village girl and a former Red Guard, sent down to the countryside like millions of others as the army stamped on the violence Mao had unleashed. Her parents, she reflects, would never otherwise have met. “Knowing I was only born as the result of a political slogan,” she observes, “has always made me feel my life was a bit random. Really though, I should feel fortunate – in this country, as the result of another slogan, many more children never got to be born.”
When her father bowed to family pressure to take university entrance exams, the marital relationship began to fall apart. As Jiaqi puts it in one of her characteristically devastating asides: “As far back as I can remember, I’ve always known my father didn’t love my mother … I thought marriage must be like our school uniform … it never fit properly but you still had to wear it.” The only time they appear as a loving family is at new year, when her parents put on an elaborate show.
The house in which the two are talking also had its Cultural Revolution story: originally built for a professor who was returning to China from the US, it became the theatre of his persecution and he killed himself there. As the novel opens, Jiaqi has returned to the house to take care of her dying grandfather, though she does not hold him in much affection. We also learn that Gong’s grandfather spent his adult life bedridden, after a vicious attack in 1967 left him in a vegetative state, living on as a source of income for his embittered wife and a prop for his young grandson, who fantasises about finding ways to communicate with him.
Zhang’s prose is meticulously economical and is well served by her long-term translator, Jeremy Tiang. In this expertly constructed novel she achieves a masterful blend of narrative suspense, emotional intimacy and self-discovery: as her characters struggle to recapture their childhood friendship, unravel the reasons for the long estrangement and understand the many ways in which their own lives have been blighted by the past, they progressively reveal to the reader the generational trauma that afflicts both families, elegantly evoking the lived experience of millions more.
