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.
