Murder and magical realism: a rising literary star mines China’s rust belt

During Shuang Xuetao’s early teenage years, he wondered for a long time what hidden disaster had befallen his family.

His parents, proud workers at a tractor factory in the northeastern Chinese city of Shenyang, stopped working and the family moved into an empty factory warehouse to save money on rent.

But they rarely talked about what happened, and Mr. Shuang worried that only a special shame had befallen his family.

Only later did he learn about the mass layoffs that swept northeast China in the 1990s, during the country’s shift from a planned economy to a market-based economy. The region had been the industrial heart of China, but suddenly millions of workers found themselves unemployed. Crime and poverty increased. Even today, the region, also called China’s Rust Belt, has not fully recovered.

The legacy of that common suffering animates the writing of Mr. Shuang, now 40 and one of China’s most celebrated young authors. For his short stories about the economic decline of his hometown and the mass disillusionment that followed, he has been praised for drawing attention to a time and people that China’s public imagination had long written off.

His stories also address the isolation of individuals within that collective experience. His characters disappear from their neighbors’ lives without saying goodbye or, in one of his signature magical realist twists, trek through the heavy snowstorms of the Northeast and end up in a cell at the bottom of a lake.

Mr. Shuang describes himself as both a participant in that era and a bystander – making him perhaps the ideal person to introduce it to a new generation of readers.

“That was my childhood,” Mr. Shuang said during an interview in Beijing, where he now lives. “So I was part of what was happening, but I didn’t necessarily understand it either.”

The question of how to understand the region’s history has become particularly relevant recently, as a wave of art about the northeast, known in Mandarin as Dongbei, has gained widespread popularity. A television drama about a faded factory town it was China’s top-rated show last year, and songs by Dongbei musicians have gone viral. Mr. Shuang published a new collection of short stories in February, and a star-studded film adaptation of one of his novellas is planned this year.

Cultural commentators have proclaimed a “Dongbei Renaissance.” Some have suggested that young people see a resonance between that time and China’s current economic slump.

Many stories set in the Northeast, including Mr. Shuang’s, have a raw aesthetic of huge chimneys, blinding snow and snow. and surrounding despair. When Mr. Shuang began writing, he rarely saw that face of the region represented.

Yet Mr. Shuang now worries that these characteristics are being interpreted as stereotypes, or worse, as gospel truth.

“Now that people have paid attention, I think we should remind them: this is not the real Shenyang,” he said. “It’s mine.”

Shenyang, where Mr. Shuang was born in 1983, was the largest city in China’s most urbanized, prosperous region. State-supported factories produced steel and heavy machinery, and their workers basked in the promise of lifelong job security. Mr. Shuang’s parents dropped him off at the factory’s kindergarten every day; the 7,000 employees enjoyed a factory hospital, cinema and auditorium.

When Chinese leaders began allowing private companies to compete with state-owned giants in the 1990s, that idyll collapsed. Mr. Shuang’s mother started selling tea eggs on the street.

Determined to earn a steady income, Mr. Shuang studied law at university and then went to work at a bank. But he soon got bored. As a teenager, he had found solace in the lost young men of Ernest Hemingway and JD Salinger. He began writing secretly at night about his own lost young men.

At first, Mr. Shuang wrote about Shenyang because that was all he knew. But when he found an audience – by winning several major writing competitions – a sense of responsibility developed. “I said, OK, I want to help others better understand this place of ours. I want to leave a record of these people.”

Many of his stories feature a recurring cast of characters: tea egg sellers, police officers, former employees who try to reinvent themselves with varying degrees of success.

The three novellas in “Rouge Street,” the first collection of his work published in English, are set in a tough neighborhood full of young dropouts, “heads hanging, smoking all the time, still not starving.”

Mr. Shuang’s prose is vernacular, and he doesn’t shy away from the unsavory choices his characters make to survive. There are murderers and drunkards. But he also lingers on the connections they forge, even if they are ultimately fleeting.

Religion is another motive. Itinerant preachers spread hope to single mothers, and churches serve as local landmarks. Mr. Shuang’s best-known work is a 2015 novella called “Moses on the Plain.”

On the surface, it’s a murder mystery. The characters quote from the book of Exodus as they ponder revenge and redemption. In one scene, retired workers protest plans to replace a statue of Mao Zedong with a gaudy golden bird. The gathering is eerie, almost ritualistic: “A group of old people in work uniforms walked down the middle of the road in a somewhat ragged formation, completely silent.”

Mr Shuang is not religious, but said he was fascinated by believers’ search for meaning. He had seen a similar quest in his parents’ embrace of socialism. During the layoffs, he said, “it is not only their source of income that collapsed, but also a kind of faith.”

Jia Hangjia, the pseudonym of an essayist from northeastern China, said “Moses on the Plain” rediscovered a period that many would have preferred to forget.

“It’s not like people processed what happened and then moved on. They just buried it,” Mr Jia said. “To dig these things up again and push for some kind of venting, I think that was very courageous.”

Mr. Shuang is hardly the first writer to examine China’s historical traumas. Renowned authors such as Mo Yan, the first Chinese citizen to win a Nobel Prize for Literature, have written about the scars of Mao’s failed collectivization campaigns or the country’s one-child policy.

Yet the experience of Northeast China had received less literary attention in the 1990s. Censorship has also become stricter — and only more so since Mr. Shuang began writing.

A commentary on the success of Mr. Shuang and other northeastern writers published in a Chinese Communist Party newspaper called their works “sincere.”

“But to wallow in this kind of writing,” the piece continued: “is what we don’t want to see. We need reflective literature, healing literature, literature that looks to the future and is full of power.”

A film adaptation of ‘Moses on the Plain’, which was set to premiere in China in 2020, was postponed without explanation. It’s now expected this year, with a more secular title: ‘Fire on the Plain’.

Mr Shuang said he thought fiction writers still had considerable leeway, due to their relatively small audience. Only one line was removed from “Moses on the Plain,” he said: a character asking, “If Mao Zedong were alive, would they dare?”

And Mr. Shuang is not an activist. His stories focus heavily on individuals and make little mention of the government.

Some critics have said they don’t go far enough in exploring the roots of the pain of that period. “He doesn’t talk about the why of history, the deeper historical meaning,” said Nie Zinan, associate professor of literature at Shenyang Normal University.

But for Mr. Shuang, the expectation that he will write about the Northeast at all has become a burden. In the decade since he left Shenyang, his visits have become less frequent. He now finds the city largely unrecognizable.

Zhang Yueran, Mr. Shuang’s wife and herself a leading novelist, said the Dongbei label had “brought him great benefit.” But, she continued, “when an author wants to expand to a broader stage, you naturally feel limited.”

Mr. Shuang has attempted to lift those restrictions, with some of his recent stories set in the early 20th century. Others show somber writers from Beijing.

But he is quick to emphasize that these newer stories are as representative of his current life as his previous works were. That is, maybe not at all.

“Fiction cannot be responsible for transmitting information,” he said. “As an author, I believe in telling the truth by lying.”

Siyi Zhao research contributed