Soft Burial by Fang Fang is a haunting and deeply affecting novel that delves into the psychological and historical trauma wrought by China's tumultuous 20th century. Set in the aftermath of the Chinese Civil War and the early years of the Communist regime, the novel follows the story of a woman who has lost her memory, her identity obscured by decades of buried secrets and state-sanctioned violence. Fang Fang masterfully intertwines personal tragedy with national history, revealing how political upheaval leaves indelible scars on individuals and families. The protagonist, known only as "the woman," lives a quiet life in the countryside until her past begins to surface, unraveling a narrative of betrayal, loss, and suppressed identity. Through her gradual remembrance, the reader is guided through episodes of land reform campaigns, family disintegration, and the brutal cost of ideological purity.

What makes Soft Burial stand out is Fang Fang’s restrained yet evocative prose. Rather than relying on overt political critique, she presents a human-centered story that allows the weight of history to speak for itself. Her portrayal of rural China is vivid and realistic, filled with moral ambiguity and emotional complexity. The novel also explores the theme of memory—how it is manipulated, erased, and reclaimed—and the quiet strength it takes to confront the truth. Banned in mainland China, Soft Burial is a bold work that challenges official narratives and invites reflection on the personal costs of historical events often sanitized in public discourse. It is both a literary and political act of remembrance, giving voice to those silenced by history. Soft Burial is a poignant, brave novel that resonates far beyond its immediate context. It is a necessary read for anyone interested in the intersection of memory, identity, and the long shadows of political trauma.

Soft Burial by Fang Fang and translated by Michael Berry is a haunting work of historical fiction that confronts the buried traumas of China’s Land Reform Movement, a campaign often remembered as a revolutionary success but rarely examined for its human cost. First published in 2016, the novel re-emerges in English translation alongside increased interest in Fang Fang, who drew widespread attention with her controversial Wuhan Diary. In Soft Burial, Fang Fang rejects simplistic narratives, offering a multi-layered story of memory, silence, and generational trauma. Through the amnesiac protagonist Ding Zitao, the novel traces personal reckonings with violence and loss as her son Qinglin attempts to uncover a past long buried. The narrative paints landlord families not as caricatures but as victims of a political campaign. Soft Burial is a bold challenge against official memory.

Recommended for those interested in Chinese history and contemporary fiction, the novel is more focussed on broader sweeps of history and society than individual characterisation.

A beautiful and poignant novel about the impact of 'New China's. Both the story and the translation were stunning. I couldn't put the book down. The themes of memory, family, trauma and history were well thought out, and laid out without blame or shame. These were the times, the circumstances and the choices people made to survive.

Soft Burial (软埋, Ruǎn Mái, 2016) is a controversial historical novel by Fang Fang (本名方方, born Wang Fang), a prominent Chinese writer known for her unflinching social realism. The book, which has not been officially translated into English in full (as of 2024), explores the silenced traumas of China’s land reform campaigns (土改) in the 1950s—a period of violent class struggle where landlords were persecuted and their families erased.

Plot & Structure:
The novel follows two parallel narratives:

1950s China: A wealthy landowning family is massacred during land reform, and their young daughter-in-law, Dai Xiuying, survives but loses her memory. She is "soft buried" (buried without a coffin, symbolizing forced oblivion) and later "reborn" as a peasant’s wife under a new identity.

Present Day: A descendant, Liu Pinyan, investigates his family’s past, uncovering layers of historical suppression.

Key Themes:
Historical Amnesia: The title Soft Burial refers to the deliberate erasure of history—both literal (unmarked graves) and ideological (state-enforced silence).

Trauma & Identity: Dai Xiuying’s forced reinvention mirrors China’s collective struggle to reconcile with its past.

Moral Ambiguity: Fang Fang portrays perpetrators and victims with nuance, rejecting simplistic class narratives.

Intergenerational Guilt: Liu’s quest highlights how unresolved history haunts later generations.

Controversy & Censorship:
The novel was banned in China months after publication (2016) for "distorting history" and "negating the legitimacy of land reform."

Fang Fang faced intense criticism from nationalist factions, especially after her 2020 Wuhan Diary (a COVID-19 chronicle) further angered authorities.

Despite this, the book circulated underground and sparked debates about historical reckoning in Chinese literature.

Style & Literary Significance:
Fragmented Narrative: Shifts between past/present mimic memory’s disjointed nature.

Gothic Elements: Vivid scenes of violence and haunting imagery (e.g., exhumed skeletons, ghostly visions).

Political Courage: Fang Fang is often compared to Yu Hua (To Live) or Yan Lianke (The Years of Red Dust) for her willingness to confront taboo history.

A truly important and reflective historical lit fic book. After finishing the book I had to stare at the ceiling for a moment and reflect.

thank you @netgalley for this ARC.
Published on March 18 2025.

It's a perfect blend of historical fiction and mysteries, an in-depth, compassionate voice exploring nuances social exploitation. A powerful intriguing commentary that describes psychological layers of China's Land Reform Campaign. Exquisitely researched and narrated with love. A gripping contemporary fiction novel can be reading anyday.

Soft Burial by Fang Fang was originally met with critical acclaim upon its publication in China in 2016 and even received the Lu Yao Literature Award, but by May 2017, the work had been denounced and removed from stores.

The novel opens with a nameless protagonist suffering from amnesia since 1952 after being pulled, barely alive, from a river. Any attempts to make her remember cause her extreme pain, and she is warned that, for her safety, it is better to keep the past buried. Now, an old woman, a change in her life, awakens those memories, and she must relive them in reverse order. Her son, Qinglin, confused by the changes in his mother and inspired by the secret diaries of his deceased father, begins pursuing an understanding of the past and must wrestle with the idea that some things are better left forgotten.

Soft Burial is a moving, mysterious, and experimental novel exploring the effects of the Chinese Land Reform, generational trauma, and the role of memory.

Thank you to NetGalley and Columbia University Press for an advanced copy of this novel for review consideration. All opinions are my own.

Soft Burial by Fang Fang has a very interesting publication history, which partially explains why it is available to English-speaking readers at all. Written by an author lauded by Chinese national-level literary prizes and enthusiastically received in China upon publication, it does not seem like the sort of novel Western publishers would pick up, as they are normally primarily interested in 'rebel' or 'opposition' minded authors coming from authoritarian countries. Some genre authors, such as Cixin Liu of The Three Body Problem fame, manager to escape this trend (despite his active support for the Uyghur genocide), but literary authors tend to be subjected to more scrutiny. However, the response to Soft Burial in China did a 180, and the book is now banned. Fang Fang did not help her case by publishing Wuhan Diaries chronicling her experiences of Chinese Covid lockdowns on Chinese social media, which made her better-known around the world. Although this might have attracted the attention of Western publishers by putting her into a more familiar 'opposition' mould, she herself denies being anti-CCP or anti-China in any way.

All of this provides valuable context for understanding this book. Innovative in structure, it follows familiar beats of many a diaspora difficult 20th century history family saga, whilst offering something more substantial and interesting precisely because it was written by a Chinese author for a Chinese audience, rather than for literary Oxfam-safari export. The story follows a young woman who is saved from a river in the early 1950s. She does not remember anything about herself or her past, and she lives with deep anxiety for her whole life. In a couple of pages we speed run to the early 2000s, when her son, a newly successful office worker in the booming economy of 90s China, buys her a beautiful villa. Setting foot in such a sumptuous environment is enough to completely derail her mentally as she remembers her past as a landlord's daughter during the Land Reform years.

Enemies of the people, class enemies, counter-revolutionaries - labels which killed, maimed and ruined the fates of millions of people, creating overwhelming multi-generational trauma. These concepts rear their ugly heads in the form of 'foreign agents' or 'traitors of the Motherland' today. I am not from China, but the underlying conflict Fang Fang is trying to address - how should we remember mass classicide and how can we ever work through the collective and individual trauma classicide campaigns created - is as relevant for my country of birth as it is for China, so this one really hit home. The protagonist's journey through the hell of her memories is absolutely harrowing. We travel with her back in time, from the last thing she remembers - burying her whole family who have just committed mass suicide to avoid a mob struggle session - all the way through the build up of the pressure on rural landlords. Her narrative is juxtaposed with the story of her son's encounter with an elderly commissar in the 2000s, who sort of presents the other side of the story. In a way, the son's story is more central than the mother's, as it hinges on the question of whether he should dig deeper, whether he should try to find out what happened to his family, and what sort of outcomes that could bring.

The overarching narrative is intentionally far-fetched and full of coincidences. One of the characters labels it as a soap opera or a TV drama, emphasising that the story and the specific characters are used as archetypes serving the exploration of the key themes of memory. Fang Fang is less interested in whether any of the violence was justified, which explains some narrative decisions. A book more interested in discussing the Land Reform movement itself would have found a way to give more of a voice to non-landlords and those participating in the struggling sessions on the other side. A repetition of one of the struggling scenes from a different perspective would have driven the point home, as would a point of view of one of the servants (Little Tea is truly the most side-lined character in this story). I can also understand that most Chinese cultural production, if it did talk about this period at all, has already focused on the peasants and how 'evil' the landlords were, and Fang Fang's expressed purpose was to uncover the trauma inflicted upon the millions of victims in this particular event. I think she did a good job of avoiding romanticising the landlords whilst still preserving their humanity and invoking our sympathy - literally nobody deserves to be treated like this. All of the 'past' storyline characters are three-dimensional human beings, who often displayed the prejudices of their class upbringing. Fang Fang is a master of detail: the protagonist, who we have met as a traumatised woman full of humility, comes across quite differently in her pre-amnesia chapters. For example, in a throwaway line, she thinks of her adopted stepbrother as always relegated to a servant class because he was not born into the family, despite his familial status as an adopted son. She still has the space to think that way after she has just buried her entire family and she is reliant on this man to save her and her child. This kind of character work is a far cry from the saintly hagiographies of someone like Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai in The Mountains Sing. I was somewhat disapproved by Fang Fang reducing the destruction of the Lu family to an interpersonal conflict, but I understand that she was trying to show that in many cases the specific victims were not picked because they were particularly exploitative, but because local rivalries and politics shaped their fates.

Nevertheless, it is a captivating and somewhat theatrical family saga that embraces its own artificial narrative and characterisation. As a family saga, it is reminiscent but more compelling than many similar books I've read. If you enjoyed How We Disappeared or Pachinko, you might like this. However, the family narrative is not the main point of this book, a discussion of private and public memory is.

Did she succeed in writing a novel about memory? I am not sure. I feel like some of the discussions of memory lacked nuance in favour of hammering a clear conflict - is it better to remember or to forget - rather than discussing how exactly we remember or how we forget. It was also interesting to see the 'present-day' storyline being set in the early 2000s, represented as a neutral time 'after' the events, full of hope and opportunities to discuss and remember. 2025 feels very different to 2005 in that regard. 'Enemies of the people' are back, both in terms of rhetoric and legal persecutions, and memory is policed more than ever since the supposed end of the Cold War, making the 'present' Fang Fang wrote into almost a utopia.

Rating: 3.75-4.25/5 ⭐

#BookReview:
✨Thank you to Columbia University Press and #NetGalley for this #ARC! This review was voluntarily written by me. This book is a part of the Weatherhead Books on Asia series.
✨Sincerely speaking, #SoftBurial is truly a heavy read for me. It is really difficult to articulate my thoughts in this review due to a lot of factors.
✨This book is a book that you have to devour slowly and makes you think with both your heart and mind.
✨This story is painfully slow around the first three-fifths of the story but getting faster and hard-hitting at some parts nearing the end. This is due to revelations in the last two-fifths of the book.
✨The backdrop of this book is the Land Reform Movement in China in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s. So, nearly all events and characters here (especially old ones) have stories during the movement.
✨The main theme is soft burial. There are several definitions for this term that are described in this book, but to my understanding, soft burial is about ignoring or forgetting or leaving the painful history at the back of their mind, especially for those who lived during that era.
✨Hence, the main question of this book is if we get to know about a painful event or history, how will we react to this?
✨If anyone asked me this question, I’m still not sure what my answer is.
✨Spoiler alert: If I am a normal person, I may choose the protagonist's son's decision. However, the researcher in me may follow his friend’s way by recording the history but in an academic-like way. Well, the truth has many sides right?
✨Despite sometimes quite lengthy descriptions, I like how the authors weaved all these characters together via their stories plus the ways she introduced the past to readers.
✨Yet, I’m still regretful (spoiler alert!) that only us, the readers that managed to patch everything up at the end instead of the son’s himself. Well…
✨In conclusion, I recommend this book for any literary fiction, historical and/or translated fiction fans that want to have a read that makes you think about a movement/event and its outcomes. Who’s badly affected and who’s gained advantage from it?

According to this novel, a soft burial is when a person is buried without a coffin, directly in the ground. There are implications: their soul never really rests, and they cannot be reincarnated. The translator’s introduction also introduces readers to the concept of mingzhe baoshen: “Put your own safety before matters of principle,” also understood as “Keep your mouth shut and stay out of trouble.”

*Soft Burial* probes the absences and silences that are part of traumatic memories. It deals with the period of Land Reform in China—after the Second Sino-Japanese War, and before the Cultural Revolution. In a coda, Fang Fang explains that although this is fiction, it is based in large part on the experiences of one woman—her friend’s mother—but also on the experiences of the generation of Fang Fang’s grandparents: people who were accused of being “evil landowners” in denunciation meetings and “struggled against,” or punished for it. The translator’s introduction also reveals that *Soft Burial* has itself suffered one, being removed from shelves in China and denunciated—for its inquiry into what must remain undiscussed and forgotten.

The structure of *Soft Burial* is intriguing: it unspools backwards through time as it reveals what happened to Ding Zitao, the main character of the novel. Ding Zitao is approaching the end of her long and complicated life that has been separated into two distinct parts by repressed trauma from terrible violence, the trauma that led to her profound amnesia. That amnesia can be considered a form of mingzhe baoshen, something that many other characters in the novel choose—including Din Zitao’s son, Qinglin.

*Soft Burial* is a moving and searing portrayal of the terrible costs of the Land Reform Campaign and its ripple effects in the lives of these characters—Ding Zitao, her families past and present, landowners and villagers in Eastern Sichuan, as well as party officials. Fang Fang is subtle, not making accusations, but the outcome for all of the people involved speaks for itself.

“History is not the past,” Baldwin said. “It is the present.” This is true of this novel. Although Fang Fang has used fiction to talk about the events of the Land Reform Campaign, the soft banning of her novel shows how sensitive those in power still are to the implications of those events, and how they may reflect on the image of the ruling party.

To be put into the earth without a coffin and have your body placed directly into the dirt is one kind of soft burial; but when the living insist on consciously or unconsciously cutting themselves off from what happened, covering up the past, abandoning history, and refusing to remember, this is another form of soft burial committed over the passage of time. And once the past has been committed to a soft burial, it will likely lie there generation after generation, forgotten for all eternity. —Fang Fang

A beautiful, if difficult read. Highly recommended for its portrayal of the silenced history. Many thanks to Columbia University Press and NetGalley for early access to a DRC.

Soft Burial draws on the brutal and deadly land reform movement of Maoist China which caused the deaths of many labelled as being landlords even if the supported the communist movement and the subsequent lasting trauma from it, through the lens of the son of couple Ding Zitao and Dr. Wu uncovering the traumatic past through his dad's diary notebooks made during the time and his mother's strange ramblings before she enters a vegetative state after moving into a new home and ultimately left with the choice to learn his parents true pasts or to leave it dead and buried.

An interesting read and observation on society and how China especially has an uncomfortable history of censorship and self censorship as a means to forget and keep the peace.

Thank you for the e-ARC Columbia University Press & Netgalley in exchange for my review, I really enjoyed Fang Fang and Berry's translated work.

A literary fiction novel in lots of short chapters. Like "All the Light we cannot see", this novel has chapters which flick between narrators and time periods but which gradually come together. The narrative starts in the present day before moving back to the events of the land reform and the violent purging of landlords in some districts in kangaroo courts. The survivors of these purges carry the trauma with them into the present. As a survival mechanism, they've chosen not to remember them (give them a soft burial). By writing about them, Fang Fang has chosen to remember and the very act of doing so has seen her book banned in China.

I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

First of all this did not need to be this long. It really could have done with being edited down by about 100-200 pages

That being said, I thought it was a really compelling story. I was invested in where it was going naturally felt a bit disappointed when I got to the end that we didn’t really find out what happened to her first son.

Side note, Qinling truly did not need a wife and son in this. He never saw them and they were so irrelevant to the plot.

Overall a good read that I learnt a lot from.

Soft Burial – the process of placing a deceased one directly into the ground without a coffin. The novel and the events that unfold, performs a thought experiment – fictionalizing the politics through the perspective of a respectable clan who owned tea estates. This fictional family’s days leading to their “purge” where peasants, villagers rebelled and revolted against the upper classmen (beating, looting etc.), offers a nuance to the process where a good idea can have catastrophic impact when not implemented correctly. As this idea, this thought process, questioned the execution of such practices, the book came under severe scrutiny and heavy criticism. Though it was released to an almost universal critical acclaim, it soon became taboo and the bookstores across the country took the book down, enforcing the ban that came upon it.
The irony is this – many people post reforms and cultural revolution adopted to be silent for the sake of safety and existing peacefully and all those who once praised the book, were quiet when the book was torn apart as harmful in sentiments. This criticism isn’t unique to just one geography – this is universal in nature. While in some places more people show support to opposing voices, many remain quiet without supporting or opposing anything.
Fang Fang uses this idea and ties it to the families and descendants decades later, the generational trauma that they carry and the silence across the subject that makes working through it even more difficult.

As a work of fiction, Soft Burial goes far by emotionally connecting people from all sides of conflict and telling their stories instead of reducing events to a historical account.

This novel was slow to start but the last third was gripping and kept me up really late.

We follow Qinlin after his father's death, as he tries to uncover his father's secrets and his mother, Zing, who had always been a mysterious figure but has suddenly fallen into a vegetative state just after moving in with him. We learned already at the start of the novel that his father, a doctor, saved her when villagers found her injured and nearly drowned with complete amnesia, possibly brought by the trauma of the Land Reforms but Qinlin is trying to find out more - who was her family, where did she come from? What happened to her and does she still have living relatives?

We also follow a few other families linked to them so at times it can be confusing to keep up with multiple characters sharing the same last name, and the timelines are all interwoven, but even if it took a while for the story to get going, I ended up finding it really interesting and I am glad I didn't give up. The translation could have been better overall, it was decent but felt very repetitive within paragraphs at times.

Free ARC sent by Netgalley.

‘Soft Burial’ by Fang Fang is a novel of historical fiction based in China, which is right up my alley, so I was excited to read it. It is a dual narrative—Ding Zitao reflects on her past and her son Qinglin searches for answers in a past he knew nothing about.
We find out that in the past, Ding Zitao had her life saved by Dr Wu and has no recollection of who she was before she was saved from the river. Dr Wu later marries our protagonist and father Qinglin. While both parents choose to keep their pasts private, telling their son they were both orphans; Qinglin learns about some of it after his father's passing, but is not sure how far he wants to go to learn the truth.
As Ding’s amnesia seems to be lifting, randomly remembering some of the repressed memories she has of her past; Qinglin tried to put the pieces together in the hope of finding out more about his parents and himself. Soft Burial is defined as being placed directly into the earth without a coffin, which becomes known as you read through the novel.
This also ties in with the historical event that Fang addresses in their book. The Land Reform Movement in China happened between 1946 and 1953, it was a movement led by the communist party during the ending of the Chinese Civil War. It focused on land redistribution to the lower class, while landlords who had a percentage of their income came from exploitation of those in the lower class. The landlords had their land taken from them and were also subject to murder by the communist party, as well as their former tenants; imprisoned or sent to labour camps.
Those that survived through this period rarely speak about the experiences they witnessed, so the novel; although focusing on a real event, is mainly based on the knowledge that Fang has about this, and what they sourced. Upon its original release in its native language of Chinese, the Chinese government banned the book due to the nature of the topic that Fang had written about, but the statement of Fang’s writing still stands as it is now being released as a translated historical fiction book in English.
Speaking of this, Ding Zitao was a witness to the Land Reform Movement and therefore it is understandable why the memories are repressed so much and are only coming to surface in her later stages of life, where she is ready to start accepting parts of her past. This book shows that preserving history, no matter how horrifying – is important; so not as to repeat it in the future and we can also be educated about things we would not necessarily learn about otherwise.
I enjoyed this book although I did think it was a bit too long in some parts, and the dual narrative was a bit confusing at times I generally do not like dual narratives as a whole anyway. However, I enjoy historical fiction, especially about countries and continents outside of Europe, so I persevered with this book and I am glad I did. I would love to read an audio version of this as I believe a more emersed reading of this book would be really interesting and enjoyable.

Soft Burial is a historical fiction novel that weaves in a mystery. Ding Zitao is pulled from a river after nearly drowning, and when she regains consciousness in the hospital, she finds herself with total amnesia. No one knows how she ended up in that situation, and no family members come forward. Dr. Wu, who treats her, gives her the name Ding Zitao. As she starts a new life, she grapples with anxiety and depression, though she can't quite pinpoint the reason. She suspects she has endured significant trauma but chooses to bury her past and live a quiet life.

As she ages, memories begin to resurface, and while she appears to be in a vegetative state, she is internally revisiting the traumas of her earlier years. At the same time, her son embarks on a quest to uncover the secrets of his parents' past, hoping to understand his own origins. However, some truths are too painful to confront, and we all face the choice of whether to remember or to embrace the comfort of a peaceful existence.

Upon its release in 2016, Soft Burial was quickly banned in China. The novel depicts the brutal realities of the land reform movement in post-WWII Maoist China and the generational trauma it inflicted. As the Chinese Communist Party aggressively pursues reforms, 50 million property owners are labeled as landlords, leading to the execution of 2 million private owners, imprisonment of 10 million, and the rest sent to labor camps. All private property is seized by the state.

Fang Fang delivers a compelling narrative that explores the impact of these sweeping reforms on individuals and society as a whole. The mystery aspect adds an engaging twist to the story. While the writing is solid, some parts feel a bit flat and lack inspiration. The development of secondary characters could be stronger, and the portrayal of Qinglin falls short. However, the final 200 pages, where we delve into Ding Zitao's story, are masterfully crafted.

Fang Fang delves into the theme of generational trauma, highlighting its lasting effects. She dives , history, and repressed memories, exploring how these turbulent past events shape contemporary China. She critiques the choice to forget, which is not only enforced by the state but also embraced by individuals who choose to ignore it. Yet, she raises the question of whether confronting these memories might be too painful and overwhelming for us. I found this new release really engaging and enjoyed it a lot.

Review posted on goodreads and i will post a 5-10 min video on my instagram and youtube as well

An interesting and well-written novel about the land reform campaign and the cultural revolution. I like it...

“The greatest thing that we are innately equipped with as humans is the ability to forget.”

Soft Burial is one of the most interesting historical fiction novels I’ve ever read. It takes place during the 1950s and continues into the early 2000s in China, a time period and location that isn’t a very popular choice. The translator's introduction explains that Fang Fang is a well known author in China, some of her work even being a regular part of the school curriculum. Soft Burial was published in 2016, and positively received by most. “Most” does not include the Chinese government, because the book was banned due to its themes, which could be considered anti-communist to an extent. The book follows several characters: An elderly woman, her son and an ex revolutionary. The characters’ stories intertwine and all come together slowly. The elderly woman, Ding Zitao, suffers from amnesia after being saved from drowning. She suddenly falls into some sort of coma-like state after her son shows her the new house he bought for her, seemingly caused by something unknown from her past. The novel then follows her son as he tries his best to help her, trying to uncover his mother’s past in the hope he’ll find something that might wake her up. He finds some journals that belonged to his father who died when he was young, and travels to try and find people who knew his mother or father.

“To be put into the earth without a coffin and have your body placed directly into the dirt is one kind of soft burial; but when the living insist on consciously or unconsciously cutting themselves off from what happened, covering up the past, abandoning history, and refusing to remember, this is another form of soft burial committed over the passage of time. And once the past has been committed to a soft burial, it will likely lie there generation after generation, forgotten for all eternity.”
Soft Burial was a term I’d never heard before picking up this book, but it hasn’t left my mind since I finished reading it.

One of my favourite things in books is when different characters who at first seem to be completely unrelated start to come together and make everything make sense. This is so well done here.
The translation felt a little wonky at times. The language felt stiff at times and completely too descriptive at others. I think this might be a case of it being hard to translate some sentences into English because certain words might not have direct translations. It didn’t bother me much overall and the positives definitely outweigh the negatives.

This is a book about history. A story inspired by what the author heard firsthand from people who lived through it. It’s a book about trauma, and how hard some people try to forget their past, either consciously or not. Most of all it’s a story about humanity.

Both a mystery and a historical novel, Fang Fang's story follows the experience of a woman who is pulled out of the river and suffers amnesia. But how did she end up there in the first place?

The nuances of the tale are revealed gradually, some of it in the context of the controversial Land Reform campaign in the post World War 2 period in China. The politics of the time and the intricacies of social change are well described through the life of one woman.

This one is worth a read. It gets 3. 5 stars