Chen Xue

Author: Li Jing
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-05-01
Features: Award-winning Novel – 19th Long Novel Prize. This is a rare soul piece from the spiritual arctic, deeply private, revealing the truth of a woman's spiritual and physical transformation in a red farce. It is the self-examination of a shy heroine, like a sensitive plant, illuminating her own confusion with courage. It delves into the profound and desolate atmosphere of the arctic, distinct from all other life in the universe. After enduring countless pains, one gazes into the vastness: it turns out that under class and bloodline discrimination, the new underclass is reborn through such extreme labor, even to the point of suicidal work, and faces thought crimes, speech crimes, love crimes, and class crimes, losing all dignity of humble existence. They even cross the Heilongjiang River to join the "Soviet social imperialist society," pursuing a rare form of life. In the deep suffering of this catastrophe, women's mutual understanding and love resist the terrifying emptiness, cowardice, terror, helplessness, and despair of the permafrost. They experience bone-chilling pain, extraordinary tremors, and heart-stirring realms, loving with delicacy, depth, confusion, doubt, tragedy, and beauty, becoming a form of life that keeps the soul alive. Here, every young man and woman who falls in love faces a profound tragedy; thus, love, older than history itself, is cut into pieces, leaving only biological instincts and the loss of emotional customs, anxiety, and excitement. Only the weak resistance and the sighs deep within youthful life remain. The deep insight into the extreme devotion of women, the spiritual life more subtle and vast than the physical body, the folk perception, self-reflection, and personal experience that plunge into the storm of anti-humanity and anti-humanity—everything is within this work. The novel delves deeply, transcends the ordinary, and is both sharp and profound, yet harmonious and subtle. Beneath the blood-like flowing words, tremble the spirit of the return of free Chinese and the spirit of risk-taking writing. The words are close yet profound, handling the heavy as if light, poetic and natural, making it hard to resist being moved to the core.