New Confucian Forest Chronicle · Reading in the Ming Dynasty: Reading in the Ming Dynasty

Author: Mai Dong
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-05-01
Features: Emerging writer, full effort, ancient stories, modern reinterpretation. What did they do before Fan Jin passed the imperial examination and after Zhou Jin left the officialdom? The Story of the Scholars didn't tell the readers. This book does. This book contains three stories: Reading in the Ming Dynasty tells the story of Fan Jin and his related figures—his teacher Wang Bochuan, his father Fan Xing, his wife Hu Hanzhi, his father-in-law Hu Tuofu, and his classmate Wei Haogu—before Fan Jin passed the imperial examination. In a dazzling life scene, they ran around aimlessly, feeling lost and anxious. In The Personal Prison, the protagonist Zhou Jin built a prison that unsettled the entire village. The prison didn't hold any real prisoners, but it was modeled after a real prison. Zhou Jin locked up a pack of wolves in it, as well as a group of figurines cast from villagers' portraits, including his own. The novel is enigmatic, filled with danger, distrust, and inescapable loneliness. In My Lover Nie Xiaoqian, the Confucian scholar Ning Caichen faces a situation where the ghost Nie Xiaoqian appears as an anomaly in his life. He brings her back into the real world, and as a result, the relationships between him, Nie Xiaoqian, his mother, his wife, his friends, and the villagers undergo subtle changes.