Plant red lotus at the top, plant lotus root at the bottom.

Author: Wang Anyi
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-01-01
Features: China Times Open Book Top 10 Chinese Books of 2002, United Daily News Readers' Choice Book Award of 2002. The Heart of a Young Girl. A classic text depicting the psychological activities, emotional entanglements, external world, and years of growth of a young girl. Delicate, precise, and deeply moving. Wang Anyi's new long "Planting Red Lotus Below, Planting Lotus Above" (20,000 words) uses the growth experiences of several 11- or 12-year-old girls as a thread to tell the story of the conscious and unconscious turbulence and transformation that occurred in the rural areas of Jiangsu and Zhejiang during the tide of the market economy. The entire book, with an extremely delicate and calm tone, tells the following story—a rural girl named Yang Baba, due to her parents' business trips, is forced to leave her old village house and comes to the city. This city, so different from the village's scenery, becomes the little girl's new world. In one year, the little girl roams every corner of Huashu Town, seeing and experiencing countless strange and wonderful people and things (including at the teacher Gu's boarding house where she stays). Yang Baba grows up unconsciously in this new environment, and the friendship between her and her classmates, Jiang Ya'er and Zhang Rosalind, also undergoes renewal and development. However, a broader world awaits Yang Baba—after a year, her parents will take her to a bigger city, Shaoxing. This is the initial, unremarkable experience of a rural child integrating into the city. Because it is unremarkable, it is easily overlooked or forgotten. But thanks to Wang Anyi's vivid writing, Yang Baba's one year of boarding life even makes the ordinary places come alive with flavor.