reading

Time (时光, pinyin: shiguang) is Ning Yuan's realist tragic baihe novel, begun in 2011 and completed around 2017. It's unusual for several reasons: first, it's Ning Yuan doing realism in a way that's reminiscent of Niu Er Er (i.e. she manages to suppress her usual tendency to slip melodrama into the closing chapters), and second, the nature of the tragedy itself.

The one-line pitch for this novel: it's the 1990s Chinese version of the k-drama Reply 1988 (my favourite of the Reply series), but more brutal, and with queer women as its focus. Spanning 1997 to 2017 (twenty years in which China saw a massive amount of upheaval and economic, social and cultural change, which the novel fully leans into), the novel begins with protagonist Wang Yutong and her childhood friend and later sweetheart Qi Yin as high school students. Their fathers work in a state-owned car factory located in the south of China (almost certainly Fujian, where Ning Yuan is almost certainly from), and their families live in the surrounding compound (which also has all the amenities you'd expect of a small town, though not at a particularly luxurious level). Wang Yutong has loving parents who've done their best to provide for her materially, but Qi Yin has a much more difficult life. Her father is an alcoholic who is often abusive to her and her mother, and her mother is quadriplegic as a result of an accident whom many neighbours believe to have been caused by her father. At the start of the novel, Qi Yin's father dies, and she becomes primarily responsible for the care of her mother at the age of thirteen.

( some spoilers, though this isn't the kind of novel that's substantially affected by spoilers )

So for something that offers a completely different take on romance from much of the baihe genre, for a compelling sketch of China's socio-economic development between 1997 to 2017 and its effects on (especially) the working class, for a sobering reminder of why a strong social welfare state is necessary, I highly recommend this novel.

I read the Chinese original of the novel here on JJWXC.