殺戮記憶

作家方方著書<軟埋>的英文版已出版，<紐約書評>(new york book review )最新一期上刊載了Madeleine Thien對此書評述及簡介了方方(作品)在疫情幾年間的一些遭遇，把這一文章用機器翻譯的中文版本貼在下麵，英語原文也附在後麵供對機器的晦澀翻譯難以捉摸的網友參考。對不了解方方所寫這些故事及其發生背景的網友們，希望這篇雙語貼文能幫助您有大致了解。

殺戮記憶

田嘉琳

中國作家方方的小說《軟埋》探討了幾代人的創傷性民族記憶，盡管她在 2020 年的新冠日記使她成為中國無情虛假信息運動的目標。



插圖：Manshen Lo

2016年，當中國作家方方出版她的小說《軟埋》時，她不可能知道她的書會在五年內開始從中國的公共生活中消失。她的舊書單——近百本書，包括小說、中篇小說、短篇小說和散文集——的重印將被停止，她的新作品實際上將被禁止在該國出版。她的名字，曾經受到尊重——她曾擔任湖北省作家協會主席，並被授予中國最高文學榮譽之一魯迅文學獎——將受到謾罵，與 2020 年 1 月 23 日至 4 月 8 日為期 76 天的封鎖密不可分，這場封鎖影響了湖北省及其省會 武漢的數千萬人。

在那六十天裏，方方一直公開寫著封城日記。每篇帖子都在深夜或淩晨出現在她的微博賬戶上。一個條目可能會記錄死者的名字，鼓勵讀者遵循最新的政府指令，注意她窗外的鮮花，或者描述她無法擺脫的新聞報道和文章。她放大了武漢同胞急需幫助的呼聲，以及醫生發出警告的話語;她寫道，“你如何對待社會中最弱小和最脆弱的成員”是對一個國家文明的“唯一真正考驗”。1 月 27 日，方方寫道：

當官場世界跳過競爭的自然過程時，它會導致災難;空談政治正確而不實事求是也會導致災難;禁止人們說真話，禁止媒體報道真相會導致災難;現在我們正在一個接一個地品嚐這些災難的果實。

日記成為一種文化現象。單個條目——轉發、發布在網站和新聞門戶網站上、編譯成 PDF、在流媒體網站上大聲朗讀——在中國覆蓋了大約 5000 萬人。據《衛報》報道，截至 4 月初，該日記僅在微博上就有 3.8 億次瀏覽。

方芳和她的《武漢日記》（Wuhan Diary）的遭遇，是網絡虛假信息的毀滅性例子，也是陰謀論和迫害運動獲得關注的速度。到 2020 年 1 月，隨著方方的帖子越來越受歡迎，微博已經開始刪除單個條目;幾周內，網絡攻擊傳播有關她帖子的虛假信息並舉報她違反規則，這充斥著中國互聯網。極端民族主義者指責方方編造故事。

批評者嘲笑她沒有離開自己的公寓報告情況（她定期與醫護人員和管理人員通電話，並將他們的觀察記錄在日記中），而她和大多數武漢居民一樣，被封鎖了。他們說，她對政府問責的呼籲被西方政府政府，特別是唐納德·特朗普（Donald Trump）利用，要求中國賠償。當微博暫時暫停她的賬戶時，她轉向了微信。3月3日，一位鄰居給她發短信說：“你家門口的秋海棠開得好了，但你的微信好像被關掉了。“朋友們替她發帖。

4 月，網上流傳著 Fang Fang 的封鎖日記已經被翻譯並將在國際上出版的消息。她因出賣自己的國家而受到譴責。在中國的社交媒體和傳統媒體上，一個驚人的共識開始出現：方芳允許她的日記被翻譯並傳播到世界各地，她進行了一次內部對話，並將其提供給那些非人化的同胞。

由煽動性新聞網站和公然的噴子發起的虛假信息運動像野火一樣蔓延到社會的廣泛領域，並被國家媒體、生活方式和流行雜誌、文化影響者、政治評論員、政府官員、領先學術機構的教授、退役軍人以及生活被大流行顛覆的普通人放大。知名人士稱她對國家安全構成威脅，並想知道為什麽沒有對她提出刑事指控;最極端的聲音要求她死去。

在2020年4月，政策製定者因處理一種病毒而受到審查的時候，一位65歲的流行作家如何成為不忠誠、欺騙和貪婪的化身——這個病毒在2020年4月正式在中國奪走了大約5000人的生命，此後非正式地奪走了8萬至150萬之間的生命——既令人困惑又熟悉的故事。那些當權者的錯誤最終消失了，取而代之的是戰勝致命病毒的敘述，但方方的名字在中國可能永遠不會完全擺脫恥辱。

在她作為出版作家的大部分時間裏，方方以她寫日常生活的親密和技巧而聞名，尤其是那些勞動對新經濟至關重要的人的生活。她的小說和同樣來自武漢的齊力以及來自河南省的劉振雲的小說幫助定義了 1980 年代在中國興起的“新現實主義”運動。他們試圖抵製虛假的安慰和道德評判;他們拒絕崇高和超然;他們探索了一種精神空虛，這種空虛似乎甚至感染了那些渴望重塑生活的人。

與葛飛的《褐鳥群》（1988）等繪畫性、模棱兩可的小說，或燦雪的《黃泥街》（1987）中大膽的敘事不可靠相比，新現實主義作品使用非正式的語言來傳達普通存在的質感。從 1990 年代到新千年，他們找到了廣泛且樂於接受的讀者群。方方的封鎖日記最初被解讀為這種傳統的產物，是一部富有同情心和坦率的共同經曆編年史。2020 年 2 月 2 日，她想起了近十年前寫的一句話：“整個時代的一粒塵埃可能看起來並不多，但當它落在你的頭上時，就像一座山撞上你。幾周後，當記者問到這些話是否是預言時，方方回答說：“那句話不是預言性的，而是現實——每個時代都與我們同在的現實。

在 2021 年的一次采訪中，中國數字時代編輯 Eric Liu 描述了對公共話語的嚴格控製如何“需要仇恨目標”。隨著武漢經受住封鎖的艱辛，一種背叛感開始在整個社會中形成，並集中在替罪羊身上。當然，很少有人能預料到目標：不是調查報告，而是實時寫的公共日記;不是一個社會結構，而是一個唯一的個體;不是政治領袖或政府官員，而是一位小說家。

方方的小說《阮邁》（Ruanmai）被學者邁克爾·貝瑞（Michael Berry）極其敏感地翻譯為《軟葬》（Soft Burial），從表麵上看，它講述了三個家庭的失蹤，包括幾代人中的幾十個人，甚至幾百人;隻剩下四名幸存者。但它也記錄了一種集體經曆，即財富在 1940 年代末和 1950 年代初從擁有土地、受過教育的特權階層轉移到耕種土地的佃農和勞動者的方式。這種重新分配仍然是中國共產黨的決定性行為，其實施的速度、土地改革運動的策劃者認為必要的暴力，以及受害者和肇事者為了在災後堅持下去而需要的失憶症，沒有一個生命能幸免於難。

《軟葬》中講述的故事始於 1952 年，當時一名年輕女子被從湍急的河流中拉出。她昏迷不醒，渾身是可怕的瘀傷，被宣布死亡。但在殯儀館到達之前，醫生看到了一隻手最微弱的震顫，並堅持要對病人進行觀察。兩個多星期後，當這位年輕女子醒來時，她不知道自己的名字、來自哪裏，也不知道自己是如何被卷入河中的。

醫生吳佳明告訴她，她在失去知覺前喊出了一個名字：丁子。為了保留她的身份，醫生將她的名字登記為丁子韜——並提到了她得救的季節，當時桃樹道開始綻放。這位年輕女子試圖重新開始。她被聘為政委家中的保姆，與家人在一起生活了十年。然後有一天，吳佳明被調到她居住的城市。兩人重新聯係上，她嫁給了他。

有一段時間，丁子濤試圖回憶河流之前的歲月，但每一次嚐試都會帶來壓倒性的恐懼。現在是 1960 年代，文化大革命的第一次迫害運動即將開始，這場運動奪走了多達 200 萬人的生命，幾乎關閉了每所大學，並使數百萬人流離失所到農村和偏遠地區。吳佳明告訴她，遺忘並不總是背叛;在某些情況下，這可能是生存的唯一途徑。

他們結婚大約四年後，一場悲慘的事故奪走了吳佳明的生命。丁子濤不知疲倦地做保姆，為兒子青林的教育賺錢，他最終學習了建築設計。經過多年的奮鬥，他得到了晉升並實現了童年的承諾，為他的母親建造了一個家，讓她可以在家人的陪伴下舒適地生活。

到現在為止，在 2000 年代初的某個時候，丁子濤已經接近退休了。她無法有意識地訪問的記憶作為根係存在於她生命之下，與其他被埋藏的曆史相關聯。這些根源隱藏在丁子濤的視線之外，通過滲透在青林的工作和日常生活中的短暫相遇變得清晰可見。人物在幾頁紙中出現和消失：退伍軍人、共產黨幹部、佃農，以及肇事者和受害者的子女（通常同時出現）在四川東部縱橫交錯地工作、娛樂和旅遊。景觀本身似乎將分離已久的個體滑向附近，但還不夠近，以至於他們無法完全認出彼此。例如，兩個老人在一家賣山西麵的商店裏偶然相遇，從未完全意識到每個人都擁有通往對方過去的鑰匙。有人對土地改革運動（Land Reform Campaign）進行了掩飾，他說：“我們不應該談論它，但這確實是那些太難提及的事情之一。

然而，認可已經非常接近了。一位前指揮官詢問他記得的一位年輕幹部，卻得知了這位年輕人令人震驚的謀殺案。一位研究偏遠莊園的教授贏得了一位老人的信任，這位老人頑強地守衛著一個萬人坑，裏麵埋葬著曾經雇用他的有影響力的家族的屍體，這些人都在一夜之間死去。一位已經九十多歲的前共產主義抵抗運動成員為獲得政治罪行的赦免而奮鬥，以便他在死前洗清自己的罪名。吳佳明的日記時間跨度從1948年到1968年，描繪了無數人物的生活，這些日記被送到他兒子的手中，但在關鍵的兩年裏沒有被閱讀，當時一個可能回答了他問題的人還活著。而丁子濤現在住在兒子精心建造的房子裏，經曆了情感上的崩潰。她陷入了緊張狀態。

她的病沒有得到診斷，青林急切地尋找治療方法。他有一種奇怪的感覺，她“存在於一種秘密狀態中”。最後，他的朋友鍾勇提供了一條線索，他透露，當他的父親處於阿爾茨海默氏症的早期階段時，他曾說過他“正在離開這個世界，前往另一個地方”。父親和他們坐在一起交談，似乎很迷茫。但當兩個人提到丁子濤時，他打斷了他。他沒有把目光從地板上移開，說道，“她的靈魂已經不屬於這個世界了。

時間，對丁子濤來說，並不完整。存在於 2000 年代初期的老婦人和存在於 1952 年的年輕婦人彼此分離。源自佛教、道教和傳統神話的中國信仰描述了一個靈魂如何為輪回做準備，踏上穿越冥界的旅程。這個領域是煉獄和地獄的結合體，有時被想象為有 18 個層次。在最糟糕的表現中，身體受到怪誕的折磨，但不會死。這種來世的概念——也是一個準備間隔，一個連接死亡和重生的連續性——認為過去的行為或罪行都不會被抹去。生活中避免的懲罰在這裏被毫不留情地執行。

軟埋葬的結構類似於雙螺旋。在一條鏈中，世界是時間性的。青林確保他的母親感到舒適，沒有痛苦，並繼續他的工作。他和鍾勇帶領一群建築專業的學生走進川東的偏遠地區，研究現在正在侵蝕到大自然中的廢棄家庭建築群。在破舊的牆壁後麵，他們發現精致的生活空間被多達 20 個內部庭院隔開;來自多個朝代的設計元素仍然可見。這些遺址在青林中喚起了強烈的情感。在與老人見麵時，他聽到了他完全不知道的令人不安的故事。

在小說的另一條線索中，世界是永恒的。丁子韜的記憶以相反的順序返回：她“回到了她曾經來的路上......現在一切似乎都那麽清晰了。在這段旅程的早期，她回憶起了解到一個人天生就有一個“豐富而充實”的靈魂;隨著時間的推移，它會瓦解。如果這個人很幸運，他們會把自己轉過來，“找回他靈魂中那些丟失的碎片，一次一塊”。

丁子韜墮入地獄，她首先經曆的是墜落，她感到“全身的骨頭都裂開了”，然後是“一排又一排的線條”上升，令人痛心。在某種程度上，她的公婆得知，他們很快就會在一場譴責會議上被遊行，而這場譴責很可能會以處決告終。看著家會那令人毛骨悚然的平靜，丁子濤回憶起她曾經

之前也目睹過這樣的一幕。當你站在那個平台上麵對村民的侮辱和攻擊時，你唯一希望的就是死亡。很難想象你需要硬起心來達到你仍然想繼續生活的地方。

小說的這一部分既構成了一次進入中國 20 世紀內部的旅程，也構成了對一個被切斷的自我的非常個人的清算——一個在一生的大部分時間裏，都通過遺忘而幸存的意識。長老丁子濤與慈愛的丈夫和愛子找到了平靜;她知道貧窮、辛苦工作和深深的孤獨。年輕的丁子濤被回憶的痛苦摧毀了。她的母親告訴她，死亡會結束痛苦。“但是，”她的母親繼續說，“還有另一種方法。如果你能抹去你的記憶，你永遠不會知道你曾經痛苦過。

《軟葬》的核心問題很簡單：發生了什麽？丁子韜，她的家人、村莊和國家怎麽了？角色經常求助於“命運”和“機會”等詞來解釋他們麵臨的恐怖，但這些詞是否因為它們掩蓋了鄰居和同胞的行為而提供安慰？

青林和鍾永是文化大革命期間的孩子。像他們這一代的許多人一樣，當政治運動結束時，他們離開了家鄉的省份，去尋找更好的生活。青林現在是一家房地產開發商的經理，她對環境與人類生活的共存，以及外在世界與內心的界限著迷。他反思了個人如何

保持他們的隱私和獨立性，實現自由，在自己的皮膚中感到賓至如歸......什麽樣的整體環境可以讓人體驗到美，除了舒適的家，人們在生活中還會尋求什麽。

在他們參觀的豪宅中，青林和鍾永看到了曾經被小心翼翼地隱藏在偏遠地區的私人財富的殘餘。有組織的暴力清空了這些房屋，其中一些房屋已有數百年的曆史，但它們的外部旨在融入環境並被環境所籠罩，像古代生物的骨骼遺骸一樣被保存下來。中永認為，隻有“與自然融為一體”的住宅才有機會隨著時間的推移而得到保護。他似乎不僅指建築物，還指政治結構和信仰體係;他和他的學生討論了在土地改革運動之後，幾代人積累的私人財富如何沒有簡單地消失;它成為國家財富的基礎。

這場運動摧毀了當地的權力中心。佃農和工人原本生活在他們通常殘酷的監督者的擺布下，突然發現自己置身於一個顛倒的世界。這種震驚釋放了幾十年，在許多情況下是幾代人被壓抑的痛苦。地主家庭受到鬥爭和集體懲罰。他們被毆打、挨餓、折磨和處決。一些富人犯下了難以言喻的罪行;有些人在小事爭鬥中被殺;有些人無緣無故地被折磨和謀殺。

大約有 200 萬人被謀殺，盡管一些估計更高。以正義為名的殘忍似乎將石板擦幹淨，但事實證明，這隻是不斷擴大的清洗的序幕。在《墓碑：中國大饑荒，1958-1962》（2012）中，楊繼生觀察到，盡管土地再分配大大減少了窮人的數量，但隨後的運動將“中農”劃分為更多的子階級，確保一類人仍然很容易成為替罪羊或政敵。

在一個國家的生活中，肇事者和受害者共存。如果和平保持下去，他們就會在一個共同的地理和社會結構中聯係在一起。《Soft Burial》的力量來自於它始終相互關聯的線索。形成一個整體的生命永遠不會完全瞥見它們是如何打結在一起的。這部小說並沒有聲稱傳達了終極真理;沒有說教，隻有持續的對話。對鍾永來說，關注——對他人的關注，也關注建築、風景、消失的曆史——成為一種歸屬感;沒有它，人們就會與環境疏遠並變得不安。但青林將這種幹擾視為為穩定付出的小代價，這似乎需要移開視線;他知道，他的父母希望他過上“無憂無慮、輕鬆的生活”。他認為，那些被謀殺和迷失的人“應該被允許與地球合而為一”。青林說出了許多人對過去的恐怖的感受：“我不想知道了。”

“軟葬”一詞是為了哀悼那些無法得到適當安葬的人，他們的遺體僅僅被當作廢物處理。有些人認為，這樣的埋葬，一具屍體匆匆忙忙地推入地下，沒有棺材，甚至沒有裹屍布——這是記憶不足的物理對應物——阻止了靈魂找到平靜;輪回是不可能的。小說清楚地表明，對丁子韜來說，遺忘就是生存。青林想起了他的朋友鍾永，為這道鴻溝又增添了一層：“我選擇了忘記，而你選擇了留下記錄。但是一旦你記錄了發生的事情，我怎麽能忘記呢？與此同時，小說本身也充當了一個紀念場所，無論多麽小，多麽不完整。

《軟葬》與方方的另一部小說《奔跑的火焰》（The Running Flame）一樣，最近由貝瑞（Berry）翻譯成英文，它以記錄女性的生活而著稱，正如方方在小說後記中所寫的那樣，“肩負著最沉重的負擔和最深的痛苦，然而，到頭來，她們的生活似乎是如此微不足道，仿佛她們甚至從未存在於這個世界上。

The Running Flame 簡潔而傷心地描繪了一位年輕女子，在被丈夫殘忍毆打多年後，她逃跑以重塑自己的生活。她在實用主義中找到了希望：“既然她什麽都得不到，為什麽她至少不能有錢呢？但在捍衛這種脆弱的自由時，她犯下了殘酷的報複行為。

兩部小說的主題都是自我塑造、重塑、生存或被災難性變化吞噬的個人。方方將這些變化標記在不同角色的意識和潛意識中，她關注這些變化如何創造它們相互交織的現實。它們共同構成了社會的結構。她對這種糾葛的認識也貫穿了她的封鎖日記：“讓我們所有在武漢的人都留下對所發生的事情的集體記憶。

翻譯、虛假信息和武漢日記是邁克爾·貝瑞 （Michael Berry） 對摧毀芳芳在中國的名聲並威脅她生命的運動的令人不寒而栗的描述。這是對一場極其有效的虛假信息運動的嚴格審查，揭示了數百萬聲音似乎幾乎在一夜之間團結起來反對一個目標。正如貝瑞所寫的那樣，這本書也是一種“保存的姿態”。在翻譯《武漢日記》時，他“一直被消失的陰影所困擾”。不僅方方的日記條目從中國的互聯網上被刪除，而且“數百篇關於日記的文章和帖子也被抹得無影無蹤”。

這次失蹤不僅包括支持方芳的言論，還包括幾個月後一些攻擊她的帖子和出版物。貝瑞覺得有責任記錄這場虛假信息運動的基礎設施——它是由數百萬個帖子、故事、文章、信息和評論構建的——因為我們目前的技術，往往掌握在政府或公司手中，可以很容易地抹去這些證據。

方方的聲音最引人注目的方麵之一是她的同情和純粹的固執。在她的封鎖日記中，她就像一個姐姐，不想驚動你，而是敦促你采取預防措施。她挑戰官員和其他權威人士，但她要求的是一些基本的東西：那些將政治和事業置於人命之上的人應該付出代價。這些條目主要被解讀為一個實時處理 60 天的地方，這完全是前所未有的。當許多人都在尋找信息和希望時，數百萬人在她堅持不懈的聲音中找到了安慰。

當形勢對方方不利時，著名小說家嚴連科允許出版他的一篇講座。2020 年 2 月 21 日，他對香港科技大學的學生說：

想象一下：作者方方在今天的武漢並不存在。她沒有記錄或寫下她的個人記憶和感受。也沒有數以萬計像方方一樣，會通過手機大聲呼救的人。我們會聽到什麽呢？我們會看到什麽？

令許多人驚訝的是，方方並沒有悔改或崩潰。她曾說過她不會離開自己的國家。坦率地說，她表現出的勇氣令人震驚。方方似乎表達的希望既簡單又有力：拒絕不連續性。2020 年 2 月 17 日，她在她的封鎖日記中寫道：

昨天在微信上的帖子又被刪除了。除了無奈，隻有無奈。我在哪裏可以分享我在這座被圍困的城市的生活記錄?...觀察、反思、體驗，並最終將筆放在紙上書寫。不告訴我這是一個錯誤？

一個問題，一個斷言，最後，對讀者的親密稱呼，對他們來說，這些文字可能已經從屏幕上消失了。

Killing Memories

Madeleine Thien

The Chinese writer Fang Fang’s novel Soft Burial probes traumatic national memories across several generations, even as her Covid diary in 2020 made her the target of a relentless disinformation campaign in China.

In 2016, when the Chinese writer Wang Fang (who publishes as Fang Fang) released her novel Ruanmai (軟埋), she could not have known that within five years her books would begin to disappear from public life in China. Reprints of her backlist—nearly a hundred books, including novels, novellas, and collections of stories and essays—would be halted, and her new work would be effectively banned from publication in the country. Her very name, once respected—she had served as chair of the Hubei Writers Association and had been awarded the Lu Xun Literary Prize, one of China’s highest literary honors—would become reviled, inseparably joined to the seventy-six-day lockdown, from January 23 to April 8, 2020, that affected tens of millions in Hubei province and its capital city, Wuhan.

For sixty of those days Fang Fang kept a public lockdown diary, fengcheng riji. Each post appeared on her Weibo (microblog) account late at night or in the early hours of the morning. An entry might record the names of the dead, encourage readers to follow the latest government directives, note the flowers outside her window, or describe the news reports and essays she couldn’t get out of her head. She amplified the calls of fellow Wuhan residents desperate for help, and the words of doctors sounding warnings; she wrote that “how you treat the weakest and most vulnerable members of your society” is the “one true test” of a country’s civility. On January 27 Fang Fang wrote:

When the world of officialdom skips over the natural process of competition, it leads to disaster; empty talk about political correctness without seeking truth from facts also leads to disaster; prohibiting people from speaking the truth and the media from reporting the truth leads to disaster; and now we are tasting the fruits of these disasters, one by one.

The diary became a cultural phenomenon. Individual entries—forwarded, published on websites and news portals, compiled into PDFs, read aloud on streaming sites—reached an estimated 50 million people in China. According to The Guardian, by early April the diary had 380 million views on Weibo alone.

What happened to Fang Fang and to her Wuhan Diary, as it is known in English, is a devastating example of cyber disinformation, and the speed at which conspiracy theories and persecution campaigns gain traction. By January 2020, as Fang Fang’s posts gained popularity, Weibo had begun erasing individual entries; within weeks, online attacks spreading false information about her posts and reporting her for rule violations were flooding the Chinese Internet. Extremist nationalists accused Fang Fang of fabricating stories.

Critics mocked her for not leaving her apartment to report on the situation (she spoke regularly to health care workers and administrators by phone and included their observations in her diary) while she, like most Wuhan residents, was under lockdown orders. They said that her calls for government accountability were being used by Western governments, and particularly by Donald Trump, to demand reparations from China. When Weibo temporarily suspended her account, she turned to WeChat. On March 3 a neighbor texted her, “The begonias on your front porch are in bloom, but your WeChat seems to have been shut down.” Friends posted on her behalf.

In April word circulated online that Fang Fang’s lockdown diary was already being translated and would be published internationally. She was denounced for selling out her country. On Chinese social and traditional media, a startling consensus began to emerge: Fang Fang, in allowing her diary to be translated and distributed around the world, had taken an internal conversation and offered it up to those who dehumanized her fellow citizens.

Initiated by agitprop news sites and outright trolls, the disinformation campaign moved like wildfire through a broad cross section of society, amplified by state media, lifestyle and popular magazines, cultural influencers, political commentators, government officials, professors at leading academic institutions, retired members of the military, and ordinary people whose lives had been upended by the pandemic. Prominent figures called her a threat to national security and wondered why no criminal charges had been brought against her; the most extreme voices called for her death.

How a popular sixty-five-year-old writer could become, for so many, the embodiment of disloyalty, deception, and venality—at a time when policymakers were under scrutiny for their handling of a virus that, in April 2020, had officially claimed around five thousand lives in China and, unofficially since then, somewhere between 80,000 and 1.5 million—is both a confounding and familiar story. The mistakes of those in positions of authority eventually evaporated, replaced by a narrative of triumph over a deadly virus, but Fang Fang’s name in China will likely never be entirely freed from stigma.

For most of her time as a published writer, Fang Fang was celebrated for the intimacy and skill with which she wrote about everyday lives, particularly the lives of those whose labor was crucial to the new economy. Her fiction and that of Chi Li, who is also from Wuhan, as well as Liu Zhenyun, from Henan province, helped define the “new realism” movement that emerged in China in the 1980s. They tried to resist false consolations and moral judgments; they rejected the sublime and the transcendent; they explored a spiritual emptiness that seemed to infect even those desperate to remake their lives.

In contrast to painterly, ambiguous novels like Ge Fei’s Flock of Brown Birds (1988), or the bold narrative unreliability in Can Xue’s Huangni Street (1987), works of new realism used informal language to communicate the texture of ordinary existence. Through the 1990s and into the new millennium, they found a wide and receptive readership. Fang Fang’s lockdown diary had initially been read as a product of that tradition, an empathetic and frank chronicle of a shared experience. On February 2, 2020, she recalled a phrase she had written nearly a decade before: “One speck of dust from an entire era may not seem like much, but when it falls on your head it’s like a mountain crashing on you.” Weeks later, when asked by a reporter if these words had been prophetic, Fang Fang replied, “That sentence isn’t prophetic, it is reality—a reality that is with us during every era.”

In a 2021 interview Eric Liu, the editor of China Digital Times, described how strict control of public discourse “necessitated hatred targets.” As Wuhan weathered the hardship of the lockdown, a sense of betrayal began to build across society and concentrate upon a scapegoat. Surely few could have anticipated the target: not an investigative report but a public diary written in real time; not a societal structure but a sole individual; not a political leader or government official but a novelist.

Fang Fang’s novel Ruanmai, translated with great sensitivity as Soft Burial by the scholar Michael Berry, is, on its surface, about the disappearance of three families, encompassing dozens if not hundreds of people across multiple generations; only four survivors remain. But it also chronicles a collective experience, the way that wealth was transferred in the late 1940s and early 1950s from a land-owning, educated, privileged class to the tenant farmers and laborers who worked the land. This redistribution remains a defining act of the Chinese Communist Party, and the speed with which it was carried out, the violence that the architects of the Land Reform Campaign deemed necessary, and the subsequent amnesia that both victims and perpetrators needed in order to persevere in its aftermath left no life untouched.

The story recounted in Soft Burial begins in 1952, when a young woman is pulled from a turbulent river. Falling unconscious, covered in horrifying bruises, she is pronounced dead. But before the undertaker arrives, a doctor sees the faintest tremor in one hand and insists the patient be kept under observation. When, more than two weeks later, the young woman wakes, she does not know her name, where she is from, or how she was swept into the river.

The doctor, Wu Jiaming, tells her that she cried out a name before losing consciousness: Ding Zi. To preserve this trace of her identity, the doctor registers her name as Ding Zitao—adding a reference to the season in which she was saved, when peach trees, tao, begin to bloom. The young woman attempts to start over. She is hired as a nanny in the household of a political commissar and stays with the family for ten years. Then one day, Wu Jiaming is transferred to the city where she lives. The two reconnect and she marries him.

For a time, Ding Zitao tries to remember the years before the river, but each attempt brings on overwhelming terror. It is now the 1960s, and the first persecution campaigns of the Cultural Revolution, which took the lives of as many as two million people, shut down nearly every university, and displaced millions to rural and remote areas, will soon begin. Wu Jiaming tells her that forgetting is not always betrayal; in some cases it might be the only way to survive.

About four years into their marriage, a tragic accident takes Wu Jiaming’s life. Ding Zitao works tirelessly as a caregiver to earn money for their son Qinglin’s education, and he eventually studies architectural design. After years of struggle, he is promoted and fulfills a childhood promise, building a home for his mother so that she can live in comfort, surrounded by her family.

By now, sometime in the early 2000s, Ding Zitao is nearing retirement. The memories that she cannot consciously access exist as a root system beneath her life, linked to other buried histories. Concealed from Ding Zitao’s sight, these roots becomes visible through the fleeting encounters that permeate Qinglin’s job and daily existence. Characters emerge and vanish within a handful of pages: former soldiers, Communist cadres, tenant farmers, and the children of perpetrators and victims (often both at once) criss-cross eastern Sichuan for work, pleasure, tourism. The landscape itself seems to slide long-separated individuals into proximity, but not quite near enough for them to fully recognize one another. Two old men, for instance, meet by chance in a shop selling Shanxi noodles, never fully realizing that each holds a key to the other’s past. Glossing over the Land Reform Campaign, one says, “We shouldn’t talk about it, but it’s really one of those things that is just too difficult to mention.”

Recognition, however, is tantalizingly near. A former commander asks after a young cadre he remembers, only to learn of the young man’s shocking murder. A professor researching remote estates wins the trust of an old man who tenaciously guards a mass grave, containing the corpses of the influential family who once employed him, all of whom died in a single night. A former member of the Communist resistance, already in his nineties, fights to be absolved of political crimes so that he might clear his name before he dies. Wu Jiaming’s diaries, which span 1948 to 1968 and illuminate the lives of myriad characters, are delivered into his son’s possession but remain unread for two critical years, when a man who might have answered his questions is still alive. And Ding Zitao, now living in her son’s lovingly built home, experiences an emotional collapse. She falls into a catatonic state.

Her illness eludes diagnosis, and Qinglin is desperate to find a remedy. He has an odd feeling that she is “existing in a kind of secret state.” At last his friend Zhongyong offers a clue, confiding that when his father was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, he’d said that he was “in a process of leaving this world and heading to another place.” The father, sitting with them as they talk, seems lost. But he interrupts when the two men bring up Ding Zitao. Without lifting his gaze from the floor, he says, “Her spirit is no longer of this world.”

Time, for Ding Zitao, is not whole. The elderly woman who exists in the early 2000s and the young woman who exists in 1952 are severed from each other. Chinese beliefs that draw from Buddhism, Taoism, and traditional mythologies describe how a soul, preparing for reincarnation, embarks on a journey through the underworld. This realm, a combination of purgatory and hell, is sometimes imagined as having eighteen levels. In its worst manifestations, the body is grotesquely tortured but cannot die. This conception of an afterlife—which is also a preparatory interval, a continuity that joins death and rebirth—holds that no past action, or crime, is erased. Punishment avoided in life is exacted here without mercy.

Soft Burial is structured like a double helix. In one strand, the world is temporal. Qinglin ensures that his mother is kept comfortable and without pain, and continues his work. He and Zhongyong lead a group of architecture students into remote areas of eastern Sichuan to study abandoned family compounds now eroding into nature. Behind dilapidated walls, they find exquisite living spaces separated by as many as twenty inner courtyards; design elements from multiple dynasties remain visible. These sites evoke intense emotion in Qinglin. Meeting elderly men, he hears disturbing stories of which he’d been entirely ignorant.

In the other strand of the novel, the world is eternal. Ding Zitao’s memories return in reverse order: she is “back on the road from where she once came…. Everything now seemed to be so clear.” Early on in this journey, she recalls learning that a person is born with a soul “rich and full”; over time, it disintegrates. If the person is fortunate, they will turn themselves around, “retrieving those lost bits of his soul, one piece at a time.”

Ding Zitao’s descent into hell, which she experiences first as a fall in which she feels “all of the bones in her body cracking,” and then as an ascent up “row after row of lines,” is harrowing. On one level, her in-laws learn that soon they will be paraded in a denunciation session that will end, in all likelihood, in executions. Observing the eerie calm of the family meeting, Ding Zitao recalls that she had

witnessed a scene like this before. When you are standing there on that platform facing the villagers’ insults and attacks, the only thing you hope for is death. It is difficult to imagine the degree to which you need to harden your heart in order to get to a place where you still want to go on living.

This strand of the novel constitutes both a journey into the interior of China’s twentieth century and a very personal reckoning with a severed self—a consciousness that has, for the better part of a lifetime, survived by forgetting. The elder Ding Zitao found peace with a loving husband and a beloved son; she knew poverty, hard work, and deep loneliness. The younger Ding Zitao is destroyed by the agony of remembrance. Her mother tells her that death brings an end to suffering. “But,” her mother continues, “there is another way. If you can erase your memory, you’ll never know that you were once in pain.”

The question at the epicenter of Soft Burial is simply: What happened? What happened to Ding Zitao, her family, village, and country? The characters often turn to words like “fate” and “chance” to explain the horrors they face, but do these words offer consolation because they camouflage deeds carried out by their neighbors and fellow citizens?

Qinglin and Zhongyong were children during the Cultural Revolution. Like many of their generation, when the political campaigns ended, they left their home provinces in search of better lives. Qinglin, now a manager for a real estate developer, is fascinated by the coexistence of the environment and human life, and the boundary between outer and inner worlds. He reflects on how individuals

maintain their privacy and independence, achieve freedom and feel at home in their own skin…. What kind of overall environment could allow people to experience beauty, what else people might seek in life besides a comfortable home.

In the mansions they visit, Qinglin and Zhongyong see remnants of the private wealth that was once carefully concealed in remote areas. Organized violence emptied these homes, some of which were several hundred years old, but their exteriors, designed to blend into, and be shrouded by, the environment, are preserved like the skeletal remains of ancient creatures. Zhongyong believes that only dwellings that become “one with nature can stand a chance of being preserved over time.” He seems to be referring not just to buildings but to political structures and systems of belief; he and his students discuss how after the Land Reform Campaign, private wealth, accrued over generations, didn’t simply vanish; it became the foundation of state wealth.

The campaign destroyed local power centers. Tenant farmers and laborers who had lived at the mercy of their often brutal overseers suddenly found themselves in an upside-down world. The shock released decades, and in many cases generations, of pent-up misery. Landowning families were subjected to struggle sessions and collective punishments. They were beaten, starved, tortured, and executed. Some of the wealthy were guilty of unspeakable crimes; some were killed in petty feuds; some were tortured and murdered for no reason at all.

Around two million people were murdered, though some estimates run higher. Cruelty in the name of justice appeared to wipe the slate clean, but turned out to be just the prologue to ever-widening purges. In Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958–1962 (2012), Yang Jisheng observes that even as land redistribution significantly decreased the numbers of the poor, subsequent campaigns divided “middle peasants” into further subclasses, ensuring that a class of people remained readily available to serve as scapegoats or political enemies.

In the life of a nation, perpetrators and victims coexist. They are bound together, if peace holds, in a shared geography and social structure. Soft Burial’s force arises from its insistently interconnected threads. Lives that form a unity never fully glimpse the ways they have been knotted together. The novel makes no claim to conveying ultimate truths; there is no moralizing, only a continuous dialogue. For Zhongyong, attention—to others but also to architecture, landscape, vanished histories—becomes a way of belonging; without it, people are alienated from their environments and become disturbed. But Qinglin accepts this disturbance as a small price to pay for stability, which seems to require looking away; his parents, he knows, wanted him to have a “carefree and relaxed life.” The murdered and lost, he argues, “should be allowed to become one with the earth.” Qinglin voices what many will feel about the horrors of the past: “I don’t want to know anymore.”

The phrase “soft burial” mourns those who could not receive a proper burial, whose remains were treated merely as waste. Some believe that such a burial, a body pushed hastily into the ground, without a coffin or even a shroud—the physical counterpart of inadequate remembering—prevents the soul from finding peace; reincarnation will be impossible. The novel makes clear that for Ding Zitao, forgetting was survival. Qinglin, thinking of his friend Zhongyong, adds another layer to this divide: “I’ve chosen to forget, while you have chosen to leave a record. But once you record what happened, how will I ever be able to forget?” Meanwhile the novel itself acts as a site, however small, however incomplete, for remembrance.

Soft Burial, like The Running Flame, another of Fang Fang’s novels newly translated into English by Berry, is notable for how it documents the lives of women who, as Fang Fang writes in the novel’s afterword, “shouldered the heaviest burden and the deepest pain, and yet, in the end, their lives seemed so inconsequential, as if they had never even existed in this world.”

 The Running Flame is a concise and lacerating depiction of a young woman who, after years of brutal beatings by her husband, runs away to remake her life. She finds hope in pragmatism: “Since she couldn’t have any of the things she really wanted, why couldn’t she at least have money?” But in defending this tenuous freedom, she commits a brutal act of vengeance.

The subject of both novels is the individual self molded, remolded, surviving, or being consumed by cataclysmic change. Fang Fang marks these shifts as they occur in the consciousness and subconsciousness of different characters, and she is attentive to how these shifts create their intersecting realities. Taken together, they construct the fabric of society. Her awareness of this entanglement also resonates throughout her lockdown diary: “Let all of us in Wuhan leave behind a collective memory of what happened.”

Translation, Disinformation, and Wuhan Diary is Michael Berry’s chilling account of the campaign that destroyed Fang Fang’s name in China and threatened her life. It is a rigorous examination of a stunningly efficient disinformation campaign, untangling how millions of voices seemed to unify, almost overnight, against a single target. The book, as Berry writes, is also a “gesture of preservation.” While translating Wuhan Diary, he was “continually haunted by the shadow of disappearance.” Not only were Fang Fang’s diary entries scrubbed from the Internet in China, but “hundreds of articles and posts about the diary were also erased without a trace.”

This disappearance grew to encompass not only words in support of Fang Fang, but also, months later, some of the posts and publications attacking her. Berry felt a responsibility to record the infrastructure of this disinformation campaign—constructed as it was from millions of posts, stories, essays, messages, and comments—given the ease with which our present technologies, often in the hands of governments or corporations, can erase such evidence.

Among the most striking aspects of Fang Fang’s voice are her sympathy and sheer stubbornness. In her lockdown diary she is like an older sister who, without wanting to alarm you, is urging you to take precautions. She challenges officials and others in positions of authority, but she is asking for something basic: that those who put politics and career ahead of human life should pay a price. The entries read primarily as a place to process, in real time, sixty days that were completely without precedent. When many were searching for information and hope, millions found solace in the persistence of her voice.

As the tide turned against Fang Fang, the celebrated novelist Yan Lianke permitted one of his lectures to be published. On February 21, 2020, he told his students at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology:

Imagine this: the author Fang Fang did not exist in today’s Wuhan. She did not keep records or pen down her personal memories and feelings. Neither were there tens of thousands of people who were like Fang Fang and who would send out loud cries for help via their mobile phones. What would we have heard? What would we have seen?

Fang Fang, to the surprise of many, has not recanted or broken down. She has said that she will not leave her country. She has demonstrated a courage that, frankly, is astonishing to witness. The hope Fang Fang seems to articulate is both simple and powerful: a refusal of discontinuity. On February 17, 2020, in her lockdown diary, she wrote:

Yesterday’s post on WeChat was deleted again. Besides helplessness there is only helplessness. Where can I share this record of my life in this besieged city?… To observe, to reflect, to experience, and, ultimately, to set my pen down to paper and write. Don’t tell me this is a mistake?

A question, an assertion, and, finally, an intimate address to the reader, for whom the words might already be disappearing from the screen.