Spotlight on rural pain

Jia Pingwa's latest novel is as much an account of a wronged woman as it is about the desertion of villages in China

Jia Pingwa's new novel, Ji Hua, tells the story of a woman who is freed after three years after being kidnapped.

The author, who won the Mao Dun Literature Prize, China's top literary award, for his earlier novel Qin Qiang (Qinqiang Opera), has named his latest book after an imaginary flower, which has later found to be the Chinese caterpillar fungus.

Ji Hua is the tale of Hu Die, a girl from a poor rural family who accompanies her single mother to the city. But her urban dreams are soon shattered as she is abducted by a group of people, taken to a village and sold to a family. Raped by Hei Liang, a member of that family, she lives through her troubles until her mother rescues her with the help of police and a reporter.

But the seeming end of the ordeal doesn't leave her happy. She returns to the same village to reunite with her baby boy, whose biological father is her former captor.

"When I wrote the ending, I wrote it as a start, another start of Hu Die's journey," Jia, 64, told his audience at a recent ceremony in Beijing to launch his book, which has been published by People's Literature Publishing House.

"Nobody knows how it goes from there - would she be beaten and disabled like many others in real life or would she try and work things out with Hei," he says in a strong provincial accent.

Jia is among China's most influential contemporary writers, and his books have been translated into many languages, including English, French, German, Russian, Japanese and Korean.

Chinese Nobel-laureate Mo Yan wrote in Soochow Academic, a bilingual magazine published in Jiangsu province: "One cannot imagine any research on contemporary Chinese literature without a close study of the works of Jia Pingwa."

Ji Hua was written based on a real-life story that Jia had heard from a resident of Xi'an, in Northwest China's Shaanxi province, a decade ago.

As Jia writes in the book's postscript: "The story stabbed my heart like a knife. Each time I thought of it, I felt a deeper pain."

But it took Jia a while to write the story as he searched for a narrative style.

"I kept thinking of how I could tell the story about the miserable experience of an abducted woman without making it sound melodramatic," he says.

Jia, who also comes from a rural family, then began to focus on population thinning in rural areas of China. Last year, he went to the Shaanxi countryside, visiting many villages along the highways.

"To my surprise, I saw only three or four people around big houses, but almost none around other residences," he says.

When he looked through the cracks of doors, he saw tall, wild grass growing in the yards.

Several years ago, in many remote villages in Shaanxi, the number of residents fell so much that the villages were merged into one.

"The villages need to survive, but there are very few young people left because they all go to big cities to look for income opportunities. There are almost no women (in the villages)," he says.

Many women who go to the cities with their husbands either divorce or abandon them, fearing the prospect of returning to the poor villages.

"In the past, Chinese literature either criticized or praised life in rural areas. But now it's impossible to do so," says Jia.

"Watching the situation arouses an unspeakable pain, just like the pain felt when a couple that has lost their only child sees a neighbor's child. It's a pain only the couple knows."

The situation reminded Jia of the story about the abducted girl, and resulted in the new novel of around 200 pages - his shortest - using a concept he borrowed from Chinese ink painting, an art form in which he also excels.

Instead of depicting pure good and evil, his book creates an organic image of a remote village in his home province, where challenging living conditions present many complexities.

Chinese author Liang Hong, who is known for her works about the Chinese countryside, says for her, Ji Hua isn't about an abducted woman, but more about how to communicate with the land. Through the abducted woman's perspective, readers not only see the problems of the rural areas, but also the different aspects of village life.

"In ink painting, white and black seem to integrate more than contrast. So all the characters in the novel are part of the village, and each person has his or her position on issues," says Liang.

"The Hei family who bought Hu Die has more than an oppressive side. They try to find ways to communicate with the outside world such as by doing business, and even with Hu Die to reach a reconciliation," she says.

According to Chen Xiaoming, a professor of Chinese literature at Peking University, Jia's writing is both about wronged women of rural China and the living conditions there.

The author writes about the villages that have been deserted for the cities - villages with history, beauty and vitality.

yangyangs@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily European Weekly 05/06/2016 page18)