Return of the Ruined Capital

By Yang Guang (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-08-06 10:02

A novel's reprint is usually a non-event, especially in today's saturated book market. But the reprint of Jia Pingwa's Ruined Capital (Fei Du, also translated as Abandoned City) is a big deal as the book recently emerged from underground circulation for the first time in 16 years.

Reprinted by Writers Publishing House, Fei Du is being packaged together with Turbulence (Fu Zao) and Local Accent (Qin Qiang) as a trilogy. The publisher has been sending copies to book dealers across the country since July 28. A book launch is to be held on Saturday at the Jia Pingwa Literature and Art Museum in Xi'an, northwest China's Shaanxi province, with Jia in attendance to give out signed copies.

First published by Beijing Publishing House in 1993, the magnum opus of 400,000 characters became an instant hit amid a publicity blitzkrieg. The first 500,000 copies were snapped up immediately.

Writer Jia Pingwa's reputation was almost eclipsed after publishing of Fei Du

Its mixed reviews catapulted Fei Du into the center of a major controversy. Three months later, all the sound and fury aroused by the novel died down suddenly, following a ban by the authorities for the novel's "vulgar style and pornographic descriptions."

But Fei Du never really disappeared and the controversy surrounding it never ended. On the contrary, the ban became a catalyst for the novel's wild underground circulation. According to incomplete statistics, more than 1 million copies have been formally or semi-formally published and the number of pirated copies likely exceeds 12 million. Jia himself has reportedly collected more than 60 pirated versions.

Fei Du features the life of four intellectual idlers in "Xijing", the fictional name for Jia's long-time home of Xi'an. Labeled by some as the modern Plum in the Golden Vase (Jinpingmei, a Ming Dynasty erotica), Jia's reputation gained from a series of award-winning short stories and novellas in the 1970s and 1980s, was eclipsed. The previous "clean" writer was denounced as an "indecent rouge" overnight.

In a dialogue with literary critic Xie Youshun, Jia reflected on the impact of Fei Du on his personal life and his writing career. "I have twice known the ways of the world most profoundly. The first was when my father was falsely convicted as a counter-revolutionary, the second was when the controversy generated by Fei Du broke out."

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