杀戮记忆

作家方方著书<软埋>的英文版已出版，<纽约书评>(new york book review )最新一期上刊载了Madeleine Thien对此书评述及简介了方方(作品)在疫情几年间的一些遭遇，把这一文章用机器翻译的中文版本贴在下面，英语原文也附在后面供对机器的晦涩翻译难以捉摸的网友参考。对不了解方方所写这些故事及其发生背景的网友们，希望这篇双语贴文能帮助您有大致了解。

杀戮记忆

田嘉琳

中国作家方方的小说《软埋》探讨了几代人的创伤性民族记忆，尽管她在 2020 年的新冠日记使她成为中国无情虚假信息运动的目标。

插图：Manshen Lo

2016年，当中国作家方方出版她的小说《软埋》时，她不可能知道她的书会在五年内开始从中国的公共生活中消失。她的旧书单——近百本书，包括小说、中篇小说、短篇小说和散文集——的重印将被停止，她的新作品实际上将被禁止在该国出版。她的名字，曾经受到尊重——她曾担任湖北省作家协会主席，并被授予中国最高文学荣誉之一鲁迅文学奖——将受到谩骂，与 2020 年 1 月 23 日至 4 月 8 日为期 76 天的封锁密不可分，这场封锁影响了湖北省及其省会 武汉的数千万人。 

在那六十天里，方方一直公开写着封城日记。每篇帖子都在深夜或凌晨出现在她的微博账户上。一个条目可能会记录死者的名字，鼓励读者遵循最新的政府指令，注意她窗外的鲜花，或者描述她无法摆脱的新闻报道和文章。她放大了武汉同胞急需帮助的呼声，以及医生发出警告的话语;她写道，“你如何对待社会中最弱小和最脆弱的成员”是对一个国家文明的“唯一真正考验”。1 月 27 日，方方写道：

当官场世界跳过竞争的自然过程时，它会导致灾难;空谈政治正确而不实事求是也会导致灾难;禁止人们说真话，禁止媒体报道真相会导致灾难;现在我们正在一个接一个地品尝这些灾难的果实。

日记成为一种文化现象。单个条目——转发、发布在网站和新闻门户网站上、编译成 PDF、在流媒体网站上大声朗读——在中国覆盖了大约 5000 万人。据《卫报》报道，截至 4 月初，该日记仅在微博上就有 3.8 亿次浏览。

方芳和她的《武汉日记》（Wuhan Diary）的遭遇，是网络虚假信息的毁灭性例子，也是阴谋论和迫害运动获得关注的速度。到 2020 年 1 月，随着方方的帖子越来越受欢迎，微博已经开始删除单个条目;几周内，网络攻击传播有关她帖子的虚假信息并举报她违反规则，这充斥着中国互联网。极端民族主义者指责方方编造故事。

批评者嘲笑她没有离开自己的公寓报告情况（她定期与医护人员和管理人员通电话，并将他们的观察记录在日记中），而她和大多数武汉居民一样，被封锁了。他们说，她对政府问责的呼吁被西方政府政府，特别是唐纳德·特朗普（Donald Trump）利用，要求中国赔偿。当微博暂时暂停她的账户时，她转向了微信。3月3日，一位邻居给她发短信说：“你家门口的秋海棠开得好了，但你的微信好像被关掉了。“朋友们替她发帖。

4 月，网上流传着 Fang Fang 的封锁日记已经被翻译并将在国际上出版的消息。她因出卖自己的国家而受到谴责。在中国的社交媒体和传统媒体上，一个惊人的共识开始出现：方芳允许她的日记被翻译并传播到世界各地，她进行了一次内部对话，并将其提供给那些非人化的同胞。

由煽动性新闻网站和公然的喷子发起的虚假信息运动像野火一样蔓延到社会的广泛领域，并被国家媒体、生活方式和流行杂志、文化影响者、政治评论员、政府官员、领先学术机构的教授、退役军人以及生活被大流行颠覆的普通人放大。知名人士称她对国家安全构成威胁，并想知道为什么没有对她提出刑事指控;最极端的声音要求她死去。

在2020年4月，政策制定者因处理一种病毒而受到审查的时候，一位65岁的流行作家如何成为不忠诚、欺骗和贪婪的化身——这个病毒在2020年4月正式在中国夺走了大约5000人的生命，此后非正式地夺走了8万至150万之间的生命——既令人困惑又熟悉的故事。那些当权者的错误最终消失了，取而代之的是战胜致命病毒的叙述，但方方的名字在中国可能永远不会完全摆脱耻辱。

在她作为出版作家的大部分时间里，方方以她写日常生活的亲密和技巧而闻名，尤其是那些劳动对新经济至关重要的人的生活。她的小说和同样来自武汉的齐力以及来自河南省的刘振云的小说帮助定义了 1980 年代在中国兴起的“新现实主义”运动。他们试图抵制虚假的安慰和道德评判;他们拒绝崇高和超然;他们探索了一种精神空虚，这种空虚似乎甚至感染了那些渴望重塑生活的人。


与葛飞的《褐鸟群》（1988）等绘画性、模棱两可的小说，或灿雪的《黄泥街》（1987）中大胆的叙事不可靠相比，新现实主义作品使用非正式的语言来传达普通存在的质感。从 1990 年代到新千年，他们找到了广泛且乐于接受的读者群。方方的封锁日记最初被解读为这种传统的产物，是一部富有同情心和坦率的共同经历编年史。2020 年 2 月 2 日，她想起了近十年前写的一句话：“整个时代的一粒尘埃可能看起来并不多，但当它落在你的头上时，就像一座山撞上你。几周后，当记者问到这些话是否是预言时，方方回答说：“那句话不是预言性的，而是现实——每个时代都与我们同在的现实。

在 2021 年的一次采访中，中国数字时代编辑 Eric Liu 描述了对公共话语的严格控制如何“需要仇恨目标”。随着武汉经受住封锁的艰辛，一种背叛感开始在整个社会中形成，并集中在替罪羊身上。当然，很少有人能预料到目标：不是调查报告，而是实时写的公共日记;不是一个社会结构，而是一个唯一的个体;不是政治领袖或政府官员，而是一位小说家。

方方的小说《阮迈》（Ruanmai）被学者迈克尔·贝瑞（Michael Berry）极其敏感地翻译为《软葬》（Soft Burial），从表面上看，它讲述了三个家庭的失踪，包括几代人中的几十个人，甚至几百人;只剩下四名幸存者。但它也记录了一种集体经历，即财富在 1940 年代末和 1950 年代初从拥有土地、受过教育的特权阶层转移到耕种土地的佃农和劳动者的方式。这种重新分配仍然是中国共产党的决定性行为，其实施的速度、土地改革运动的策划者认为必要的暴力，以及受害者和肇事者为了在灾后坚持下去而需要的失忆症，没有一个生命能幸免于难。

《软葬》中讲述的故事始于 1952 年，当时一名年轻女子被从湍急的河流中拉出。她昏迷不醒，浑身是可怕的瘀伤，被宣布死亡。但在殡仪馆到达之前，医生看到了一只手最微弱的震颤，并坚持要对病人进行观察。两个多星期后，当这位年轻女子醒来时，她不知道自己的名字、来自哪里，也不知道自己是如何被卷入河中的。

医生吴佳明告诉她，她在失去知觉前喊出了一个名字：丁子。为了保留她的身份，医生将她的名字登记为丁子韬——并提到了她得救的季节，当时桃树道开始绽放。这位年轻女子试图重新开始。她被聘为政委家中的保姆，与家人在一起生活了十年。然后有一天，吴佳明被调到她居住的城市。两人重新联系上，她嫁给了他。

有一段时间，丁子涛试图回忆河流之前的岁月，但每一次尝试都会带来压倒性的恐惧。现在是 1960 年代，文化大革命的第一次迫害运动即将开始，这场运动夺走了多达 200 万人的生命，几乎关闭了每所大学，并使数百万人流离失所到农村和偏远地区。吴佳明告诉她，遗忘并不总是背叛;在某些情况下，这可能是生存的唯一途径。

他们结婚大约四年后，一场悲惨的事故夺走了吴佳明的生命。丁子涛不知疲倦地做保姆，为儿子青林的教育赚钱，他最终学习了建筑设计。经过多年的奋斗，他得到了晋升并实现了童年的承诺，为他的母亲建造了一个家，让她可以在家人的陪伴下舒适地生活。

到现在为止，在 2000 年代初的某个时候，丁子涛已经接近退休了。她无法有意识地访问的记忆作为根系存在于她生命之下，与其他被埋藏的历史相关联。这些根源隐藏在丁子涛的视线之外，通过渗透在青林的工作和日常生活中的短暂相遇变得清晰可见。人物在几页纸中出现和消失：退伍军人、共产党干部、佃农，以及肇事者和受害者的子女（通常同时出现）在四川东部纵横交错地工作、娱乐和旅游。景观本身似乎将分离已久的个体滑向附近，但还不够近，以至于他们无法完全认出彼此。例如，两个老人在一家卖山西面的商店里偶然相遇，从未完全意识到每个人都拥有通往对方过去的钥匙。有人对土地改革运动（Land Reform Campaign）进行了掩饰，他说：“我们不应该谈论它，但这确实是那些太难提及的事情之一。

然而，认可已经非常接近了。一位前指挥官询问他记得的一位年轻干部，却得知了这位年轻人令人震惊的谋杀案。一位研究偏远庄园的教授赢得了一位老人的信任，这位老人顽强地守卫着一个万人坑，里面埋葬着曾经雇用他的有影响力的家族的尸体，这些人都在一夜之间死去。一位已经九十多岁的前共产主义抵抗运动成员为获得政治罪行的赦免而奋斗，以便他在死前洗清自己的罪名。吴佳明的日记时间跨度从1948年到1968年，描绘了无数人物的生活，这些日记被送到他儿子的手中，但在关键的两年里没有被阅读，当时一个可能回答了他问题的人还活着。而丁子涛现在住在儿子精心建造的房子里，经历了情感上的崩溃。她陷入了紧张状态。

她的病没有得到诊断，青林急切地寻找治疗方法。他有一种奇怪的感觉，她“存在于一种秘密状态中”。最后，他的朋友钟勇提供了一条线索，他透露，当他的父亲处于阿尔茨海默氏症的早期阶段时，他曾说过他“正在离开这个世界，前往另一个地方”。父亲和他们坐在一起交谈，似乎很迷茫。但当两个人提到丁子涛时，他打断了他。他没有把目光从地板上移开，说道，“她的灵魂已经不属于这个世界了。

时间，对丁子涛来说，并不完整。存在于 2000 年代初期的老妇人和存在于 1952 年的年轻妇人彼此分离。源自佛教、道教和传统神话的中国信仰描述了一个灵魂如何为轮回做准备，踏上穿越冥界的旅程。这个领域是炼狱和地狱的结合体，有时被想象为有 18 个层次。在最糟糕的表现中，身体受到怪诞的折磨，但不会死。这种来世的概念——也是一个准备间隔，一个连接死亡和重生的连续性——认为过去的行为或罪行都不会被抹去。生活中避免的惩罚在这里被毫不留情地执行。

软埋葬的结构类似于双螺旋。在一条链中，世界是时间性的。青林确保他的母亲感到舒适，没有痛苦，并继续他的工作。他和钟勇带领一群建筑专业的学生走进川东的偏远地区，研究现在正在侵蚀到大自然中的废弃家庭建筑群。在破旧的墙壁后面，他们发现精致的生活空间被多达 20 个内部庭院隔开;来自多个朝代的设计元素仍然可见。这些遗址在青林中唤起了强烈的情感。在与老人见面时，他听到了他完全不知道的令人不安的故事。

在小说的另一条线索中，世界是永恒的。丁子韬的记忆以相反的顺序返回：她“回到了她曾经来的路上......现在一切似乎都那么清晰了。在这段旅程的早期，她回忆起了解到一个人天生就有一个“丰富而充实”的灵魂;随着时间的推移，它会瓦解。如果这个人很幸运，他们会把自己转过来，“找回他灵魂中那些丢失的碎片，一次一块”。

丁子韬堕入地狱，她首先经历的是坠落，她感到“全身的骨头都裂开了”，然后是“一排又一排的线条”上升，令人痛心。在某种程度上，她的公婆得知，他们很快就会在一场谴责会议上被游行，而这场谴责很可能会以处决告终。看着家会那令人毛骨悚然的平静，丁子涛回忆起她曾经

之前也目睹过这样的一幕。当你站在那个平台上面对村民的侮辱和攻击时，你唯一希望的就是死亡。很难想象你需要硬起心来达到你仍然想继续生活的地方。

小说的这一部分既构成了一次进入中国 20 世纪内部的旅程，也构成了对一个被切断的自我的非常个人的清算——一个在一生的大部分时间里，都通过遗忘而幸存的意识。长老丁子涛与慈爱的丈夫和爱子找到了平静;她知道贫穷、辛苦工作和深深的孤独。年轻的丁子涛被回忆的痛苦摧毁了。她的母亲告诉她，死亡会结束痛苦。“但是，”她的母亲继续说，“还有另一种方法。如果你能抹去你的记忆，你永远不会知道你曾经痛苦过。

《软葬》的核心问题很简单：发生了什么？丁子韬，她的家人、村庄和国家怎么了？角色经常求助于“命运”和“机会”等词来解释他们面临的恐怖，但这些词是否因为它们掩盖了邻居和同胞的行为而提供安慰？

青林和钟永是文化大革命期间的孩子。像他们这一代的许多人一样，当政治运动结束时，他们离开了家乡的省份，去寻找更好的生活。青林现在是一家房地产开发商的经理，她对环境与人类生活的共存，以及外在世界与内心的界限着迷。他反思了个人如何

保持他们的隐私和独立性，实现自由，在自己的皮肤中感到宾至如归......什么样的整体环境可以让人体验到美，除了舒适的家，人们在生活中还会寻求什么。

在他们参观的豪宅中，青林和钟永看到了曾经被小心翼翼地隐藏在偏远地区的私人财富的残余。有组织的暴力清空了这些房屋，其中一些房屋已有数百年的历史，但它们的外部旨在融入环境并被环境所笼罩，像古代生物的骨骼遗骸一样被保存下来。中永认为，只有“与自然融为一体”的住宅才有机会随着时间的推移而得到保护。他似乎不仅指建筑物，还指政治结构和信仰体系;他和他的学生讨论了在土地改革运动之后，几代人积累的私人财富如何没有简单地消失;它成为国家财富的基础。

这场运动摧毁了当地的权力中心。佃农和工人原本生活在他们通常残酷的监督者的摆布下，突然发现自己置身于一个颠倒的世界。这种震惊释放了几十年，在许多情况下是几代人被压抑的痛苦。地主家庭受到斗争和集体惩罚。他们被殴打、挨饿、折磨和处决。一些富人犯下了难以言喻的罪行;有些人在小事争斗中被杀;有些人无缘无故地被折磨和谋杀。

大约有 200 万人被谋杀，尽管一些估计更高。以正义为名的残忍似乎将石板擦干净，但事实证明，这只是不断扩大的清洗的序幕。在《墓碑：中国大饥荒，1958-1962》（2012）中，杨继生观察到，尽管土地再分配大大减少了穷人的数量，但随后的运动将“中农”划分为更多的子阶级，确保一类人仍然很容易成为替罪羊或政敌。

在一个国家的生活中，肇事者和受害者共存。如果和平保持下去，他们就会在一个共同的地理和社会结构中联系在一起。《Soft Burial》的力量来自于它始终相互关联的线索。形成一个整体的生命永远不会完全瞥见它们是如何打结在一起的。这部小说并没有声称传达了终极真理;没有说教，只有持续的对话。对钟永来说，关注——对他人的关注，也关注建筑、风景、消失的历史——成为一种归属感;没有它，人们就会与环境疏远并变得不安。但青林将这种干扰视为为稳定付出的小代价，这似乎需要移开视线;他知道，他的父母希望他过上“无忧无虑、轻松的生活”。他认为，那些被谋杀和迷失的人“应该被允许与地球合而为一”。青林说出了许多人对过去的恐怖的感受：“我不想知道了。”

“软葬”一词是为了哀悼那些无法得到适当安葬的人，他们的遗体仅仅被当作废物处理。有些人认为，这样的埋葬，一具尸体匆匆忙忙地推入地下，没有棺材，甚至没有裹尸布——这是记忆不足的物理对应物——阻止了灵魂找到平静;轮回是不可能的。小说清楚地表明，对丁子韬来说，遗忘就是生存。青林想起了他的朋友钟永，为这道鸿沟又增添了一层：“我选择了忘记，而你选择了留下记录。但是一旦你记录了发生的事情，我怎么能忘记呢？与此同时，小说本身也充当了一个纪念场所，无论多么小，多么不完整。

《软葬》与方方的另一部小说《奔跑的火焰》（The Running Flame）一样，最近由贝瑞（Berry）翻译成英文，它以记录女性的生活而著称，正如方方在小说后记中所写的那样，“肩负着最沉重的负担和最深的痛苦，然而，到头来，她们的生活似乎是如此微不足道，仿佛她们甚至从未存在于这个世界上。

The Running Flame 简洁而伤心地描绘了一位年轻女子，在被丈夫残忍殴打多年后，她逃跑以重塑自己的生活。她在实用主义中找到了希望：“既然她什么都得不到，为什么她至少不能有钱呢？但在捍卫这种脆弱的自由时，她犯下了残酷的报复行为。

两部小说的主题都是自我塑造、重塑、生存或被灾难性变化吞噬的个人。方方将这些变化标记在不同角色的意识和潜意识中，她关注这些变化如何创造它们相互交织的现实。它们共同构成了社会的结构。她对这种纠葛的认识也贯穿了她的封锁日记：“让我们所有在武汉的人都留下对所发生的事情的集体记忆。

翻译、虚假信息和武汉日记是迈克尔·贝瑞 （Michael Berry） 对摧毁芳芳在中国的名声并威胁她生命的运动的令人不寒而栗的描述。这是对一场极其有效的虚假信息运动的严格审查，揭示了数百万声音似乎几乎在一夜之间团结起来反对一个目标。正如贝瑞所写的那样，这本书也是一种“保存的姿态”。在翻译《武汉日记》时，他“一直被消失的阴影所困扰”。不仅方方的日记条目从中国的互联网上被删除，而且“数百篇关于日记的文章和帖子也被抹得无影无踪”。

这次失踪不仅包括支持方芳的言论，还包括几个月后一些攻击她的帖子和出版物。贝瑞觉得有责任记录这场虚假信息运动的基础设施——它是由数百万个帖子、故事、文章、信息和评论构建的——因为我们目前的技术，往往掌握在政府或公司手中，可以很容易地抹去这些证据。

方方的声音最引人注目的方面之一是她的同情和纯粹的固执。在她的封锁日记中，她就像一个姐姐，不想惊动你，而是敦促你采取预防措施。她挑战官员和其他权威人士，但她要求的是一些基本的东西：那些将政治和事业置于人命之上的人应该付出代价。这些条目主要被解读为一个实时处理 60 天的地方，这完全是前所未有的。当许多人都在寻找信息和希望时，数百万人在她坚持不懈的声音中找到了安慰。
当形势对方方不利时，著名小说家严连科允许出版他的一篇讲座。2020 年 2 月 21 日，他对香港科技大学的学生说：

想象一下：作者方方在今天的武汉并不存在。她没有记录或写下她的个人记忆和感受。也没有数以万计像方方一样，会通过手机大声呼救的人。我们会听到什么呢？我们会看到什么？

令许多人惊讶的是，方方并没有悔改或崩溃。她曾说过她不会离开自己的国家。坦率地说，她表现出的勇气令人震惊。方方似乎表达的希望既简单又有力：拒绝不连续性。2020 年 2 月 17 日，她在她的封锁日记中写道：

昨天在微信上的帖子又被删除了。除了无奈，只有无奈。我在哪里可以分享我在这座被围困的城市的生活记录?...观察、反思、体验，并最终将笔放在纸上书写。不告诉我这是一个错误？

一个问题，一个断言，最后，对读者的亲密称呼，对他们来说，这些文字可能已经从屏幕上消失了。

 

 

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 (软埋), 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.