CWN#12: Family literature triptych // An avant-garde time capsule // Light self-promo
Featuring Liao Jing 辽京, Peng Jianbin 彭剑斌, and guest critic Sha Tong 沙童
Welcome back to the Cold Window Newsletter. In this issue: a conversation with guest critic Sha Tong about Liao Jing, arguably the best writer about family drama in all of China. Further down, an experimental writer worth your time, and a call for collaborators.
Conversation: Sha Tong on the family stories of Liao Jing
Something a little different today. For months I’ve wanted to devote an issue to the author Liao Jing 辽京, whose surgically precise household dramas have made her one of the most widely read literary writers in China. But I’ve only read her two most recent short story collections, not her 2024 novel Spring Will Never Fall 《白露春分》, which immediately became her defining work when it won the Blancpain-Imaginist Prize last year.
That’s why I’ve brought in my good friend and reading role model Sha Tong 沙童 to serve as guest critic in this issue. Below is a translated, edited version of our conversation about Liao Jing, family narratives in Chinese vs. American literature, emotional violence, and changing family structures in today’s China.
Andrew: I remember that you were already reading Spring Will Never Fall before it won the Blancpain-Imaginist Prize last November. Can you give me an overview of the story?
Sha Tong: The story is nonlinear—it starts out from the perspective of the granddaughter Jiayue, but then the narrative voice shifts to focus on the grandmother Xiumei as she approaches the end of her life, eventually expanding to reveal the stories of all three generations of this family. Liao Jing herself has said that she chose this narrative strategy because human memory itself is not linear, but rather is woven together from various fragments. I think many Chinese readers will discover a lot of their own memories in this book, whether they’re memories of the dissolution of a family, memories of emotional and gendered violence, or memories of elder care and death.
It does seem like Liao Jing has a lot of interest in the hidden currents of violence that underlie family relationships. Her earlier collection Someone Is Dancing 《有人跳舞》 features several stories about how dismissiveness and unconscious acts of aggression can become baked into the everyday routine of men’s interactions with women. And On the Apple Tree 《在苹果树上》, her collection from last year, is all about unpacking the psychology of a single family from different angles.
The family in Spring Will Never Fall almost never expresses their approval or emotions to each other, although they do their best to put on a show of unity and filial piety in the presence of others. But it’s physical violence, emotional coldness, shaming, and judgment that form the true everyday baseline for this family.
The characters in the novel simply don’t have the ability to talk about their feelings. It’s not just that they don’t display affection, it’s also that they’re never open with each other about what they’ve gone through. They have no practice at talking about their sadness, because they know that they’ll only receive criticism and mockery in return, never comfort. For instance, Jiayue knows that if she tells her grandmother about her experience of intimate partner abuse, her grandmother will just accuse her of being careless or cheap. This pattern repeats between generations—they prioritize the appearance of love, not real love.
Why is so little warmth shown in this story? Is Liao Jing trying to tell a particularly melodramatic story of a particularly damaged family, or is she making a larger point about what goes on inside many families?
The point is not to say that there’s no love at all in this family. The point is, why is it that the family acts this way? Liao Jing can’t offer a direct answer in this novel, but she can provoke a strong feeling of empathy by making the reader realize how these same feelings of pain recur again and again in so many Chinese families. Do you think that these patterns are specific to China, or do they appear in some American families too?
Obviously emotional repression and abuse is also common in many American, non-Chinese families. But I have to admit that there’s a particular rhythm and weight to the way Liao Jing writes about family that I don’t run into often in American literature. For example, the point of On the Apple Tree seems to be revealing the web of mutual harm that all the members of this family are bound up in, but that none of them can acknowledge out loud. It’s not about some dramatic event that pushes the family to its breaking point, but more about gradually coming to recognize this toxic dynamic that you’ve been in all along.
I think a lot of stories about Chinese families are written this way.
Yeah, it feels like the focus is much more on unpacking repression than on the sorts of explosive, dramatic events that you’d expect in a lot of Western literature on problematic families.
I totally agree. I mean, compare it with Alice Munro. She’s also a very restrained writer, but in a story like “Runaway,” the drama centers around the protagonist’s decision to leave her husband, and later how she decides to come back. Even if the writing is restrained, there’s a strong story element. But many Chinese family stories are more about examining a preexisting structure, like traditional morality or the expectation of filial piety, and the emotional repression that these structures create.
What you’re saying is really making me think back on the two Liao Jing collections I read in a different light. I was seeing them mostly as reflections on modern feminist discourse—more universal stories about women waking up to the structures of repression that they’re trapped in. But I think I missed the ways in which those stories are specifically putting feminism in conversation with conservative Chinese morality.
The Chen family in Spring Will Never Fall is always trying to playact the traditional script of “benevolent fathers and filial sons” 父慈子孝. But, when you look more closely, their actions are all about violence, control, and emotional desolation. It’s not that the parents don’t love their children; it’s that their love is constantly being twisted to conform to traditional hierarchies. Because of this, physical and emotional violence becomes the only way they know how to communicate and discipline their children.
A key topic in the book is the disintegration of this kind of big, traditional family unit. Whether it’s because of the one-child policy or because historical concepts of filial piety simply haven’t existed in their traditional form for decades, the disintegration of these traditional family structures is inevitable. That’s one of the main things this book is trying to examine.
What I want to know most of all after hearing you describe this book is—did you enjoy it? It sounds like an extremely heavy read.
I actually really did enjoy the novel. It makes you reflect on the countless similar stories playing out around you and in your own life. Maybe you as an American wouldn’t enjoy it as much, if the emotional dynamics it’s describing aren’t familiar to you. But a Chinese reader would absolutely feel a connection with this book. And it’s so precise in its depiction of the relationships between the characters. Personal resonance is an incredibly important part of its appeal.
Maybe I have a little more confidence than you that it would be possible to empathize with these difficult characters, even if my lived experience is different from theirs. I absolutely know what you mean about the relationships. The family relationships in On the Apple Tree are just about the subtlest I’ve ever seen in a work of Chinese fiction. But that was a collection of linked stories; Spring Will Never Fall is a full-length novel, and it seems like it would be so painful to spend so much time following this family.
I wouldn’t say it was painful, because it resonated so deeply. It’s not about giving you clear answers or lessons so much as it is about quietly revealing the chaos and grief hidden in the lives of these characters, and inviting readers to search for themselves in the midst of all that.
Feature: An avant-garde time capsule
And now for something entirely different.
Don’t feel like putting yourself through the emotional wringer of novels about family trauma? Then allow me to suggest the bizarre short stories of Peng Jianbin 彭剑斌, who is just about as unlike Liao Jing as you can possibly get. His new book, Laughter and Tears 《欣泣集》, was my sixth-favorite collection of the second half of last year—just below the cutoff for last month’s list, but still extremely memorable, and totally different from everything else I read.
There was a time, earlier this century, when the avant-garde strain was ascendant in Chinese fiction. It’s easy to track down this kind of writing in English, if you’re interested, as Western translators and publishers have historically been very enamored of it—try Can Xue’s 残雪 surreal landscapes in last year’s Mother River, or the freaky nonsense fables of Zhu Yue 朱岳. But, from what I’ve seen, newer Chinese literature doesn’t often indulge in that kind of bizarre, gleeful experimentation anymore.
Peng Jianbin is keeping the torch alive. Laughter and Tears use plain language and an intentionally flat emotional palette to tell weird, bite-sized little stories that read like Kafka, but funnier. In “Vocational School Student” 《大专生》, the narrator wanders around in the eerie stillness of his empty campus while the rest of his classmates are off at an unexplained assembly. In “Daysickness” 《白日梦》, an agoraphobe cooks mountain of food and transcribes piles of newspapers while waiting obsessively for a mysterious phone call. Typically I gravitate toward lush, character-driven fiction, so when weird little sketches like these draw even me in, you know they must be good.
Peng Jianbin 彭剑斌
Born 1982
Recommended story in Chinese: 《白日梦》(read online)
Peng Jianbin was born in 1982 in Guiyang, Hunan. His works include the short fiction collections I Went to a Dance at Chandlerville《我去钱德勒威尔参加舞会》, An Unpolished and Exceedingly Sentimental Book《不检点与倍缠绵书》, and Laughter and Tears 《欣泣集》. He now lives in Changsha.
Some light self-promotion
I was recently invited to join two episodes of the Chinese-language podcast 镜面反射 Specular, one on a new Chinese translation of Shirley Jackson’s Hangsaman (my favorite novel by one of my favorite authors) and another in conversation with the author Li Tang 李唐 about his new short story collection Godly Games 《神的游戏》. I was also featured talking about my bookshelves on the video series 《去你家读书好吗？》, which you can find on Bilibili if you’re interested.
The 2026 Chinese edition of Hangsaman (1951). Seriously, go read some Shirley Jackson if you haven’t in a while. I have a review out in The Spectator of Tibetan Sky 《天·藏》by Ning Ken 宁肯 (translated into English last year by Thomas Moran), a really underrated philosophical novel about identity in Tibet.
I’m looking to make interviews a bigger part of this newsletter in 2026. If you are an author, editor, translator, or reader of contemporary Chinese literature and would be interested in having a conversation or otherwise collaborating, please reach out over Substack or at coldwindowlit@gmail.com. A special appeal to avid readers of internet novels to get in touch, as I’d love to include some other readers’ opinions in an upcoming feature.
That’s all for this issue. Keep an eye on this space for some bonus features before the next full issue in March. And thanks for reading as always.
One of my favorite qualities of Liao Jing’s narrative voice in this novel is the distance afforded by her fluid timeline, not just in terms of viewpoint shift but in the mix of narrative present, flashbacks to childhood or the more recent past, and commentary from an indeterminate storyteller’s setting. It’s a delicate balance that deftly portrays the family dynamics of emotionally oppressive situations without feeling like it’s punishing the reader.
It’s worth noting that Peng Jianbin’s collection doesn’t really consist of new material; rather, these are early stories exhumed from forgotten web forums that he reworked to varying degrees. (I haven’t seen an actual copy yet, but I’ve read some of the pieces elsewhere, as well as his entertaining, online-only afterword in which he describes the rediscovery and explains what guided his decision-making as curator and editor.) 白日病 is essentially unchanged from the version carried in Heilan #40 in 2006.
Avant-garde stories are certainly less discoverable than they were when authors were regulars on the lit boards of BBS portals and on speciality forums like Heilan and Twinsphere. I feel like the rise of microblog platforms drained the value of those forums for day-to-day conversation, and participation further declined once they migrated to centralized hubs and were subject to the periodic ratcheting up of content restrictions. These days, rather than collectives open to the wider internet, most of the activity seems to take place on closed groups or individual public accounts. You’ve got to follow breadcrumbs to locate new authors rather than diving into the open archive of a public forum. (I can’t say how it’s affected creators. I’m sure there are bustling group chats out there sustaining author interactivity in ways opaque to the common lurker.)
Indie press communities are one way I find new writers. For example, I came across macabre stories by 曼旎 Manni by checking out the WeChat feed of indie publisher 飞象界, which put out the 2023 collection 三种不可能的日常 by 黎幺 Li Yao, one my favorite a-g writers of the 2010s. And Manni’s WeChat account pointed to her stories on p-articles under the name 李曼旎, which gives me another outlet to check out.
Another recent standout is 刘按 Liu An, who I must have started following on WeChat after hearing about his polarizing novel 刚刚 Just Now. His surrealistic shaggy-dog story 此时世界上有多少人正在想你 was hilarious as a WeChat serial, and it eventually reached print in an indie edition from KPee. I think it’s a WeRead publication now?
Great interview!