A periscope on history

Writer Fang Fang [Photo provided to China Daily]

Her new novel explores a forgotten past as its protagonists retrieve their family history. The lost memory from the era of land reform in early 1950s and its aftermath are topics not many contemporary writers would take on easily or eagerly.

Fang skillfully combines history with suspense in her storytelling, making the book hard to put down once begun.

The novel is about Ding Zitao, who loses her memory, and her son, Qinglin, an architecture graduate in the real estate business.

Ding works as a helper for richer families to raise her son. She shows great fear when Qinglin becomes better off and moves the family into a luxurious villa. The shock is so strong that she goes into a coma.

In parallel plotlines, Ding comes out of her coma and recovers her memory, while the son searches for the truth of his mother and father's past－from clues including his mother's scattered words and his father's diary.

It turns out that both his parents are children of landlords, whose family properties are confiscated during land reform. Then Ding's father-in-law tells all the family members to commit suicide, afraid of losing dignity as he faces the peasant uprising. But Ding does not die as her attempted suicide fails.

"The reform was a necessary move, as I show from stories of the retired Red Army general in the novel. It just went uncontrollably wild at certain phrases. And I found some people who experienced that were inclined to forget about the past," Fang says.

"I let people from different historic stances speak, and even to argue in my novel. I'm not judging from an overseeing perspective."