City of Fiction by Yu Hua, translated by Todd Foley (Europa, April 8, 2025)

Strangers are unusual in the town of Xizhen so everyone knows about the tall Northerner who has shown up for no apparent reason. The man arrives carrying an infant so young that he has to pay women who are nursing their babies to give milk to his motherless child. Although it’s difficult for the townsfolk to understand his dialect, his love for his daughter and his friendly demeanor wins them over, especially when he reveals a talent for carpentry that he offers for free. 

Li Xiangfu and his little daughter become an integral part of Xizhen, although his origins are still a mystery. He takes on the task of teaching, telling his students to “sit upright and walk straight,” words that he embodies in his own life. His daughter becomes the most beautiful girl in town, with people saying she’s as “lovely as Xishi,” the first of China’s legendary Four Beauties.

Nobody knows that Li Xiangfu had once fallen in love and married a woman whose dialect was identical to the people of Xizhen. She had run away with part of his fortune, leaving him with their newborn child, and he has devoted his life to finding the woman he still loves. Settling in Xizhen only because the town his wife said was her own seemed to be a place nobody has ever heard of, Li Xiangfu hopes that someday she might appear in this town where everyone speaks her language.

Life is idyllic in this prosperous farming region until the political instability that takes place after the fall of the Qing Dynasty leads to terrorism. Bandits roam unchecked, stripping crops and wealth from people who have never learned how to fight. With unspeakable cruelty, they murder and pillage, takin hostages who may yield substantial ransoms--or die slow and terrible deaths. After the leading citizen of Xizhen is captured, Li Xiangfu is the one who volunteers to buy his friend’s freedom.

What begins as a story of love and devotion turns into stories of stomach-turning torture, graphically described, with an abrupt ending that brings no feelings of hope or redemption. Much as Yu Hua did in Brothers (Asia by the Book, January 2010), he has written City of Fiction in what feels as if it should be in two separate volumes. The first has sweetness while the second has none at all. Even the beautiful daughter, the guiding hope of Li Xuangfu’s life, disappears from the second half of the narrative, safely ensconced in a Shanghai boarding school.

Beginning with fascinating descriptions of village ceremonies and wildly humorous episodes of magic realism, Yu Hua’s immediate plunge into sadism and grueling battle scenes is viciously jarring. Even when he brings his novel into a circular structure that gives the story of Li Xuangfu’s faithless wife and retells the events that began this novel in a way that offers another dimension, this brings no brightness to the book’s conclusion.

Still it’s impossible to stop reading City of Fiction, even as it swerves into brutality that is rarely leavened with any sort of mercy.  Yu Hua has brilliantly recreated life in China during the beginning of the last century, stunning readers with how much has changed in the past hundred years.~Janet Brown