City of Fiction by Yu Hua

Translated from the Chinese by Todd Foley

Review by Frances Spurrier

Lin Xiangfu was on edge that evening. Moonlight streamed down through the hole in the roof like a sparkling column of water and the mournful village had fallen silent under the dark night. The only sound was that of the wind brushing past the eaves as it flew out into the night sky, the distant sound of its swishing like soft words of encouragement.

We gather from the above extract that author Yu Hua has little difficulty in producing lyrical writing! This is one of the things I loved about the book. All 427 pages of it.

So to the story.

Losing both parents at a young age, Lin Xiangfu learns all he can from master carpenters in the area in Northern China in which he lives. But while he develops the necessary skills and has been left well off financially by his parents, he has only the local matchmaker to guide him in the protocols and choice of a wife. 

When the time comes for him to marry,  Lin Xiangfu messes up his chances with the beautiful daughter of a local wealthy household. He returns to his home, his fields and his carpentry in a despondent mood wondering what his future holds.  But suddenly a mysterious woman, Xiaomei, appears at his home accompanied by a man called Aqiang who says he is Xiaomei’s brother. 

The visitors end up staying for some time. Aqiang leaves, but Xiaomei remains with Lin Xiangfu.  They marry and Xiaomei gives birth to a baby daughter. But Xiaomei will soon disappear too, leaving her husband to care for their baby daughter. Lin Xiangfu sets out on a long journey to find Xiaomei, carrying their baby daughter in a harness strapped to his chest – realising how little he knew about her and her brother, only that they came from a place called Wencheng. If I had any advice for this character it would be that he needs to learn to ask a few more questions and not be quite so trusting.

The difficulties of this journey are many; the donkey cannot travel on the boat and has to be left behind, the journey takes place in the midst of a freezing winter, the child is in need of breastfeeding, necessitating Lin begging from door to door to find a woman with a baby of her own. Not the least of Lin’s problems are that the place called Wencheng for which he is searching does not seem to exist. Lin Xiangfu asks up and down the land after this mythical city yet everyone he asks looks completely baffled.   

Lin Xiangfu arrives in a place called Xizhen and decides – based on the accents of the local people and their apparel – calico headscarves and lots of wooden clogs ( such garb as had been worn by his beloved Xiaomei) – that Xizhen will serve as the non-existent Wencheng. 

Xizhen is a place that will suit the newly arrived father and baby daughter. Readers are carried along with the narrative. The main protagonist rises to prominence in his newly adoptive town due to his farming and carpentry skills. We perhaps overlook the slightly unstable pretext of Lin Xiangfu settling in a place at the other end of the very large country of China from the place he started, with no real inkling of whether he will find the child’s mother and no solid reason why he should.

This roaming Northerner had come from north of the Yellow River, over a thousand li away, where fields of sorghum, corn and wheat cover the land, where in winter the yellow earth stretched as far as the eye could see.   

Meanwhile Lin Xiangfu and Xiaomei’s child is named Lin Baijia by her father. She grows up, goes to school, falls in love, but then disappears from the story, which I thought was a shame as she seemed a worthy character to develop further. 

The above saga takes care of the first two-thirds of the book. 

The last one-third of City of Fiction returns to the beginning of the story to follow Xiaomei, Lin Xiangfu’s missing love, on her own journey. 

The whole story is set against the background of momentous changes taking place in China at the turn of the 20th century. This is where a reader who is using a translated version is at a disadvantage perhaps, unless Chinese history is a speciality which for me it is definitely not.    

I have taken the following paragraph from an article which appears on the Tricontinental website:  The Twentieth Century, The Global South and China’s historical position.

The Western binary opposition between tradition and modernity occludes, on the one hand, the immense weight of the old world on the new and, on the other, the mutual influence between Europe and the rest of the world… Careful theoretical reconstruction of the past provides far more than antiquarian interest: it reveals the way in which countries, such as China, develop through their complex relationship to both the immensity of their break with the past (the 1911 and 1949 Chinese Revolutions) and the roots of these breaks both with a history that predates them and with areas of the world (such as the Soviet Union) that influenced them.

Much of the story of City of Fiction is acted out against a background of encroaching lawlessness and banditry – the town of Xizhen is attacked, with residents left to organise their own militia or flee, or both.  Bandits kidnap and torture one of the town’s leaders. Revolution is only a few years away, a thousand-year-old empire crumbles, a nation is on the brink of modernity. However it is not necessary to understand this history to follow the lives of the protagonists; it is only really necessary to understand the tragedy of human existence, love and missed opportunities.

Trigger warning: City of Fiction contains graphic scenes of violence.

Frances Spurrier is the author of a poetry collection, The Pilgrim’s Trail (Cinnamon Press), and a novel, The Winchester Codex (Troubador Publishing).  Her blog can be found here.

Yu Hua, City of Fiction (Europa Editions, 2025). 978-1787705654, 432pp., paperback original.

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