Mapped
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
Dai Sijie
During the Cultural Revolution, two teenage sons of denounced doctors are sent for re-education to a remote mountain village in Sichuan, where they haul coal, work the paddies, and discover a hidden suitcase of forbidden Western novels that changes everything, above all for the tailor's daughter one of them loves. Dai Sijie, himself sent to the Sichuan hills, draws on that real world of re-education: the mountain village, the mine and the fields, the tailor's house, and the county town far below.
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Beijing Coma
Ma Jian
Ma Jian's Beijing is two cities held in one body: the Beijing of spring 1989, when students carried the democracy movement from the campuses of the north-west out to the occupied heart of the capital, and the demolition-and-construction Beijing of the following decade, glimpsed through a window by a man who was shot on Chang'an Avenue and left in a coma. The map runs from the universities of Haidian down the central axis to Tiananmen Square and west along the avenue where the army advanced.
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Border Town
Shen Congwen
Shen Congwen's lyrical pastoral is set in the little ferry town of Chadong, on a river in the far west of Hunan near the borders of Sichuan and Guizhou, where the orphan girl Cuicui lives with her grandfather, the old ferryman, and comes shyly of age between two brothers who both love her. The real West Hunan landscape is the whole book: the rope ferry over the green stream, the white pagoda above it, the little riverside town and its dragon-boat festival, and the encircling hills.
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Empire of the Sun
J. G. Ballard
Ballard's wartime Shanghai, drawn from his own childhood: a boy is cut loose from his parents when the Japanese seize the city after Pearl Harbour. The map runs from the family villa in the western suburbs, through the International Settlement of the Bund and Nanking Road, out to the internment camp beside the Lunghua pagoda and airfield where he waits out the war.
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Family
Ba Jin
Ba Jin's landmark novel of youth in revolt is set in the great feudal Gao household of 1920s Chengdu, where three grandsons chafe against the tyranny of the patriarch and the weight of the old ways, and the young women around them are destroyed by them. The real city frames it: the sprawling family compound with its courtyards and garden lake, the Chengdu streets alive with student demonstrations and new ideas, and the river down which the youngest brother finally escapes.
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Fortress Besieged
Qian Zhongshu
Qian Zhongshu's great comic novel follows Fang Hongjian, home from Europe with a bought diploma, through the pretensions of 1930s Shanghai society, a farcical journey to a shabby university in the interior, and a marriage that proves the book's famous image: a besieged fortress, which those outside want to storm and those inside want to escape. The city anchors it, its returning ships, salons and matchmaking, before the long trek inland and the disillusioned return.
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Red Poppies
Alai
Narrated by the supposedly idiot second son of a Tibetan chieftain, Alai's novel follows the last days of the feudal chieftain system in the Gyalrong borderlands of eastern Tibet in the 1930s and 40s, as opium poppies bring sudden wealth, guns and ruin, and the Chinese armies close in. The world of the book is that frontier: the chieftain's fortress-estate, the poppy fields that transform it, the market and border where Han traders and warlords come, and the mountains beyond which a whole way of life is about to end.
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Red Sorghum
Mo Yan
Mo Yan's Northeast Gaomi Township is a fictionalised version of his own home county on the Shandong plain: a country of red sorghum, distillery villages and the Black Water River, where in 1939 a ragtag band ambushes a Japanese convoy at a stone bridge. The map runs from the county town of Gaomi out across the fields to the north-east, where the real Dalan district, the distillery-town sets and the river all sit near the Jiaozhou border.
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Rickshaw Boy
Lao She
Xiangzi, a strong young man come to the city from the countryside, pulls a rickshaw through 1920s Beijing with one dream, to own his own rickshaw and be his own master, and the city and its cruelties grind that dream down step by step. Lao She maps the real Beijing of the rickshaw men: the hutong rental yards where they lodge, the city gates where soldiers seize Xiangzi, the Western Hills he flees to with the army's camels, and the scholarly households of Haidian where he briefly finds decency.
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The Good Earth
Pearl S. Buck
Wang Lung, a poor farmer, rises through his devotion to the land, marrying the plain, steadfast slave O-lan, until famine drives the family south to a great city and back, and returning fortune lifts them into a wealth that draws the next generation away from the soil that made them. Buck kept her geography deliberately broad, but rooted it in the real farming country of eastern China she knew: the fields and the great landlord's house, and the southern city where the starving family scatters in the streets.
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Waiting
Ha Jin
For eighteen years the army doctor Lin Kong shuttles between his home village, where his dutiful arranged wife Shuyu lives, and the city hospital where he loves the modern nurse Manna Wu, bound by a rule that will not let him divorce until the couple have lived apart for eighteen years. Ha Jin sets his quiet tragedy of thwarted love in a real Manchuria: the northern farm village, the county divorce court, and the army hospital city of the Chinese northeast.
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