A SOFT BURIAL

The original Chinese-language edition of A Soft Burial was published to great critical acclaim on August 1, 2016. When the novel was awarded the prestigious Lu Yao Literature Award later that year, the jury applauded the novel for its ability to "perfectly combine both critical and literary elements" and complimented its "rich aesthetic vision and its penetrating ability to see through different layers of history.

A Soft Burial is a novel that begins with a mysterious protagonist without a name decades earlier she was pulled out of a river in a state of near-death. Upon regaining consciousness, she discovers that her entire memory has been erased. The narrative follows her on journey through recovery as she takes a job as a housekeeper in the home of a powerful cadre, marries the doctor that saved her, and starts a family of her own. Gradually, as the story unfolds, the protective cocoon of amnesia that her unconscious meticulously wove around her begins to give way, revealing glimpses of her previous life. Eventually, it is revealed that both she and her husband's families were victims of the Land Reform Movement. During the height of the movement, her entire family was killed and her first husband's family committed mass suicide, their bodies given "a soft burial," that is, haphazardly dumped in the ground without coffins. She eventually falls in love with the doctor that saved her. Her second husband, Dr. Wu, came from a family in Shanxi that was also murdered during the Land Reform Movement of 1948. He managed to escape by changing his name and moving to another city where, years later, he saves a woman who had suffered a similar fate. Living in the shadow of trauma, silence dominates their lives, until their son grows up and begins to investigate the past.