In China, Fang Fang’s books are suppressed, especially her famous Covid diary. Now her strong, tender family novel “Shining View” is finally being published in German.
Little Eighth is the narrator of this family story, son No. 8, the youngest child of a typical large Chinese family in Wuhan in the second half of the last century. She leads a life at subsistence level, which reflects the contradictions of a socialist society. The rigorous restrictions and the consequences of Mao’s ideological re-education, then the easing in the 1980s when new economic forms enabled more initiative and independence. “Shining View” by Fang Fang was published in China in 1987, a robust little novel of astonishing frankness that unbiasedly tells of the miserable everyday life in China. With the same candor, Fang Fang wrote her Covid diary from Wuhan in her blog on Weibo in 2020, when the first-ever radical lockdown was imposed there (the German translation was published by Hoffmann and Campe in May 2020). She was insulted as a traitor for this openness and received death threats.