The Scar Literature Movement
Within China, the “the scar literature” or “the wound literature” movement began in the summer of 1977 when Lu Xinhua, a 23-year-old university student, presented a story entitled The Wounded as a big-character poster on the walls of the campus. The story was soon published, and it inspired hundreds of youngsters. Another one which became equally famous was Liu Xinwu’s Class Counselor, published in November 1977. In Liu’s story, the young girl fails to achieve reconciliation with her mother, whom she had been forced to denounce during the “Cultural Revolution”. An open- minded class counselor recognizes that there is still hope for the generation of youth who suffered in the “Cultural Revolution”. For several years, story after story poured out the guilt, regret, and pain over lost lives and ruined careers, betrayal of friends and family members, and the need to seek restitution.
Representative Writers of Scar Literature
- Liu Xinwu
A pioneer of Scar Literature, Liu Xinwu (1942—) is known for his preoccupation with social criticism. He was a middle school teacher for 15 years in Beijing before he gained fame with the publication of Class Counselor. It is the first story to expose the failure of education during the “Cultural Revolution”.
Liu’s stories on urban problems are more successful. His novella The Overpass vividly depicts psychological suppression in an unbearably crowded environment. His novel, The Bell Drum Tower, shows the multifaceted life of ordinary Beijing locals who live in an old-style compound.
- Feng Jicai
Born in Tianjin, Feng Jicai (1942—) is the author of essays, novels, short stories and prose pieces, which have been standard reading for school children for nearly 20 years. Feng is best known for his literary production of the 1980s and the early 1990s, and he rose to prominence as a pioneer of the Scar Literature movement. He has published close to 100 literary works including Ah! The Carved Pipe, The Tall Woman and Her Short Husband, The Miraculous Pigtail, The Three Inch Golden Lotus and Extraordinary People in Our Ordinary World. His work has been translated into many foreign languages.
Feng is also a cultural scholar and over the last two decades he has campaigned to preserve urban culture and traditional villages. He is currently an honorary member of the Literature and Arts Association, honorary president of the China Folk Literature and Art Association. In 2013, he won the 22nd Montblanc de la Culture Arts Patronage Award. In 2018, the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles honored him with the Lifetime Achievement Award in Folk Art and Literature.
Other Literary Trends
The Misty Poetry
Also translated as “obscure poetry”, misty poetry was one of the most controversial phenomena on the Chinese literary scene in the 1980s. From the late 1970s to the early 1980s, a group of young poets who had experienced suffering and disillusionment during the “Cultural Revolution” wrote poems that were distinctively different from the socialist realist. Symbolically subtle and thematically iconoclastic and polysemous, these poems are unique in images and bold in self-expression. The best-known misty poets include Bei Dao, Shu Ting, Jiang He and Liang Xiaobin.
The Avant-Garde
Chinese avant-garde fiction in 1980s undoubtedly represents a summit in contemporary Chinese literature. Given the remarkable achievement of the genre and its revolutionary and profound impact on Chinese literature, it has attracted much attention from the English-speaking academic world. The spirit of the avant-garde group expresses itself in strong experimental tension, in the search for stylistic forms and methods that release new expressive possibilities into the language. The main figures are Wang Shuo, Can Xue and Liu Suola.
- Wang Shuo
After service in the navy, Wang Shuo (1958—) began by contributing short fiction to periodicals in 1978, but found his distinctive voice when he adopted the fashionable idioms and local language of Beijing to create characters caught in illicit or absurd situations during the late 1980s, when the economic reforms had taken hold. Several novellas were rapidly adapted as films. Most successful as both fiction and film was The Troubleshooters, in which young people venturing into the market economy offer personal services to relieve people of their ennui and sense of responsibility. In the early 1990s Wang played a role in conceiving and writing for successful television productions, among them the sentimental story of an adoptive mother, Yearnings, Aspirations, the comedy Stories from an Editorial Office and the love story No Question, I Love You.
The Free Literature
- Yu Hua
Yu Hua (1960—), originally a dentist by profession, came to public notice as a writer of experimental fiction in the latter half of the 1980s. He has since established himself as a professional writer of short fiction and novels and as an authority in literary criticism and music theory. Yu Hua first came to fame in 1986 with his short stories On the Road at Eighteen and One Kind of Reality. His detached and controversial depictions of violence are coupled with his own experimental language.
To Live, by Yu Hua, traces the struggles of Fugui and his family. In the novel, an unknown narrator encounters Fugui, who proceeds to tell the story of his life. Instead of traditional chapters, the novel is broken into sections based off whether or not it’s the narrator talking or Fugui. Fugui’s story focuses on the minutiae of life amidst an expansive historical backdrop.
