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Shuang Xuetao (author), Jeremy Tiang (translator), Rouge Street: Three Novellas, Metropolitan Books, 2022. 216 pgs.

Over the past few years, China has seen a resurgence of interest in its northeastern rust belt, comprising the provinces of Heilongjiang, Jilin, and Liaoning. The region, commonly referred to as Dongbei in Mandarin, began to receive widespread attention soon after northeastern-born rapper Gem’s retro rap “Yelang Disco” went viral in 2019 (linked below). With its playful infusion of the distinctive Dongbei accent and deliberately corny colloquialisms, the song evoked more than nostalgic sentiments for the 1990s and a renewed enthusiasm for regional dialect and culture. A new wave of artistic expressions and literary works animating the region’s past ensued as the “Dongbei Renaissance” took centre stage on China’s cultural scene.

As China struggles with a stuttering economy and dormant labour market more recently, many have found Dongbei’s enduring socio-economic malaise since the 1990s highly resonant in the present day. To several Dongbei-born writers, however, the northeastern economic downturn is more than a tale from the past that offers us solace today. Among the most representative of novelists from this group, Shuang Xuetao describes the mass layoffs and deindustrialisation of the region—once the heartland of modern China’s heavy industry—as “lethal” and “excruciating” to people of his parents’ generation (Guernica). As state-owned enterprises were forcibly downsized or shuttered as part of the post-Mao market reforms, a huge population of skilled workers were made redundant—their dream of serving the country with their expertise instantly shattered, and the foundation for lifelong job security crumbled right away. In Rouge Street, Shuang’s collection of three novellas on the northeastern communal experience of the economic slump, we see abundant portrayals of its characters’ humdrum existence: jobless smokers roam the streets to while away their time, a now-redundant factory supervisor sits around at home all day, and a former engineer throws himself into drinking post-layoff and leaves his child for a temporary job far away.

The book’s rich representations of the post-reform social milieu notwithstanding, Shuang describes himself as “both a participant in that time and a bystander”: “… I was part of what was going on, but also didn’t necessarily understand it” (New York Times). Born in the 1980s, Shuang was still in his formative years as Northeast China went through its seismic shift a decade later. Driven perhaps by the lingering puzzlement from his childhood as he witnessed the older generation being thrust into destitution, as well as his writerly commitment in bringing attention to his people and their collective suffering, Shuang posits all three of his novellas in Rouge Street, translated by Jeremy Tiang, as unsolved mysteries and invites us to join him in tracing the imprints of the northeastern past that might otherwise fade into oblivion.

The collection begins with “The Aeronaut”, which unravels the ties between the families of Gao Likuan and Li Zhengdao since the late 1960s. Li, originally an apprentice of Gao’s at a printing company in Shenyang, leaps into prominence and becomes the deputy factory manager. But the arrival of the Cultural Revolution quickly turns things upside-down. Painfully devastated by the persecution, Li eventually takes his own life in spite of his nine children. Years later, his oldest son Mingqi grows up and marries Gao’s daughter, though their marriage is built less on mutual love than Gao’s pity for Mingqi’s misfortune, as well as the latter’s need to secure a financial source for his vision of building a flying device. Cut to the present: the narrative follows Gao’s grandson Yafeng as he returns to Shenyang in search of his missing uncle Mingqi and cousin Li Gang. As Yafeng works through his family history to locate their whereabouts, he is reminded of Gao Likuan’s weird fascination for Mingqi’s fanciful dream amid the socioeconomic turbulence of the nineties. A greater mystery, then, is in the secrets hidden by Mingqi, the titular aeronaut, who claims to possess “light bones” and the ethereal quality of becoming buoyant in the air that so captivates the Gaos for years.

The second novella “Bright Hall” details another mystifying disappearance of characters in the neighbourhood of Rouge Street (also known as Yanfen Street in Mandarin), Shenyang, in the immediate aftermath of the Cultural Revolution. The narrative opens with the strange friendship between a primary schoolboy named Zhang Mo and Liao Chenghu, a former sculptor in his early forties, whose middle fingers have been cut off by the Red Guards because of a revolutionary clay statue he sculpted. Using a map left by Liao Chenghu, the young Zhang Mo navigates the Rouge Street neighbourhood on his own, having been left alone by his father who has taken a job away from home, to seek help from his aunt at Bright Hall. But the hall is more than an old worker’s home where his aunt and cousin Gooseberry currently reside; it is also a venue for dance rehearsals during the week, and a location where a pious congregation gathers on Sundays to hear Pastor Lin preach. The much-admired pastor, however, is stabbed to death one day. As Zhang Mo and Gooseberry flee for refuge during a blizzard, the two unknowingly enter the middle of the frozen Shadow Lake—a place everyone knows to stay away from—with the suspected killer. From here on out, they are transported to an uncanny locale where they come face-to-face not only with characters who have previously vanished, but also a creature they never imagined themselves to confront or battle with.

Rouge Street concludes with the most well-known novella among the three, “Moses on the Plain”, a crime story adapted into a movie titled Fire on the Plain in 2021. Switching between the voices of seven characters, “Moses on the Plain” traverses the winter of 1995 in Shenyang, when five taxi drivers are killed in the space a month, and the year 2007, when the murders of two city officials lead a police investigation back to the still-unsolved case from twelve years previously. As police officer Zhuang Shu delves deeper into these cases, he is inadvertently brought back to his childhood. Raised by a father who was adept at reinventing himself and a mother deeply passionate about the arts, Shu grows up in a family more privileged than the others, including that of his neighbour Li Fei, the daughter of a skilled bench worker. Fei, like Shu’s mother Fu Dongxin, has a penchant for art and literature, and is drawn to the beauty of fire as Fu does as a child. While Fei frequents their place to read and learn from Fu, Shu receives little attention from his mother, who is way more invested in spending time with his childhood friend. Not long after that, Shu’s family moves to a new neighbourhood and finally loses touch with the Li’s, but his memories of Fei—though having dissipated slowly with time—are once again brought to the surface as the investigation unearths the ties between the two families and the unusual deaths.

These novellas are, on the surface, crime mysteries, but the more closely we follow the plot, the more we understand finding the truth isn’t near as important as identifying the network of connections each story charts, and the structure of feeling that emerges. This “structure of feeling”, as highlighted by Henry Zhang in his introduction to an interview with Shuang, points to a persistent and collective feeling of buruyi 不如意, or being “upset” (Guernica). It is a shared pain and disillusionment for those who have been “abandoned by the state, by their biological families, by the socialist lifeworlds that nourished them” in the drastic market transitions of Northeast China (Guernica). Zhang also directs our attention to the physical structure of Rouge Street depicted in “Bright Hall”—a spiral-like street that, if viewed from above, looks like “a mosquito coil, one circle after another” (Shuang 70). While the unending spirals of Rouge Street work to fortify it against outside influence and turns the street into what Zhang calls a “temporary respite” for Shuang’s downtrodden characters, I also see its physical layout as the reification of the structure of feeling these characters are hardly able to escape from (Guernica).

But if Shuang’s characters experience the structure of feeling as a result of the regime’s abandonment of the working class, the children of these characters are likewise subject to a structure of feeling, but one that is characterised by feelings of abandonment and isolation as their parents, or the older generation, leave the family to forge a new path in the throes of the mass redundancies and social ills. In “Bright Hall”, for example, it isn’t only Zhang Mo who awakes to the disappearance of his father one day. Zhang Mo’s cousin Gooseberry, who is only a third-grade primary schooler, is also faced with the abrupt departure of her mother soon after Pastor Lin is murdered. Zhang Mo’s father had attempted to persuade Mo to stay with his aunt for the winter before he left, whereas Gooseberry’s mother also conversed with Pastor Lin about feeling summoned by God to head to the south. But we get a sense that Shuang’s characters from the younger generation are still expected to come to grips with the uninformed disappearance of their parents at some point in their lives. Even in the story of “Aeronaut”, where Li Mingqi has gone missing, it is Gao Yafeng, Mingqi’s nephew, who is tasked with searching for the much-admired dreamer, or else, unpredictable grifter of the family. And it goes without saying that in “Moses on the Plain”, Zhuang Shu grows up without ample opportunities to connect with his mother Fu Dongxin, or with his father, who is busy building his career and turning himself into an entrepreneur despite the dire circumstances at the time.

To these characters, living under a structure of feeling means more than experiencing emotions privately. The structure in fact challenges the belief that emotions are predominantly personal and reminds us of the presence of invisible but overriding sentiments particular to the time and space we are born into, or  gradually take on and embody along the way. In “Moses on the Plain”, Shuang brings this notion to the fore through a conversation between Zhuang Shu’s father and a cab driver while they witness a protest at the Red Flag Square:

He shifted gears. — Why do you think they’re protesting there?

— Nostalgia, I guess.

— No, they’re upset. They wonder, if Chairman Mao were still alive, would the Party behave like this? (176)

Interestingly, watching the protest only from afar, the cab driver is certain of the driving force behind it. But his awareness of the pent-up sentiments of the working-class protesters may have less to do with his natural ability to empathise, than the reality that emotions of sadness and disappointment existent in the social atmosphere manage to seep more quickly into the hearts of those already shaken up by life’s challenges. The scene, then, works to suggest that it isn’t only the protesters and cab driver who are vulnerable to these ambient sentiments. In a way, other characters whose lives are considered lowly and disposable—including many of those from the rest of Rouge Street—are also susceptible to the pervasive structure of feeling.

It would be inaccurate, however, to say that Rouge Street only deals with the misery of Northeast China’s past. The ruptures left by the economic reforms actually make the idea of hope more precious, and certainly, pressing to those who are yet to recover from the region’s massive turbulence. Both Guernica and the New York Times mention Shuang’s sense of responsibility as a Dongbei writer who gives voice to this lesser-known part of China and his oft-forgotten people. But an honest representation of their lived experiences is to me more than giving unsparing accounts of their plight, but also shedding light on the ways these afflicted ones cling onto hope when their situation has yet to take a turn for the better. Perhaps this also explains why the book is embedded with biblical references to the idea of hope. In what appears to be an uneventful scene where Fu Dongxin bids farewell to her neighbour and student Li Fei in “Moses on the Plain”, Shuang elaborates on what it means to have hope in the face of the unknown:

— … You know why I taught you Exodus today?

— I won’t see Shu anymore?

— I picked this book because I wanted you to know that as long as what’s in your heart is genuine and sincere, the mountains and oceans will part for you, and the people coming after you, the ones who didn’t make space for you, will all get punished. When you’re grown, when you’re older, I want you to hold on to that thought. (168)

While the use of biblical references in Rouge Street may be Shuang’s way of expressing his fascination with “believers’ searches for meaning”, I trust that it also informs his decision in positing the second-generation characters as key figures responsible for solving their families’ mysteries (New York Times). By inviting these characters to search for answers to these mysteries and therefore bring order to the chaos of their lives, the writer seems to suggest that the hope for restoration is available even to those who bear the brunt of deprivation and despair—as long as they keep looking for it.

Works Cited

▚ Shuang, Xuetao. Rouge Street. Translated by Jeremy Tiang, Metropolitan Books, 2022.
▚ – – –. “Shuang Xuetao: Writing Rouge Street, a Home for Exiles of Chinese Modernity.” Guernica, 14 Jun, 2022.
▚ Wang, Vivian. “Murder and Magic Realism: A Rising Literary Star Mines China’s Rust Belt.” New York Times, 1 Mar, 2024.

How to cite: Lee, Kammy. “Finding Hope in Despair: Shuang Xuetao’s Rouge Street.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 6 Sept. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/09/06/rouge-street.

Kammy Lee is from Hong Kong. She majored in English at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and completed her MA degree in English Studies. Her research interests include representations of postcolonialism and its after-effects, traumatic inheritance, and narratives of violence. Currently, she has a growing interest in Asian-Anglophone fiction and poetry, and is working towards publishing more of her work. [All contributions by Kammy Lee.]

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