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[REVIEW] “The Weight of Change: Shuang Xuetao’s Hunter” by Seiya Tanase
All things Jeremy Tiang in Cha.
Shuang Xuetao (author), Jeremy Tiang (translator). Hunter, Granta Books, 2025. 288 pgs.
In a nine-hour night-time ambulance journey to Beijing, a dying father laments that his son’s “existence devours mine. From the day you were born you’ve been eating my existence bit by bit with a little spoon” (pp. 22–23). The father has suffered a heart attack; the doctor, a recent graduate, does not think he will survive.
The opening pages of “Heart”, the first story in Shuang Xuetao’s new short-story collection Hunter (translated by Jeremy Tiang and published by Granta Books in 2025), are filled with memories. The son reflects on the heart disease that runs in the family, speaks rationally of death and recalls the historical violence of the Cultural Revolution. He recounts the fantastical demise of his “great-great-great-uncle, a superb woodworker… When he was fifty-five, his heart exploded… They cut him open and discovered that his heart was full of tiny wood shavings, enough to build a foot-high pagoda” (pp. 1–2). He also makes small talk with the doctor about his occupation as a writer. When he describes himself as lazy, she refutes the claim: “lazy people don’t usually get so anxious, nothing about you feels lazy to me” (p. 9). Midway through the journey comes a strange twist, received with surprising calm by the narrator: both the doctor and the ambulance driver fall asleep, the latter continuing to drive with skill and frightening speed despite his eyes being firmly shut. Suddenly, the father splutters awake, shadow-boxes with an invisible opponent, converses briefly with his son, and dies.
Shuang’s short stories examine the contemporary anxieties of China’s former industrial heartlands.
Often set in his hometown of Shenyang, a Rust-Belt city with a plummeting birth rate, a declining share of working-age adults and a dwindling economy, Shuang’s short stories examine the contemporary anxieties of China’s former industrial heartlands. In Rouge Street (reviewed in this journal by Kammy Lee) a collection of three novellas (Metropolitan Books, 2022), Shuang’s narrators were drawn from the disenfranchised working class of China’s north-eastern provinces, a harsh region bordering Mongolia, Russia and North Korea. As a leading pioneer of the so-called Dongbei Renaissance, a gritty, noir-tinged artistic movement, Shuang’s early work was characterised by its unflinching representation of a place that is home to “criminals, orphans, heretics, and minor deities” (Guernica).
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Still, the prose remains unmistakably coloured by Shuang’s idiosyncrasies.
In this new collection, Shuang moves further afield, to Beijing and even London. No longer an emerging literary figure, and having recently moved to the capital as a full-time writer, Shuang has shifted his focus towards cities, where the needs of the individual overshadow those of the collective. Still, the prose remains unmistakably coloured by his idiosyncrasies: he writes in a colloquial yet precise register, while magical realism bleeds into his effortless deadpan humour. Throughout the collection, his underlying concern with the inevitability of change, often generational, persists, carrying with it a poignant, existential tone. Despite the changed setting, Shuang sees contemporary China’s modernity as afflicted by a chaos perhaps more readily associated with a developing city. “Beijing’s sidewalks”, he writes, are “a jungle” (p. 162).
In “Heart”, the father’s admission to his son reads paradoxically because it is undercut by the diminishing force of north-eastern China’s disaffected youth. If not paradoxical, it is at least deeply cynical. Importantly, the father does not begrudge his son’s progress. He has his own stubborn pride, cultivated through resilience, survival and habit. In an interview with The New Yorker, Shuang referred to this sense of pride, explaining that despite the economic crash, which led to an irretrievable elimination of “the cumbersome, the inefficient, the human, the traditional”, “Northeasterners once regarded themselves as the eldest children of the Republic, and that pride still lingers today”.
Drawing on the words of other figures shaping this frontier in Chinese literature is illuminating. In an interview with Granta, the translator and editor Wu Qi spoke of the “disease of weightlessness” in today’s China. His words recall the “lying flat” movement that emerged in 2021, whose proponents rejected work and the traditional expectations of success encouraged by previous generations. Wu also invokes the innovations of the writers of the 1980s, but argues that they “can no longer provide new ammunition… only… words of consolation”. The poet, novelist and researcher Li Zhuang, meanwhile, contrasts the opposing forces of “crime and misery” as a “reflection of reality, while comedy is the deconstruction”. While Shuang’s original intensity may have been diluted by the success that has brought film and television adaptations and propelled him into the mainstream, his humour and magical realism continue to offer a panacea for reality.
In “Theatre”, two friends struggle to see eye to eye. The narrator is a failing journalist; his friend, Cao Xixue, is the loquacious daughter of a “perpetually unemployed guy” (p. 79) who accidentally burned down the narrator’s childhood home while experimenting with chemicals. Each night, Xixue rehearses The Tempest with six blind women in an abandoned theatre. Her motivations are simple: “I’m just acting for myself. Why leave such a magnificent stage empty? Don’t you ever feel like that?” (p. 84). She asks him to write a play to resolve their differences, and he does so, but only in secret. Meanwhile, in “Daughter”, a self-assured writer is approached by a nameless young man who claims to be a far better writer than he is and sends him brilliant sections of his work but, to the writer’s despair, no ending.
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Such clashes of artistic ego are ubiquitous in Hunter, and although they are obscurely resolved, Shuang’s endings often arrive through departures from reality, leaving it uncertain whether anything has been resolved at all. In the eponymous story, an actor takes method acting a little too seriously and imagines a passer-by to be a terrorist. But then:
A weightless distant spirit takes hold of his legs, and he can’t stop himself from falling over. He drops the knife and sits beside the man amid the flowing traffic, and he looks up into the distance, where perhaps someone is taking aim at him, judgement for all the wrongs he’s done since he was born. But so what? (p. 280)
Perhaps Shuang’s mission is to encourage his readers to embrace the weightlessness and ennui that result from change. Despite his characters’ frequent lack of reason, and their acceptance of every unnatural occurrence, his stories are reassuring, even comforting. In his own words, they unburden us.
How to cite, Tanase, Seiya. “The Weight of Change: Shuang Xuetao’s Hunter.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 17 Aug. 2026. chajournal.com/2026/08/17/hunter.
Seiya Tanase is a London-based writer. Born in New York City and of Indian and Japanese descent, he has lived and studied in both London and Tokyo. His writing explores art, language, and cities, often in search of solace. In his spare time, he may be found reading, wallowing in coffee, or photographing the streets. More of his essays and fiction can be found on his Substack, @seiyatanase.