茶 FIRST IMPRESSIONS
茶 REVIEW OF BOOKS & FILMS
[ESSAY] “The Impossibility of Coming Home: Love, Memory and Political Trauma in Yan Geling’s Criminal Lu Yanshi” by Karen Ma
Geling Yan (author), Lawrence A. Walker (translator). Criminal Lu Yanshi, New Song Media GmbH, 2025. 536 pgs.
When the Chinese version of Yan Geling’s Criminal Lu Yanshi (陆犯焉识) first appeared in 2011, it startled many in literary circles. The ambitious historical epic was starkly different from the previous works of the renowned Chinese-American novelist. Instead of her familiar female narrative style, often centred on a deity-like heroine who is resilient and all-encompassing, Yan presented a detached, analytical account of the political downfall of an intellectual undone by his arrogance, cowardice and selfishness. It was a demanding read spanning five decades, from the Republican era through the late 1970s. Many scholars lauded its scope and ambition, with some calling it “a significant achievement in 21st-century Chinese contemporary literature”.
In part because the sprawling book runs to some 400,000 Chinese characters, and in part because of Yan’s recent run-in with Beijing, the English translation appeared only in 2025, well over a decade later. Translated by Yan’s husband, Lawrence A. Walker, a retired US diplomat who also translated some of Yan’s earlier works, including White Snake (1996, trans. 1999), this long-awaited, 536-page edition includes extensive descriptions of political movements, the reformation of intellectuals and the cruel, desolate life of Qinghai labour camps during the tumultuous Mao era. As the second book published by Yan and Walker’s newly established independent publisher, New Song Media, after Beijing banned her work in 2020, it offers Western readers a rare opportunity to examine a painful chapter in modern Chinese history.
❧
The narrative complexity of Criminal Lu Yanshi makes a simple synopsis nearly impossible. The first half of the book reads like an agonising chronicle of a young prodigy, the son of a prominent Shanghai family, who is mercilessly reduced to a withered, toothless vagabond after 20 years of relentless persecution in the vast wastelands of north-western China. We see him use all his wits, including a feigned stutter, to survive his mental anguish and the torture and abuse inflicted by fellow prisoners and guards alike. Yet, on another level, the narrative, tracked largely through Lu’s granddaughter, reveals a melancholic love story about a husband and wife tragically misaligned in time and space.
To avoid overwhelming the reader, Yan skilfully interweaves the bleak labour-camp material with a lively, at times even humorous, portrayal of Lu’s extravagant and bustling earlier life in Shanghai. She also introduces a family-reunion section towards the book’s end, creating not only a sharp contrast but also some much-needed relief.
Before his fall from grace, Lu is a flamboyant playboy proud of his US doctoral degree. A multilingual scholar and straight-shooter who values his intellectual and individual freedom above all else, he scorns his devoted wife, Feng Wanyu, because she was forced upon him by his overbearing stepmother. His vanity and political naïveté soon prove fatal as China becomes engulfed in revolution and war. After being branded a “rightist” in the 1950s, he is rapidly shuffled from one labour camp to another, his sentence unjustly extended until, at one point, he is placed on death row. In his darkest moments, he considers suicide, until he experiences a revelation.
❧
A pivotal passage in the novel captures Lu’s profound spiritual awakening, the story’s defining turning point. After surviving a harrowing encounter with a pack of wolves in the remote Qinghai wilderness, he realises that he has always loved his wife, Wanyu.
Last night that shopkeeper had saved his life. No, it was the sorghum liquor that had saved him. Were it not for that liquor, he’d have already been buried inside the wolves’ stomachs, already digested by that wolf family. It was a marvel, a true miracle! And there appeared to be a revelation in that miracle: perhaps he would be able to go on living.
But why should he go on living?
If he didn’t escape, why did he want to go on living?
It was from that evening on that my grandfather began to devise his escape plan.
If he were to run to Wanyu, he would tell her, you and I have had a misunderstanding…Or perhaps I did not understand myself. I loved, yet I thought I did not love. Generations of dramatists and novelists have worked so hard and written so much to help us understand ourselves, and yet we understand ourselves so little. It takes the fall of a city, or a major cataclysm or banishment for life before we can come to know that we have loved.
(Criminal Lu Yanshi, pp. 111 -112)
Wanyu, whom he has viewed as a trap, suddenly promises salvation. Driven by this newfound sense of purpose, Lu breaks out of prison and flees to Shanghai, desperate to return home and make amends. Upon reaching the city, however, he makes the painful decision to remain in hiding. As an escaped counter-revolutionary, he knows that his presence would condemn Wanyu and his family to severe political punishment. To protect them, he returns to the labour camp and surrenders.
Lu patiently waits for his official “rehabilitation”, when he can legally return home. Yet life refuses to grant him a fair chance. Ready at last to reconcile his feelings for Wanyu, he is shocked to find a changed world and a wife whose advancing dementia has erased all memory of him. These paradoxes and plot twists give the novel much of its extraordinary power.
❧
In a 2025 interview in New York for a different article, Yan told me that Criminal Lu Yanshi was by far the hardest book she had written in her more-than-four-decade career because both male protagonists and the intellectual world represented uncharted territory for her.
Closer to home, the book’s early sections draw on the life of her paternal grandfather, Yan Enchun, a prodigious scholar from a wealthy Shanghai family who spoke several foreign languages and received his PhD at the age of 23. Tragically, he committed suicide in his forties during the Sino-Japanese War after severe bouts of depression. The novel’s central material about the Great Northwest was based on her maternal step-grandfather, a former middle-school principal who was imprisoned in a harsh Qinghai labour camp for nearly three decades after being branded a counter-revolutionary during the Anti-Rightist Campaign. The book comes closer to her family history than any of her other novels, which is why, she said, “If I were only allowed to write one book, then this one has to be it.”
The novel caught the attention of Zhang Yimou, who adapted it into his 2014 film Coming Home, starring Gong Li and Chen Daoming. The film’s success rekindled interest in the Cultural Revolution and the Anti-Rightist Campaign, further boosting sales of Criminal Lu Yanshi. It also brought renewed attention to Yan’s politically sensitive subject matter in the years preceding the eventual ban on her books in China.
A still from Coming Home (2014)
❧
Although Criminal Lu Yanshi received considerable praise and literary recognition, including the Shi Nai’an Literature Prize in 2013, it also drew criticism. Some objected to the fact that the onset of Wanyu’s Alzheimer’s disease coincides so precisely with Lu’s return to Shanghai, dismissing this as conveniently “pitch-perfect” timing that appears melodramatic and clichéd.
Yet this criticism misses a larger point. Wanyu’s ill-timed amnesia is less a contrivance than a powerful literary device. It highlights the cumulative suffering and psychological trauma endured by the families of persecuted intellectuals outside prison walls during the height of the political purges, a form of collateral damage often overlooked in conventional Chinese “scar literature” about Mao’s revolutionary campaigns.
Yan devotes roughly two-thirds of the novel to Lu’s gruelling imprisonment and his earlier, more carefree days in Shanghai. Only late in the book does she reveal structurally that the Lu family, and Wanyu in particular, paid an equally devastating price as relatives of a political outcast. Wanyu, a fiercely loyal and traditional woman who idolises her husband, endures years of social exclusion and humiliation while quietly keeping Lu alive. Despite the distance, she makes frequent prison visits, bringing him home-cooked food. Later in the novel, we learn the full extent of her sacrifice. By trading sex with a powerful official to have Yanshi’s death sentence commuted, she demonstrates that survival outside the prison walls exacts its own unthinkable toll.
It is therefore easy to see how news of Lu’s imminent return might have triggered profound and conflicting emotions in Wanyu. Crushed by the weight of guilt and shame, she faces an unbearable crisis: how can she look into the eyes of the man she loves, knowing that she is no longer the chaste woman he left behind? Under such pressure, it is entirely conceivable within the logic of the novel that Wanyu’s mind fractures. Forgetting becomes her only sanctuary, a profound subconscious defence mechanism shielding her from a reality too painful to confront.
Many scar novels end with rehabilitation and the protagonists effectively deciding, “Let’s just dust ourselves off and carry on”, as though those who have been so gravely wronged can simply turn the page and return to their former lives. Gu Hua’s Hibiscus Town and Yu Hua’s To Live are two examples. Yan refuses to allow her story to end this way. By afflicting Wanyu with dementia, she ensures that a “happy reunion” between husband and wife remains impossible.
Towards the end, realising that he has forever lost Wanyu and his place within a family marred by bickering, infighting and hostility, Lu makes a shocking choice that the reader does not anticipate. In doing so, Yan conveys an important message: the debts incurred in troubled times can never be fully repaid, whether spiritually, physically or monetarily. Ultimately, she poses a haunting question. After so much time and loss, is it truly possible for a wrongfully accused prisoner to return home? Zhang Yimou’s choice of title for his adaptation, Coming Home, underscores precisely this point.
❧
Walker’s English translation of the star-crossed bond between Lu and Wanyu closely reflects Yan’s literary ambition to wrap a serious inquiry into the nature of humanity within a tragic love story, and the result is particularly moving. His rendition of the novel is meticulous and faithful to the Chinese original. He not only renders the plot accurately but also vividly captures the protagonist’s sense of spiritual revival after prolonged suffering.
When navigating the text’s distinct linguistic textures, including Yan’s refined old-Shanghai prose describing the protagonist’s youth, however, the English translation cannot always fully convey her playful, witty humour, particularly her puns and the layered, era-specific slang of the labour camps. These culturally and politically charged double entendres are exceptionally difficult to reproduce in English.
One such example can be found in the novel’s title itself. Chinese-language readers will notice that the original title is Lu Fan Yanshi (陆犯焉识) rather than the standard Fanren Lu Yanshi (犯人陆焉识). This distinction is critical. The unusual placement of the character fan (犯, “convict”) splits the surname Lu from the given name Yanshi. By interrupting his name with this designation, the title signals that Lu belongs to a specific political class. He is no ordinary criminal, but a permanent outcast who has been systematically sentenced and institutionalised by the state.
Lu’s given name, Yanshi (焉识), carries its own layers of hidden meaning. The name can be understood in several ways: “How could he have known?” or “Who truly understands him?”, both of which foreshadow Lu’s tragic trajectory. It can even suggest “Why bother to know one another?”, a poignant reading that underscores the bitter irony of Wanyu’s eventual inability to recognise her husband. This linguistic wordplay allows Yan to bury profound thematic weight within a single name. Yet these interpretations depend entirely on the nuances of the Chinese language, in which sentences frequently omit explicit subjects and verb tenses remain fluid. Consequently, it is structurally almost impossible to capture this full spectrum of meaning simultaneously in English.
Overall, Walker’s thoughtful and conscientious translation allows Western readers to see the novel not only as a work of scar literature about the Anti-Rightist Campaign and the Cultural Revolution, but also as an important meditation on love, memory, the redemption of humanity and the true meaning of freedom, universal themes that transcend national and cultural boundaries.
Geling Yan, 2015.
How to cite: Ma, Karen. “The Impossibility of Coming Home: Love, Memory and Political Trauma in Yan Geling’s Criminal Lu Yanshi.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 2 Oct. 2026, chajournal.com/2026/10/02/criminal.
Karen Ma is a New York-based writer and film scholar specialising in Chinese cinema and literature. Raised in Hong Kong and Japan, she is the author of the novel Excess Baggage (2013) and China’s Millennial Digital Generation (2022), a book based on interviews with young Chinese film-makers. Her articles have appeared in NPR, The New York Times, China Books Review and the South China Morning Post, among others. Ma is a lecturer in Chinese literature and film and a frequent speaker on trends in Chinese cinema. [All contributions by Karen Ma.]