A periscope on history

Writer Fang Fang [Photo provided to China Daily]

Author combines perspectives to shed light on difficult times, she tells Mei Jia.

Fang Fang has always been an outspoken voice among the established Chinese writers born in the 1950s.

In her works, she is straightforward in examining life's misery for people living at the bottom, and she is equally direct in criticism of unfairness she perceives in awarding literary prizes, even if that means trouble and even a lawsuit for herself.

"I need to fight for my right to criticize. Though it was just an accidental event ignited by two of my micro blog updates, I was involved and I decided to stay in the battle," says the 61-year-old Wuhan-based writer, who was in Beijing for her new book launch.

Such controversies and "energy-consuming headaches" forced Fang to stop working on her latest novel, Ruan Mai (Bare Burial), for a year before it was released by People's Literature Publishing House last month.

"Bare burial" is a phrase known to few Chinese, especially younger people. It means burying the dead directly in the earth without a coffin, or even without a shroud－an indecent act in the minds of traditional Chinese.

Fang first learned the phrase from a longtime friend whose mother has Alzheimer's disease but remembered an old horror. "Don't bury me barely," the woman kept telling her daughter, who bought a decent coffin when her mother was cremated.

Fang was struck by the words. "A folk tale goes that people being barely buried can't go to an afterlife. To me, a living person who refuses past memories is also barely buried in time and history."