A periscope on history

Fang Fang [Photo provided to China Daily]

Qinglin, the son in Bare Burial, chooses to let go of the burdens of the past and to value the present, while a friend decides to record Qinglin's family history, only anonymously.

Liu Ting, a critic and editor with People's Literature magazine, says: "One of the biggest values of Fang's work is that she presents attitudes toward history from different groups and generations of people, making them sensible and reliable."

Fang says the landlord's estate in the novel is based on a property in western Hubei province.

Even Qinglin's discovery of his father's hidden diaries is based on a true story she herself experienced. She reads about her own family past in her father's recording of events from 1942-72.

Born as Wu Fang in Nanjing, Jiangsu province, in 1955, she moved with the family to Wuhan, Hubei province, when she was 2, beginning a lifelong obsession and love with the city that features prominently in her works.

Like the characters in the new novel, her family was classified as "having a bad social status" during the land reform, leading to hardships in her youth.

She worked at a job handling cargo for three years before she was recruited by Wuhan University in 1978. In her university days, she mainly wrote poems and novellas.

Later she became a professional writer and magazine editor.

She won the Lu Xun Literature Award in 2010, and many of her works have been translated into other languages.

"I usually write from noon to midnight. With writing, there's freedom rising from the words that enables you feel that you can talk freely to anybody and forget about any loneliness and trouble," she says.