Howling Memories

Rhoda Kwan reviews two newly translated novels reckoning with China’s bloody past, Fang Fang’s “Soft Burial” and Tsering Döndrup’s “The Red Wind Howls.”

By Rhoda KwanAugust 20, 2025

• History

• Politics

WHAT DO WE owe the past? When an enforced national amnesia buries historical wrongs, how should we inherit the memory of countless devastated lives? Two recently translated novels—one from Mandarin Chinese, the other from Tibetan—confront repressed collective memory in communist China. In their fiction, both authors—Fang Fang (known also for her 2020 record of the early COVID-19 pandemic, Wuhan Diary: Dispatches from a Quarantined City) and Tsering Döndrup—muster the courage to deal with the enormous suffering and wholesale death of Mao’s China.

In Fang Fang’s Soft Burial, a woman with no memory is fished from the waters of the fictional Eternal Valley River in Eastern Sichuan. The doctor who saves her gives her the name Ding Zitao, after the mysterious word she repeats and the blossoming peaches outside the hospital window. Of her past, she knows nothing but sudden pangs of pain, bouts of terror, and strange phrases that erupt from her lips in moments of turmoil. Despite her amnesia, she rebuilds a kind of peaceful life. She eventually marries Doctor Wu, the kind man who saved her, and gives birth to a son named Qinglin. She keeps the unnamed horror that lurks in her past at bay.

When Zitao’s husband dies in a bus crash, she finds herself screaming: “No soft burial! I don’t want him to have a soft burial!” As the words leave her mouth, she can sense that “something [i]s wrong with this world.” On a trip to the abandoned estate of a landlord, her son later learns that a soft burial is the act of covering a body with dirt without a coffin or proper burial rites, which custom dictates condemns the spirit of the dead to keep roaming the land. This unsettled mood permeates Michael Berry’s flowing translation of Fang Fang’s novel as she layers alternating narratives—one follows Ding Zitao’s descent into a catatonic state, while another traces Qinglin’s journeys across China, where he unwittingly finds himself uncovering fragments of his parents’ separate unspoken pasts.

Within the recesses of her mind, Ding Zitao finds a hellscape where she stands 18 levels below ground. As she climbs each level, a fresh scene from her suppressed past replays. Scene by scene, her suffering and torment—as the daughter of a landowning family during Mao’s murderous land reforms in the 1950s—is dredged up from her past. Her nightmare unravels backward, with each scene shining new light on the one that came before. A suppressed past erupts and overwhelms the present. What is wrong with their world, it turns out, is the unacknowledged and unresolved horrors of the past. In a state of enforced amnesia, a disturbing emptiness replaces the past. For Ding Zitao’s son Qinglin, a void haunts instead of informing the present. The son knows nothing about his parents’ past. When he eventually stands at the threshold of knowing what happened to his mother, he decides to look away.

Fang Fang’s haunting novel confronts the reader with a choice: become willfully blind and live haunted by a faceless past, or take on the painful duty of remembering, lest buried historical wrongs lurk beneath life’s surface, threatening to erupt and paralyze the living. Qinglin’s decision to give his past a “soft burial” suspends him in history. He chooses amnesia, deciding instead to lead a calm life. But it is the calm of his mother’s life: a superficial peace that masks a churning, unburied past. He muses: “I’m not the kind of person who has the courage to face reality, and I’m certainly not the kind of person who has the strength to carry the burden of history on his shoulders.”

The Tibetan writer Tsering Döndrup, however, is that kind of person. His daring novel The Red Wind Howls, which details the enormous suffering of Tibetans and the annihilation of Tibetan culture and spirituality under communist rule, goes beyond just carrying the heavy burden of his people’s history. It turns memory into a vivid work of surreal literature.

The novel is divided into two parts: the first details how political prisoners were reduced to skeletal “labor machines” at Mao’s camps amid an atmosphere of “terror and mutual suspicion”; the second considers how nomadic life was eradicated on the plateaus during the Great Leap Forward (1958–62) and the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), two periods when Maoist radicalism reached extremes. The novel unfurls all at once, leaping backward and forward decades within a single page. In Christopher Peacock’s lively translation, the past and present seem to take place at the same time, as though past suffering is lived simultaneously with the present moment. The story begins at its ending—with Alak Drong (which translates to the lama “Wild Yak”) back at his monastery after 20 years at a labor camp, having renounced his vows and informed on his devotees to save his own skin.

What follows is a breathtaking torrent of storytelling, as though, after decades of contained silence, the dam walls have burst. The outpouring is a kaleidoscope of stories drawn from oral history spanning 30 years of communist oppression. The narrative expands and contracts, shifting from the intimate thoughts of the characters to bird’s-eye-view scenes showing the enormity of the destruction wreaked upon the land (“the hills around the river were now as bald as the head of a newly ordained monk”). This shape-shifting narrative presents the full extent of Tibet’s suffering under the communist regime—not just the physically razed plateaus but also the spiritual erosion caused by lamas coerced to break their vows and moral codes.

Tsering Döndrup deals with the absurdity and the horrors of communist rule in Tibet with biting irony and surprising humor. In one scene set at a labor camp, a man recently released from an asylum attacks a tree with his axe, in his fervor to serve the party, until he passes out. Upon waking up, he repeats this comical cycle. In another, Tibetans are trained by communist cadres to welcome educated youths to their plateau by chanting the Chinese phrase “relie huanying” (“warmly welcome”). After hours of training, the youths are welcomed by a crowd of Tibetans trying to approximate the Chinese phrase they heard: “really bam bing.”

These moments of levity cut through an otherwise grim account. The novel alludes to the taboo brutal beginning of the subjugation of the Tibetan people under Chinese rule—referred to in the novel as the “Harrowing Day.” During this event, the People’s Liberation Army in 1958 bloodily quelled uprisings in Amdo (a culturally Tibetan area of Western China, largely outside the Tibet Autonomous Region), which by some estimates saw over 20,000 Tibetans fight to keep control of their homeland. The novel considers the grand scale of the cruel suffering and wholesale death of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution without losing sight of the small details that make up an individual life.

The novel’s second section follows the tribulations of the monk Lozang Gyatso, who strives to keep his vows in the chaos caused by Mao’s failed economic policies. Lozang Gyatso and his “wife,” Tashi Lhamo, eke out a “labeled” existence, spending their days moving manure when not being beaten in brutal struggle sessions orchestrated by Lozang Tsültrim, another former monk who has renounced his vows to earnestly serve the Party. After a struggle session at a neighboring village, Lozang Gyatso returns in a ruined coat with a sleeve missing, devastating Tashi Llamo, who spent four years painstakingly saving up little pieces of animal hide to sew the garment for him.

A single coat is but one of the millions of things destroyed by the Cultural Revolution, but in Döndrup’s account, it is still a forgotten wrong that should be remembered. As for Alak Drong, to compensate for his 20 years of torment at the labor camp, he is offered two bricks of tea. Lozang Tsültrim, who perpetrated horrors on his fellow Tibetans for the same two decades, is installed as his right-hand man. Their decades of suffering are compounded by the absurdity that it was all for naught. In Döndrup’s imaginary account of the harshness of life during those decades of turmoil, fiction fills in the void of a repressed history where accurate figures are impossible to confirm.

Throughout the novel, an unforgiving red wind lashes the land, tearing lives apart as carelessly as the sweep of politics and history: “The people’s fates were entirely dictated by the howling red wind,” the narrator observes. The violent wind whips up the earth to fill the air with stifling sand. This analogous oppressive wind still blows in Tibet today. Döndrup self-published his novel in 2006, because, despite his reputation as one of Tibet’s most prominent writers, no publishing house would take the political risk. Almost two decades later, the novel can reach readers everywhere except the country in which it was written.

Likewise, Soft Burial, after winning a major literary award upon its initial publication in 2016, was effectively banned by Chinese authorities. In her afterword, Fang Fang writes that her novel is “a kind of memory” to combat the soft burial of the grief and pain of her parents’ generation by the passing years. And yet, her novel itself is condemned to a soft burial in Chinese, covered up and forgotten. In this sense, its translation is an act of exhumation.

These two censored historical novels seek to surface the unimaginable suffering under China’s communist hegemony. Silencing these stories does not just cover up a bloody history; it also diminishes the body of Chinese and Tibetan literature, depriving both peoples of masterly writing in their native languages. These new translations represent fresh chances to confront the failures of the past, and afford those who lived through unspeakable horrors the most basic of dignities: that they be remembered.