In 1989 a remarkable film, Ju Dou, banned in China for depicting
adultery, was released to worldwide acclaim and nominated for an
Academy Award. The film was adapted from the first novel by Liu
Heng, one of China's most important young writers. Black Snow is
Liu Heng's second novel, and it will prove to be equally
unsettling. Li Huiquan returns to Beijing after serving a
three-year sentence in a prison labor camp for his involvement in a
juvenile street fight. Both his foster parents, who raised him
after he was discovered abandoned in a train station, are dead, and
Huiquan is left with nothing but his mother's small life's savings
and the attentions of his Auntie Luo, who arranges for his
livelihood. Huiquan agrees, with his aunt's urgings, to sell
clothing from a peddler's cart. It is joyless, tiring work, and
Huiquan can barely contain his disdain for the crowds of people
eager to snatch up foreign goods. At night, Huiquan frequents a
karaoke bar, where he meets a bearded stranger with connections to
the shady world of the black market, a world Huiquan finds both
seductive and repulsive. He also meets Zhao Yaqiu, a naive and
silly young singer who becomes the object of his overwhelming
obsession and the focus of his previously diffuse anxiety. As his
surroundings turn increasingly bleak and meaningless, Huiquan's
attraction to Yaqiu, who, in his mind, may provide the only
connection to the society around him, grows dangerously strong.
Black Snow is a stunning psychological portrait of a dissatisfied
and emotionally illiterate young man's desperate search for meaning
and companionship in the gray world under totalitarianism. It
combines the existential angst of writers such as Camusand Sartre
with the disaffection of the American urban novels of the 1980s.
Liu Heng's voice is one of the first of his generation to be heard
outside of China, and this novel offers an extraordinary glimpse
into the psyche and life-style of the young generation in
contemporary Beijing.
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