Rouge Street

February 28, 2022
Shuang makes his English-language debut with three beautifully spare novellas exploring present day northeast China and the imprints of the past. In “The Aeronaut,” Li Mingqi arrives at his deceased father’s alcoholic mentor’s home in 1979 to court the man’s daughter. In an alternating thread set decades later, Mingqi’s nephew tracks him down after he disappears in pursuit of an aviation obsession. In “Bright Hall,” Zhang Mo’s unemployed father sends him to live with his aunt Zhang Yafeng, a former dancer. After the murder of Pastor Lin, a grieving Yafeng sends her own daughter away with Mo, and their journey takes on fairy tale dimensions. “Moses on the Plain” loosely follows an investigation into several carjacking murders, and Shuang shifts perspectives between various people connected to the events, including a policeman who is injured in a sting operation; new investigating officer Zhuang Shu, who has a speckled past; and Li Fei, a precocious girl tutored by Shu’s mom. Shuang sustains a cool, placid tone, even when reckoning with lingering traumas of the Cultural Revolution, Japanese occupation, and economic decline. Anglophone readers will be glad to get to know this rising star.

May 1, 2022
These three novellas are a magical and gritty tour through life in Shenyang's Yanfen Street shantytown, set against the backdrop of Mao's China. Shifting continuously among the perspectives of multiple characters and sometimes reaching across generations, Shuang blurs the boundaries among memory, imagination, and historical events. In the first novella, The Aeronaut, flashily dressed Li Mingqi courts the daughter of his father's former mentor at a Communist leaflet printing firm, who still resents his one-time apprentice for outshining him. Mingqi's visit sets off a series of events that force him to reckon with his father's death and its rippling effects on the family. The narrator of the second novella, Bright Hall, is a young man still suffering from his mother's abandonment when he was a boy. When he and his cousin Gooseberry, a dancer, chase down the suspect in the murder of an illegal preacher, their escapade leads them onto a frozen lake and into a dreamlike interrogation with a monster fish of biblical proportions. The final novella, Moses on the Plain, follows the aftermath of a string of taxi robberies and the people who are intertwined with them, including a young girl who has a fascination with fire and whose family falls into ever more dire financial circumstances. Shuang reaches the height of his literary powers when magical realism breaks through into the everyday lives of the characters, revealing the emotional and political stakes of their actions and desires. Patient and attentive readers willing to follow Shuang through the twists and turns of the characters' shifting narratives will be rewarded with a surreal portrait of how history is made and remembered--expanding and contracting like an Escher cityscape. An ambitious portrait of the struggle to thrive in the Chinese equivalent of the "American Wild West."

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