Quotes of the Day

In literature at least, never dismiss the lunatics. They're often the voices of reason. The Chinese learned that lesson in 1918 with Lu Xun's Diary of a Madman. This short story, which told of a world filled with bloodthirsty cannibals, was an attack on imperialists and China's own feudal system—both accused of devouring the masses. So astute was the critique that the story's madman became a revolutionary hero of sorts, and Lu Xun came to be heralded as the father of modern Chinese literature. In Ran Chen's novel A Private Life, set in Beijing in the late 20th century, the heroine follows a similar path. In the book, the scars from the Cultural Revolution are fresh, the social and economic changes of the turbulent 1980s are under way, and the deranged main character is mumbling to herself in her bathtub—so it's best we pay attention.

As the novel opens, 26-year-old Ni Niuniu has just returned from the hospital where she's been diagnosed as "mentally disordered." Outside she sees a city bustling with new roads, new cars, new phones, new buildings—and filled with a compassionless new breed of people chasing material wealth. She is a self-proclaimed "fragment in a fragmented age," left to dwell on her own adolescence and wonder where it all went wrong.

Niuniu takes us back to when she was an innocent young girl and leads us through the pivotal moments of her life. It's not unlike watching a Formula 1 race: there are lots of sharp twists and turns but it only gets really good when somebody crashes. Luckily (at least for the reader), this story is filled with wrecks. Niuniu's father abandons the family. Her teacher sexually assaults her. A fire kills her lesbian lover. Her boyfriend leaves her. Illness takes her mother. The pain of these tragedies awakens Niuniu to the reality of life in Beijing, where men are "wolves" and women "have a vague feeling that they are forever in danger." It's a place that is emotionally and sexually repressed, that pits student against student in a brutal exam system, that values gossip about people more than connections between them. Spiraling into despair, Niuniu notes: "You don't have to be from a strange place to be a stranger."

In one of the final scenes, Niuniu is walking down a quiet street when a stray bullet strikes her in the calf. We soon learn that it's June 1989 and that the street lies directly behind Tiananmen Square. Her wound is not serious, though—and that's the point. The world remembers the deaths of the student protesters, but they weren't the only casualties of the period in which China began its epochal shift from communism to capitalism. There were other, less political, less public lives ruined, too. That's what A Private Life chronicles so well.

The novel, originally published in China in 1996, is the first of Ran Chen's works to appear in English. At times her poetic style weighs down the story, but she's a seductively intimate writer and a powerful commentator on the perils of China's giddy embrace of capitalism. Chen's main character proves that it's often the most scared, the most hurt, the most rejected who can show the lemming-like masses where they're headed. And in this case, the cliff looks dangerously close. Lu Xun's madman ends his famous diary with the plea: "Save the children." Though times have changed, the warning from A Private Life is much the same.

• Jeff Plunkett
• The casualties in A Private Life are those who fall by the wayside as China careens toward capitalism