The Running Flame
A Novel
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"She knew that if she didn't say her piece, that flame would never be extinguished; even after death, it would continue raging."
The Running Flame opens with its protagonist in prison awaiting execution, desperate to give an account of her life. Yingzhi, a girl from the countryside, sees opportunity in the liberal trends sweeping across China. After high school, she joins a song-and-dance troupe, which allows her to travel and opens her eyes to new people and places. But an unplanned pregnancy brings an abrupt end to all her youthful dreams. Trapped in a bad marriage, Yingzhi is driven to desperate measures--and eventually a shocking act of violence.
Fang Fang's explosive short novel inspired widespread social debate in China upon its publication in 2001. In exploring the difficulties of one woman shackled by patriarchal tradition against the backdrop of radical social change, The Running Flame bears witness to widespread experiences of gendered violence and inequality. Fang Fang evocatively captures both the heady feeling of possibility in China's roaring 1990s and its dark underside, as economic reform unleashed social dislocation in towns and villages. The novel draws loosely from interviews the author conducted with female death row inmates in a Chinese prison. Equal parts social critique and domestic horror, The Running Flame is a gripping, propulsive narrative that shines a light on the struggles of poor women in China's countryside.
About this Author
Fang Fang is the pen name of Wang Fang, one of contemporary China's most celebrated writers. Her books in English include Soft Burial, also translated by Michael Berry. Fang Fang's account of the COVID-19 lockdown in her hometown, Wuhan Diary, was translated into twenty languages and garnered critical acclaim from major media outlets around the world.
Michael Berry is professor of contemporary Chinese cultural studies and director of the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. A Guggenheim Fellow, he is the author of several books, including Jia Zhangke on Jia Zhangke (2022) and Translation, Disinformation, and Wuhan Diary (2022). He is also the translator of numerous books, including Fang Fang's Wuhan Diary: Dispatches from a Quarantined City (2020).
Reviews
Berry's beautiful and accurate translation of The Running Flame will allow many more readers to gain deeper insight into contemporary Chinese women's lived realities. This work is an extremely valuable contribution to the body of texts by Chinese women writers that exist in English translation.
This novel by one of China's most famous and incisive authors is a heartfelt but unflinching look into the lives of village women in the postsocialist People's Republic. It excavates the tangled emotions connecting money, marriage, and violence and reveals the machinery of gender as experienced by the rural poor. At the heart of the book, its own motivating fire, is a desire for more and better choices for China's young women.
Fang Fang is a powerful voice in contemporary Chinese literature, recognized for her steadfast attention to the underdogs of society. Through poignant and compassionate storytelling, she delves into the depths of the human condition, challenging readers to confront difficult truths with empathy and understanding.
Revenge, murder, and gender-based hypocrisy in communist China drive the unsentimental narrative of Fang Fang's short novel The Running Flame.
The book is a social commentary about the forces of market expansion in 1990s China and the social role of women, but it reads more like a thriller, with the ominous weight of womanhood around every corner.
This novel is both a searing social critique and an intimate portrait of one woman's fight for
agency in an unyielding world.
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