Reflections on Reading *Soft Burial*
Yesterday, I finished reading Soft Burial with a heavy heart, thinking I’d put it down and never bring it up again. But today, picking up Jiang Fangzhou’s A Year in Tokyo, hoping to “retreat into my little building, caring not for winter or summer” as I had yesterday, I couldn’t stop hearing Hu Daiyun’s words echoing in my ears: “I don’t want to be soft-buried! I don’t want to be soft-buried!” Fine—I’ll write down my thoughts to express my attitude toward the world.
Soft burial—when a person dies without a coffin and is buried directly in the earth. People in eastern Sichuan (around Fengjie in Chongqing and Lichuan in Hubei) believe that those who are soft-buried have no next life.
The novel is set during the land reform movement of the 1950s in eastern Sichuan. The poor, responding to policy calls, overthrew landlords and redistributed land. Landlords in the surrounding area suffered terribly—either killed or left wishing they were dead. The Hu and Lu families, both major landowners and related by marriage, were caught up in this struggle. Except for Daiyun, who was forced to sever ties with her parents and thus escaped, every member of the Hu family was killed, their house seized, their fortune scattered, and their book collection burned for three days and nights before being carried away by peasants to use as fertilizer. The Lu children, facing the situation, prepared to flee. But because the Lu family had contributed to the liberation, they received guarantees from the county government and villagers that they would not be subjected to struggle sessions, so they abandoned their escape plans. Unexpectedly, an old enemy named Jin Dian returned from out of town, exploiting the policy and the villagers’ greed, and organized a crowd to surround the Lu household, preparing to denounce them the next morning. The Lu family received a secret warning the night before, knowing they could not escape their fate—their end would likely mirror the Hu family’s. The impoverished villagers would not only take their land and houses but also force their daughters and maidservants to marry local villagers.
Knowing the ending made the choice simple—it was only a question of how to die. The Lu family ate one last sumptuous dinner, went into the garden and dug their own graves, then drank arsenic and lay down in the pits. Daiyun, the daughter-in-law, buried them. In the pitch darkness and despair, after soft-burying all ten family members, Daiyun grabbed her son and escaped through a secret passage, boarded a small boat that could carry only two or three people, and drifted downriver. Not long after, the boatman Fugui learned from Daiyun that the maidservant Xiaocha, whom he loved, had taken her own life by poison. He immediately jumped back overboard to find her. Daiyun couldn’t row, the boat capsized in the rapids, her son was lost, and she was rescued by people downstream—after which she lost her memory.
The amnesia lasted decades. Daiyun changed her name to Ding Zitao and eventually married the doctor who had rescued her, Wu Jiaming, giving birth to a son, Wu Qinglin. Ding Zitao dared not recall the past; whenever she tried to probe the depths of her memory, fragmented recollections would cause inexplicable tension and panic. Wu Jiaming, noting Ding Zitao’s fair skin, refined nails, and her ability to read and write, deduced that she must have been from a wealthy family and had surely endured tremendous suffering before losing her memory. Wu Jiaming himself had emerged from despair—his original surname was Dong, his parents were major landlords killed during the land reform, and he had attempted suicide before being rescued by a hunter surnamed Wu in the mountains. He later lived in seclusion and changed his name to Wu. His clean background saved him from repeated political struggles. Ding Zitao’s identity was an absolute time bomb; in the social environment of that era, not investigating and not probing was the best protection for her. He resolved to keep the secret forever.
Later, the son Qinglin found clues about his parents’ backgrounds in his father’s notes. Qinglin’s college classmate Long Zhongyong accompanied him on a field investigation. As he drew closer to the truth about his mother’s past, he foresaw its cruel mercilessness. He thought: “Life seems gentle and ordinary on the surface, but peel it back and you find truly terrifying, hideous features.” Forget the past, and you can travel light on life’s road. Since his father had tried so hard to forget and his mother refused to remember, Qinglin decided he didn’t need to pursue it either.
He said: “There are always some things in this world not worth remembering. Or rather, there are some things and some people in this world that must be forgotten.”
Long Zhongyong was silent for a long time. Only after the car left Chongqing did he say: “That’s true. But while some people choose to forget, there will always be others who choose to remember.”
The central theme of the entire book is roughly captured in those two sentences. Some truths are indeed brutally cruel. Bystanders may desperately want to dig to the bottom of things, unearth every detail, cause and effect. But for those who lived through it? What kind of heartbreak and helplessness, what kind of unspeakable shame comes from looking back at the past?
January 28th is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. I saw on TV elderly people who had been in Auschwitz concentration camps returning to mourn their fellow victims. One old man said it was very hard for him to face that place again, but in order to ensure that people today don’t forget the truth and cruelty of history, he was willing to make the trip.
If I were a bystander interrogating a survivor, how would I choose? If I were the survivor, how would I receive such interrogation? I cannot answer such questions. Perhaps time is the best medicine—much like Yang Xianhui’s interviews with Jiabiangou survivors. Four or five decades later, when asked to recount their experiences, many elderly people spoke with humor and ease, as if it had all been rather light. But think carefully about the circumstances at the time, and it was anything but amusing.
When discussing the creation of this book, author Fang Fang said: “You may not need the truth, but history does.” But with some irony, it seems history doesn’t need this book either. The victors don’t want her to paint the dark side of history. And so Soft Burial itself was softly buried.