Raise the red lantern

When the internationally acclaimed film Raise the Red Lantern opened in North America, it was praised by critics and nominated for an Academy Award. This extraordinary film was based on an even more sensual and brutal novella by one of China's most provocative New Wave writers--a then-twenty-six-year-old Nanjing resident named Su Tong (now thirty-one). The title novella is a hauntingly beautiful, nightmarish tale of four concubines competing for the sexual attentions of their master in a stifling, 1930s rural clan house. Su Tong explores a world where emotionally stunted men thoughtlessly destroy the women in their lives; where the women seem to rise above their surroundings even as they are crushed by their circumstances; where insanity is both a weapon and a refuge. Called "a little feast of venomous subtlety" by one critic. Raise the Red Lantern dazzles with its cold beauty, perverse cruelty, violent sexuality, and hypnotic decadence.^

Nineteen thirty-four Escapes is also concerned with the grotesque psychological realities of the human condition. The narrator examines the history of his family in 1934, a year of disaster. In this novella, a fifteen-year-old boy (the narrator's uncle) collects and sells dog turds to raise money for rubber overshoes. A strange, demonic landlord hoards semen in a white jade crock. And the narrator's grandmother shivers with happiness as she smells the sweet, putrid odor of death at a pool of rotting corpses. The final novella, Opium Family, is a brilliant portrait of self-destruction. Su Tong describes with riveting suspense the complete breakdown of morality as a rich, enervated family is ruined by greed, lust, sloth, savagery, and impotence: Bandits come and go; a boy tries to shoot the genitals off his father; the intoxicating smell of the family's poppy fields permeates every scene and every action.^ Written with astonishing intensity and elegance, these three novellas break new ground in Chinese fiction and establish Su Tong