Ruined City

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Some works of fiction excel at capturing the defining spirit or mood of their time, informing contemporaries as well as later generations of what it was like to live then, transcending aesthetic qualities to erect a mirror for society to view itself. Jia Pingwa’s Ruined City (Feidu, 1993) ought to have been one of those, a literary snapshot of urban life in the early years following the culturally sterile and politically savage Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). But it wasn’t — it was banned by government censors almost immediately after it came out, a ban that remained in effect for seventeen years. The reported offense was lurid sexual content. The bleak tone, the skewed relationships among characters, and a negative image of public officials and of society in general probably played a role in the decision to keep the book out of readers’ hands, but it was mainly about the sex. It would be naïve to assume that, as a result, the novel went unread in China over all those years, for copies were smuggled into the country, usually from Hong Kong; more to the point, dozens of pirated versions made it, however briefly, into bookstores and private homes. Nonetheless, Ruined City could not be openly sold and read in China for nearly two decades.

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