Su Tong

Su Tong a Chinese novelist and short-story writer (born 1963) whose lyrical yet brutal depictions of women, family and desire in the Jiangnan region made him one of the leading authors of his generation. He is best known for the novella Wives and Concubines, the basis for the acclaimed film Raise the Red Lantern.

Early Life and Beginnings

Su Tong was born on 23 January 1963 in Suzhou, an old canal city in Jiangsu province celebrated for its gardens, its silk and its refined culture. His family moved to the nearby city of Zhenjiang when he was young, and he grew up amid the upheavals of the Cultural Revolution. His parents divorced during his childhood, and the disruption of family life became a persistent theme of his fiction.

He studied Chinese literature at Beijing Normal University and graduated in 1984. Afterward he worked as a teacher and then as an editor for a literary journal, the Zhongshan, in Nanjing, where he settled and where much of his work is set. Nanjing, with its imperial past and its vanished palaces, gave him a richly historical backdrop for stories about desire and decline.

He began publishing fiction in the mid-1980s, at first in the experimental idiom of the Chinese avant-garde. His early stories were bold and sometimes shocking in their treatment of violence and sexuality, and readers noticed at once his gift for sensuous description and his fascination with the darker corners of the human heart.

The Avant-Garde Phase

Su Tong belonged to the wave of experimental writers who came to prominence in the late 1980s, a group that also included Yu Hua and others who questioned the conventions of realist storytelling. His early work is marked by fragmented chronology, ambiguous narrators and a cool, detached tone that contrasts sharply with the misery of his subject matter. He wrote of madness, obsession and cruelty with an almost aesthetic pleasure.

The stories of this period, gathered in several collections, often take place in a timeless, half-mythical Jiangnan of ruined mansions and misty rivers. He mixed historical setting with dreamlike incident, so that readers can never be quite certain whether they are reading history, fable or nightmare. This instability of genre became a hallmark of his style.

Even in his most experimental work, however, he was preoccupied with family and with the power struggles between men and women, masters and servants, the old and the young. The household, rather than the battlefield or the factory, is his fundamental arena, and its intimate tyrannies are his true subject.

Wives and Concubines and Raise the Red Lantern

Su Tong's best-known work is the novella Wives and Concubines, published in 1990. It tells the story of a young woman who becomes the fourth wife of a wealthy landowner and enters a closed world of rivalry and intrigue among the women of the household. The narrative lays bare how the concubine system turned women against one another and how their identities were defined by the favour of a single man.

The novella was adapted by the director Zhang Yimou into the film Raise the Red Lantern, released in 1991, which won the Silver Lion at the Venice film festival and became an international success. The film brought Su Tong's name to audiences around the world, and the novella was subsequently translated and widely read. Its imagery of red lanterns and sealed courtyards became emblematic of Chinese cinema of the period.

The work is admired for its economy and its atmosphere, for the way setting and ritual convey oppression without explicit statement. It is also intensely cinematic in its visual precision, and its success demonstrated how deeply the concerns of the avant-garde could resonate when translated into another medium.

Later Novels and the Jiangnan World

After the international recognition that followed the film, Su Tong continued to write prolifically in both short and long forms. His novel Rice depicts a man of desperate ambition whose hunger for food and power drives him to cruelty, and it extends his inquiry into appetite as a fundamental and dangerous human force. The book is at once a social chronicle and a parable of greed.

Other major works include The Boat to Redemption, which was awarded the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2009, and a body of historical and semi-historical fiction set in the Jiangnan region. He has written about the fall of dynasties, the fate of women in traditional society, and the memory of the twentieth century's upheavals, always with his characteristic blend of lyricism and cruelty.

He also produced a number of novellas and short stories about childhood and youth, in which the pressure of political events on private life is felt rather than stated. His range is considerable, from the gothic and the violent to the reflective and the elegiac, and his best pages combine sensory richness with a hard, sceptical intelligence.

Style, Reputation and Legacy

Su Tong's prose is celebrated for its imagery and its rhythm; his scenes of water, rain, silk and lantern-light linger long after the plot has been forgotten. He is a master of atmosphere, and his finest work achieves a haunting quality in which beauty and horror are inseparable. Critics place him among the finest stylists of his generation.

His treatment of women has been praised for its psychological penetration and sometimes criticised for a certain coldness, but it is central to his vision of how desire and power shape private lives. He is often described as a writer of the south, and his Jiangnan settings have given his work a distinctive regional identity within modern Chinese literature.

He has lived for much of his career in Nanjing and has served in literary organisations there, while continuing to publish steadily. His work has been translated into many languages, and he remains, together with a handful of contemporaries, one of the most internationally recognised Chinese novelists of the reform era.

See also

• Raise the Red Lantern
• Zhang Yimou
• Avant-garde Chinese fiction
• Jiangnan