Review of Soft Burial by Fang Fang

*Soft Burial* by Fang Fang, translated by Michael Berry (2025). Published by Columbia University Press.

If you’re new here, welcome! This is my blog, which is where I often do reviews of television, books, and movies that have come across my way. I worked as a film critic for almost three years at an online outlet, and I also am a professionally published author and writer in the literary world. I like using this website as a digital diary and archive, as well as to keep my criticism skills sharp.

Anyways, running a book blog forces you to keep thinking about what you’re consuming critically in a plethora of ways. I started noticing patterns in the kinds of books and movies I was consuming, and as someone curious about the world and wanting to learn more about it, I wanted to break these cycles.

They weren’t necessarily bad, but I wanted to go beyond my comfort zone. This keeps life going in a less boring way for me, especially as this has become a crutch during a period of unemployment. But one of the key things I was noticing, despite focusing on Asian literature, is that I was actively avoiding Chinese literature.

I think it’s because in college, way before I started this blog, I was reading a lot of Chinese literature that I didn’t really care for. I kept saying I didn’t like Chinese literature, which is so dismissive because I was waving off an entire country’s and language’s books.

So I’ve been trying actively to read more books from Chinese authors in translation. I read a lot of Chinese diaspora authors, but not actual writers living and working within the Sinosphere. When I found that digital review copies of Soft Burial were being offered, I gladly took one and slowly worked my way through the book.

It took me a bit to finish this one due to the denseness of its material, but it was worth it. Much love to the publisher, NetGalley, and the author and translator for the advance copy.

Let’s get into the review!

A woman with amnesia slowly begins to remember her trauma of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

We begin this novel not knowing who exactly our protagonist is, as she remains unnamed until we get towards the middle of the book. Many years prior, she was pulled out of a river. No one knew who she was, and when she was taken out of the river, she had no memory prior to when she was rescued.

At the beginning of the novel, she is moving in with her son. He’s been working hard in a post-revolution China and is able to secure a house for his wife and mother, and he wants to pick up his mother and take her to live with him.

When she does move in with him, everything slowly starts coming back. This might not be the best thing for her, as there is an incredible amount of trauma contained within her history. While she was pulled out of the river and married the doctor who saved her, and while he might’ve died tragically young too, she was never known by her real name: Ding Zitao.

Her son begins trying to understand their family history as well throughout the course of his book, especially after his mother begins acting strangely. As his mother slowly loses her sanity remembering what she went through, he has to piece together what happened in his parent’s lifetime.

And this is it: the land reform movement and the Chinese Revolution seriously changed the landscape of China. Ding Zitao worked as a housekeeper for a wealthy land-owning family, but when the revolution began approaching, the winds of change began to instill fear in them.

As they heard what was happening to other land owning families, the atrocities committed against them, it led to a series of decisions that would forever alter their lives, including Zitao’s. Over the course of a few years, and even days at a time, her life was completely changed—one might call it a soft burial in itself.

The notion of a soft burial is one I did not get at first, but it began making more sense when we weave through the past and memories that lead our protagonist’s story to consistently bring up the concept. A soft burial does not allow one to be reincarnated in the Chinese belief system, but in a world that stops for no one, is a soft burial the best decision, or being killed by association?

All of this is pretty brutal prose at times. There’s a scene when the family decides what to do that literally made me feel so sick, and I could see why this book was censored in China. This is a history that doesn’t want to be discussed out loud, especially as it does not fit within state narratives.

The characters themselves not born during this time show very little knowledge of what happened, which could be a soft burial of knowledge and history in itself.

Overall Thoughts

Soft Burial is a book that is quite haunting. The prose is very deliberate, and I found the translation to not be clunky as I was reading it throughout. It flowed quite well, but because of the book’s content I had to take my time with it.

There was no way I was reading through all of this in one go because of how heavy it is. Some books aren’t meant to be binge read, and this is one of them.

This is a novel I requested a digital copy of on a whim, but I’m seriously glad I had the chance to read it. It’s inspired me even more to try and go read more Chinese literature, which is especially helpful as I received another copy of Fang Fang’s other translated novel with it.

If you’re thinking about picking this novel up, give it a chance for sure. I think it’s worth reading if you want to know more of the time period, the author, or contemporary Chinese literature.

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