Review of The Running Flame by Fang Fang

*The Running Flame* by Fang Fang, translated by Michael Berry (2025). Published by Columbia University Press.

If you’re new here, or are a returning reader, welcome! My name is Ashley, and I run this blog as a side quest to my writing journey to keep track of everything I’ve read, watched, and come across throughout the years. Not only am I a writer, who has published my own work out in the world, but I worked professionally as a film and television critic for a bit.

One of my goals of 2025 is to diversify the kinds of content I’m consuming. One interesting aspect of working as a critic and a blogger in this realm is that you’re constantly thinking about what kinds of movies, shows, and books that you’re coming across, and how they can be so similar.

I realized I fall into very specific patterns, and I don’t want to be like that in the future. I want to read as wide as I can, seeing how different life and writing is in different parts of the world, or picking up a book outside of my usual genre.

Although I’ve specialized in East Asian literature for years, even doing a masters’ thesis in Korean women’s literature from the colonial and postcolonial periods, my grasp of Chinese literature is much weaker. I’ve read a handful of Chinese authors here and there, but not as much as Japanese and Korean literature.

So, in 2025, I’m going to change that. I was thankfully given a copy of Fang Fang’s newest works in translation, and this review is dedicated to The Running Flame. Both novels I was given were very thought provoking in the context of modern China, the Communist Revolution, and how it impacts women.

I don’t want to ramble too much in the introduction, so let’s get into the review! I know introductions can get a little long sometimes, which is why I don’t want to keep going for too long.

Much love to the publisher, NetGalley, the author, and translator for the advance copy! I am truly grateful for it.

Cursed to marry a man who isn’t sufficient or kind, Yingzhi tries to survive in rural China.

Our main character in this novel is Yingzhi, who is a young woman living in rural China. The opening reveals to us that she’s in jail, on execution row, and no one comes to visit her. She is resigned to her fate, but the circumstances that led her to this moment were inevitable.

She joins a troupe led by Sanhuo, an older man from her village, and makes a lot of money singing around the other villages. It makes more money than she ever expected, but it all comes crashing down when she gets romantically involved with a man named Guiqing. They have sex, and she becomes pregnant.

Suddenly, her singing career comes to a halt, and she agrees to get married to him because she knows the stigma of an unmarried woman giving birth. She feels she has no other choice, but when she moves from her village and family eventually into her in-laws’ home after giving birth, she realizes they hate her guts.

This novel very much shows us the misogyny and patriarchal systems that dominate rural China and its villages, as Yingzhi is blamed for everything that is Guiqing’s fault. Guiqing doesn’t want to get a job, just plays mahjong and gambles away all their money, and it just a bum.

Yet his parents blame Yingzhi for everything, even when it’s implied he is unfaithful. Yingzhi is not happy with the circumstances, and this puts her on a crash collision with the events we know happened at the beginning of the novel. We were not explicitly told what happened in the beginning, but becomes more obvious as the tension brims to the surface.

Fang Fang looks at all of this with an unflinching look. This can be a miserable book to read because of how terrible Yingzhi is treated, and she’s quite the modern woman. When given the opportunity to go to the city, we realize she would fit in there more with her attitudes rather than the countryside.

The reactions of female characters to the events of the book are most interesting to me as well—it shows how these are cycles of abuse and patriarchal hurt. This is how generational trauma is formed, and having read the other Fang Fang book, I know this is something Fang Fang dives deeper in within her writing in general.

Overall Thoughts

I often find more “classic” Chinese authors more difficult to get through, which is why I turned away from Chinese literature in general. But it’s through reading Fang Fang’s work, especially The Running Flame, that has convinced me further to stop writing off an entire genre of national literature. It’s been a bit of a mental block I’ve been trying to get over.

This is such a book full of hurt and despair, but it’s also very reflective of modern China and the transition from rural landscapes to rapid modernization. This book is only a little over 200 pages, but it flew by quickly; I read all of it in one sitting because of how easy the prose was to read.

I see this as a mark of a good translation as well, so kudos to the translator. It’s a hard job to make it read so smoothly, so I commend that. If you’re interested in the plot, characters, or general setting of this novel, I suggest picking it up whenever you get the chance.

I found it quite enjoyable, and it is something I do believe I would return to in the near future!

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