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Jia Pingwa's controversial novel Ruined City was nothing short of a national sensation in 1993 when it sold over a million copies in the months before it was banned for its sexually explicit content. The second novel in a trilogy, Ruined City takes place in a fictionalized version of Xi'an, the capital of the author's home province of Shaanxi. The corruption of Xi'an, which served as the capital of several Chinese dynasties, casts a metaphorical shadow over the novel as it explores the city's "fall" through a complex weaving of traditional literary, historical, philosophical, and poetic allusions into an earthy, vernacular prose that for many critics crosses the line into pornography. The novel's character-driven plot follows their lives through a network of digressions that as a whole calls into question the moral claim of literature as the crown jewel of Chinese cultural values. The "unbanning" of Ruined City in China seventeen years after its initial publication has revived Chinese media attention along with comparisons to the erotic Ming Dynasty novel The Plum in the Golden Vase.
The following excerpt contains the first movement of Ruined City, which opens as a series of poignant vignettes highlighting the shifting relationship between traditional Chinese culture and the global forces of change.
Something strange occurred in the city of Xijing in the 1980s: When two devoted friends in search of a little recreation visited the tomb of the Tang concubine Yang Yuhuan, known as Guifei, the Imperial Consort, they wondered why so many visitors were scooping up gravesite dirt. They were told that since Guifei was known as an ageless beauty, if they took dirt from her grave and mixed it into their potted plants, the flowers would grow bright and beautiful. So the friends scooped up handfuls of dirt, took it home in their clothing, put it in a black earthenware pot they had kept for years, and left it there until they could purchase some fine flower seeds. Imagine their surprise when green sprouts broke through the surface a few days later, and within a month had spurted almost magically into a flourishing growth the likes of which no one had ever seen. They carried it into town to ask an old flower expert at the...