JING FU, PEN NAME OF GUO JINGFU (1942— ) - The Dictionary

Chinese Literature - Li-hua Ying 2010

JING FU, PEN NAME OF GUO JINGFU (1942— )
The Dictionary

JING FU, PEN NAME OF GUO JINGFU (1942— ). Novelist and essayist. Like his more famous colleague Jia Pingwa, Jing Fu was born in Shangzhou, Shaanxi Province, and like Jia, he has also written extensively about the rural societies of the northwestern province, having published many short stories, essays, and novels. His best-known work is Bali qing chou (Feud in Bali), a novel that portrays the entangled relationships of two families in a small town in southern Shaanxi from the 1950s to the 1980s. While centering on two women’s unfortunate experiences and unhappy marriages, the novel reflects the starvation of the 1950s, the destruction of the Cultural Revolution, and the reform era, offering a glimpse into the vulnerability and lack of recourse in the lives of ordinary people and the destruction of family as a result of terrible abuses of power and human cruelty. Jing Fu’s recent work is an environmental novel, Lu ming (The Cries of Deer), which portrays a young man’s arduous journey to fulfill his father’s dying wish to release a herd of badly abused deer back to the forest. Characteristic of Jing Fu’s style, the novel mixes the sensational with the serious, resulting in a popular, entertaining novel with a nod to social criticism. Jing Fu sees environmental problems as the biggest challenge of the 21st century for humankind and plans to write more on the issue.