Chinese Literature - Li-hua Ying 2010

HONG FENG (1957— )
The Dictionary

HONG FENG (1957— ). Fiction writer. Born and raised in a small town of Jilin Province in China’s northeast, Hong Feng is often mentioned in the company of Ma Yuan, the most prominent Chinese experimental fiction writer, also from the northeast. The stories he wrote in the 1980s are regarded as representative works of China’s avant-garde literature. “Bensang” (Going to a Funeral), a story of a son attending his father’s funeral, uses an ironic voice to dismantle the authority of the father by a rebellious son, symbolizing the call for an end to the blind political idealism of the Mao era. “Hanhai” (The Great Sea) shares some of the concerns of the root-seekers in its depictions of folk customs in China’s northeastern borders. In his more recent works, Shengsi yuehui (Critical Rendezvous), which recounts a man’s history of sexual relationships with several women, and Zhongnian dixian (The Last Defense of Middle Age) about the dangerous world of sex, power, and money, Hong takes a completely different approach. Instead of writing for the elitist few, he aims to entertain the populace both in terms of subject matter and narrative method.