Rouge Street: Three Novellas
By Shuang Xuetao
Translated by Jeremy Tiang
(2016, 2017, translated 2022
Metropolitan Books
(Three Novellas)

Shuang Xuetao’s Rouge Street, Three Novellas, includes “The Aeronaut,” “Bright Hall,” and “Moses on the Plain.” All are set in the land he grew up in China’s far north: Shenyang in Liaoning Province. Shuang Yanfen or Rouge Street is an everyman’s neighborhood populated by men and women who survived the upheavals of Mao’s revolutions. Some lost property and family, others escaped the worst blows, but all are doing whatever they can to keep what little they have as China’s market economy chills. As factories are closing down and hope is drying up, characters are realizing they can trust no one and that even the oldest and truest slogan “Mechanic, Miller, Lathe Hand, the best jobs in the Land,” no longer applies. Fortunately, Shuang’s Realist narrative is illuminated by confident and inspired intrusions of Magic Realism. He sets the tone in “The Aeronaut,” introducing us to the Gao and Li families, who live in homes built by the Japanese during their occupation of “Manchuko” between 1931 and 1945. The Japanese built many heavy industrial factories during this period and following the Liberation, the Chinese made the region the home and exemplar of Chinese steel and iron production. In his youth, Gao Likuan was imprisoned once by the Japanese and twice by Nationalists. A printer by trade, he survived the Cultural Revolution on the strength of his knack for producing the finest red ink for big-character posters ensuring protection for his family as he churned out pamphlets, manuals, and propaganda posters for the Party. Gao Likuan, later known as one-eyed Gao, takes on the desperate Li Zhengdao. Flattered to be considered a mentor and delighted to exploit Li’s fealty, Gao leans into his Big Shot role. Ever the opportunists, Gao and Li attend a two-week study session in a local cadre in a bid to join the Party. Unfortunately, Gao loves alcohol. He is also impatient and quick to brawl; after attacking his instructor, he is banned from the Party. Li, however, is a model student, a regular Lei Feng. He becomes a Party member and over the next twenty years rises through the ranks at the factory and enjoys a status far above his mentor. He also marries and sires nine children. But with the death of Mao, Li is sacked and forgotten. He returns to factory work and not long after, he hangs himself. “Rouge Street” begins when Li’s oldest son, Li Minqing, shows up at one-eyed Gao’s The young man is an altogether different creature than his father. Bell-bottomed, educated, and a dreamer, Lin Minqing brightens Gao’s world and marries his daughter. They are a practical match: he has a good job in a parachute factory and she works in a machine shop. After the factories begin to go silent, Minqing invests his energies in one doomed entrepreneurial venture after another. Before Old Gao dies, he urges his son, Xuguang, to live life like a Napoleon, but the boy lacks his father’s positivity, skills, and luck. Rueful and irritated, he attempts to atone for his long years of neglecting filial piety, following up on appeals from isolated and abandoned aunts and finally visiting his grandmother. After earning a BA, he finds work in a bank, believing that a hidden, quiet, prescribed life will be enough for him and the best he could hope for. But SHuang does not leave us with nothing, for Rouge Street, despite all the sorrows it has witnessed, is capable of miracles. Rouge Street: Three Novellas was The New Yorker Best Book of 2022 and a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice. Shuang Xuetao has won many awards in China and is one of the artists behind the Dongbei Renaissance.

“Look at the last ten years that had just gone by, and project them forward two decades, would these college students enjoy the fruits of their labors? He’d witnessed a classmate slitting a teacher’s nose, and if he’d wanted to he could have grabbed the knife and slashed the teacher’s cheek as well. They said A one day and B the next, and now the university exams were back, but who could say that they wouldn’t turn from B back to A again? …he had gotten very close to Ling, a woman on his production team. She was pure as sunlight, and never questioned his silence or melancholy. If he had to absolutely spend the rest of his life with one person, this girl would suffice.”  –from “Rouge Street.”