Welcome to FairlyCurrent’s SPOTLIGHT, a series where we explore the Chinese-language speaking world through art! In this installment we’re looking at writer An Yu’s debut novel: Braised Pork.

An Yu（安於）was born and raised in Beijing. She graduated from NYU with a degree in Creative Writing, and Braised Pork is her first novel.

A young painter comes home one evening to find her husband lying face down in their bathtub, drowned. There had been no prior indication of suicidal ideation, and no sign of a struggle; the only clue to what happened was a small, folded piece of paper on the ledge beside his body. On it – a pencil drawing of a recurrent character from her late-husband’s dreams: a fish with the head of a man.

What follows is at once an enthralling whodunnit, and equally, a young women’s disorienting search for meaning in the aftermath of grief. The protagonist’s quest to understand what happened to her husband leads her across China: from her smog-choked hometown of Beijing to the dream-like, folklorically saturated Tibetan countryside. This is a novel which expertly treads the taut lines of contrast – urban and rural, secular and religious, and predominantly, when to indulge the desire for independence, and when to come home.

The opening scene of the novel sets its surrealist tone; strange occurrences are constantly shrugged off by characters as mundane. The painter, Jia Jia, spends the days immediately following her husband’s death in a rich couple’s apartment, working on a commissioned mural – she notes the irony of painting a Buddhist devotional piece for an atheist couple. A fish tank spontaneously catches alight in her grandmother’s apartment. Jia Jia happens across a writer who is searching for his lost wife, leading to a confusing, disjointed exchange on the bank of a river. Characters seem to pop up from nowhere, with no exploration of their backstory or intentions, and later vanish without explanation, yet strangers who are looking for lost things all seem to end up in the same place. The protagonist is self-aware of the surreal events surrounding her, but can do mercifully little to control them; she deals with her grief with a sense of detachment and existential bewilderment. 

An beautifully and vividly captures the otherwise subjective, corporeal experience of grief, through a very real gateway to another realm. Throughout the novel, Jia Jia travels in and out of the “world of water”; a place of stillness, darkness, and disorientation, where one breathes water in place of air, and slowly dissolves into the surrounding atmosphere. When she traverses the boundary between worlds is out of her control:  she falls into it as one falls asleep, but upon returning to her own reality, she finds herself dripping, soaked to the bone and painfully disorientated. The flow of An’s melancholic, contemplative prose, too, is rich with references to the dark, soft, feminine yin 阴 of Chinese cosmology; the novel is an exploration of how the female identity can morph with grief and loss.

The dream-like, soothing rhythm of An’s writing perfectly expresses the novel’s balance between the mundane and magical; descriptions of Beijing’s dull nightlife, pollution and housing market are juxtaposed with scenes of rural Tibet: of imagery of mysterious wood carvings of the ‘fish-man’, and fields upon fields of white tulips glowing eerily under the light of a full moon. Jia Jia’s bewilderment at the things she encounters throughout this novel demonstrates how the world seems to make less sense when you have lost someone.

The central themes of this novel are ones in which I think we can all find solace in the uncertain times we are living in: of trying to rationalise the irrational, of feeling vulnerable and fragile, and yet still capable of finding connection in strange places. The novel’s title expresses all: Braised Pork is the dish she returns home to, made by her father, when she is exhausted and frustrated at her vain search for answers. It is the reminder that whilst we may not always find what we are looking for, we can always find meaning and truth by returning to our roots. 

For soothing, mystical escapism in Beijing and rural Tibet, as well as a soft, safe place to land and explore ways of understanding loss, you can find An Yu’s Braised Pork here.