Why this book

Yu Hua is among China's greatest living novelists, author of To Live. Here he turns the afterlife into a mirror, holding up the cruelties of a nation racing toward wealth. What the living quietly bury, the patient dead remember.

The Story

On the first day, Yang Fei sits eating in a shabby restaurant when the kitchen's gas erupts. The blast kills him at once. Therefore he rises, dazed, into a grey and foggy world, his face torn, and answers a call summoning him to be cremated.

With no family to prepare him, Yang Fei must mourn himself. He ties a black band on his own arm and takes a paper number for cremation, like a customer in a queue. But the fine plots belong to the wealthy dead. Therefore the poor simply wait.

Drifting, Yang Fei remembers Li Qing, the dazzling woman who once married him though he was only a poor clerk. Every friend envied her choice of love over money. But poverty is patient, and so was the richer man who began to court her.

For a while they were happy in one rented room, laughing over cheap meals. But the shine of wealth pulled at Li Qing until she could not resist. Therefore, weeping, she asked Yang Fei for a divorce, and he loved her enough to let her go.

Among the dead, Yang Fei learns her ending. Her rich husband fled abroad, exposed in a corruption scandal, leaving Li Qing disgraced and alone. Therefore she slit her wrists in a cold marble bath. Now she too wanders graveless, her heart still turned toward Yang Fei.

But his deepest memory is of his father. Yang Fei was born on a speeding train and slipped through the toilet onto the tracks below. A young railway switchman named Yang Jinbiao found the wailing infant between the rails. Therefore, at twenty-one, he became a father.

Yang Jinbiao raised the boy alone, working double shifts to feed and school him. He was engaged once, but his fiancée refused to accept another woman's child. Therefore he chose the boy over the marriage and never wed, pouring his whole young life into his son.

Yang Fei remembers the small things best: riding his father's broad shoulders along the rails, the saved coins for schoolbooks, the fevered nights his father sat awake. Yang Jinbiao gave everything and asked for nothing. Therefore the son's love for him never once dimmed.

Years later Yang Jinbiao fell gravely ill with a tumor. He knew that treatment would swallow all his son had. Therefore, one quiet day, the old man vanished, leaving only a folded note, so that Yang Fei would not ruin himself trying to save him.

Yang Fei quit his job and searched everywhere, riding trains, asking strangers, printing his father's photograph. But the old man had hidden himself to die unseen and unmourned. Therefore the search failed, and grief slowly became the very shape of Yang Fei's remaining days.

So Yang Fei moves between two worlds: the cold living world of his memories, and the warm, foggy world of the dead. But he cannot truly rest, because two beloved souls are still missing. Therefore he keeps walking and searching, day after day, toward the seventh.

On the fourth day, Yang Fei drifts into a luminous green land beyond the fog. Here rest the dead who have no grave and no one to bury them. They are gentle and unhurried, and here, at last, every soul is perfectly equal.

There he meets a young woman the others call Mouse Girl. In life she was poor, sharp-tongued, and tender. She loved her boyfriend fiercely, but when he gave her a counterfeit phone as a gift, she felt mocked and worthless. Therefore she climbed to a high rooftop.

Before a filming, jeering crowd below, Mouse Girl jumped, and her death became a passing spectacle online. But her boyfriend, Wu Chao, reached the street too late and was shattered by grief and guilt. Therefore he swore to give her the one thing she never had in life.

A burial plot and cremation cost money Wu Chao did not have. Therefore he sold one of his own kidneys to a back-alley broker, and with that blood-money he bought Mouse Girl a grave, so her restless soul could finally lie in the ground.

Word reaches the green land that Mouse Girl now has a grave waiting. Therefore she must leave the unburied to be cleansed and cremated, and rest properly at last. The others bathe her tenderly and send her onward, both gladdened and grieved to watch her go.

Wandering the land of the unburied, Yang Fei hears how the others came here. A young couple were crushed asleep in their beds when officials demolished their home by night. Therefore they arrived still holding each other, their grievance forever unanswered by the living world.

He meets men and women who burned in a shopping-mall fire, then learned the authorities reported only a handful dead while quietly erasing dozens more from the count. But here their true number stands whole and together. No official ledger can shrink them now.

In a cold corner drift twenty-seven newborns, thrown out as medical waste by a hospital that called them garbage. But the other dead have gathered them up, cradling them beside the silver stream. Therefore, here, the discarded children are finally wanted and warm.

Still Yang Fei searches for the one soul he most longs to find. Therefore he comes to a quiet station where the newly dead are received and comforted. And there, in a neat attendant's uniform, patiently greeting each arrival, stands his father, Yang Jinbiao.

Father and son fall into one another, the long years of searching collapsing into a single embrace. Yang Jinbiao had waited here all along, greeting strangers only to watch for one beloved face. Therefore, in death, the family that poverty had scattered is whole again.

But the kidney sale had poisoned Wu Chao's body. On the seventh day he dies of the festering wound and arrives, dazed, in the grey fog. Therefore Yang Fei, now gentle and at peace, takes the lost young man by the hand to guide him.

Wu Chao asks where they are going. Yang Fei tells him of the green land ahead, where the graveless dead are equal, kind, and free of every wound. There is no rich or poor there, no cruelty, no shame. It is called the land of the unburied.

What it means

Yu Hua's vision is a quiet, devastating verdict. In a nation sprinting toward riches, the poor find dignity, love, and equality only after death, only among the discarded. The land of the unburied is at once a sharp indictment of the living world and a tender, aching mercy.

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