His Kingdom

His Kingdom is a novel by Han Han published in 2009, set in the fictional Jiangnan town of Tinglin. The protagonist, Zuo Xiaolong, is a young man in his early twenties who buys a motorcycle with his savings and drifts through town, carefree and idle. Riding around town, he befriends Dashuai and Niba, a girl who has adored him since their school days; he hates the tacky songs blaring all day from the corner grocery and tries to drown them out with his engine, only to blow the motor and be forced to repair a bike he cannot afford to fix—and meanwhile to look for a job he may or may not want. Told through Zuo Xiaolong's eyes, the novel unfurls a portrait of the whole town: grassroots officials eager for development, a printing plant trading pollution for profit, a zoo hyped up to attract investment, and the town's collective frenzy over "rare animals." When the environment is polluted and the animals mutate, the town treats it as a chance for fortune and fame, and absurdity is written into daily life as the norm. Zuo Xiaolong wants to hold on to something of his own amid the clamor—he even plans to form a choir—only to find himself facing a wall that will not budge. Beneath the laughter is a clear-eyed sting. With exaggerated, bantering prose, Han Han turns a Chinese small town in an era of transformation into an allegorical space: GDP, official performance, the media, celebrity-style frenzy entangle with individual bewilderment and loss. The title comes from a Southern Weekly article commemorating Che Guevara, but the author says it has nothing to do with revolution—it refers only to that place in a person's heart that reality refuses to erode. At the end, Zuo Xiaolong, having survived a suicide attempt, sees mutant fireflies and says, "You can glow—you should fly ahead of me." Whether the book is about failure or a spark in the dark that will not go out, readers will each decide.