Snuggling

Snuggling is a novel by Ding Jie written in 2011 and first published in the magazine Zhongshan; a standalone edition was brought out by People's Literature Publishing House in 2012, with the title calligraphy by Nobel laureate Mo Yan. The story takes place in a fictional northern snow country, "Yabulis": a young painter, Luan Xiaotian, comes from the south to attend a writers' conference, only to find at the resort's front desk that his luggage and ID have vanished and that no one even knows the name of the meeting—his identity is left suspended. Just then An Fen, a bar singer ten years his senior, steps in to help and takes him under her wing with a worldly-wise "child." Together they travel through the snow in search of the legendary "Vine Village," said to produce vine-fragrance tea and to bring travelers extraordinary encounters. Along the way they tell each other the stories of their youth—the boy's childhood cowardice and wounds, the girl's tangled origins and the hidden pain of her first period—and as one heart after another opens, telling and listening turn into love. The novel employs interwoven explicit and implicit plotlines, with flashbacks and interpolations: the present-day lyrical passages are pure and delicate, while the remembered narratives are rough and hurried, the styles colliding with each other. In the final chapter, however, everything the narrative has built is overturned at a stroke: the reader discovers that this pure encounter and romance is in fact a spiritual love consummated between two people who never knew each other yet are deeply connected, as their souls communicate on the brink of death after a car crash. The work writes death as soft and love as hard, blending suspense, psychological analysis and romantic imagination into a distinctive Eastern dreamscape, and is regarded as a singular entry in the new-century Chinese tradition of tragic romantic fiction.