The People Beneath the Ice

The People Beneath the Ice is a collection of novellas and short stories by the young Beijing writer Hou Lei, published in 2017 by Beijing United Publishing Company. It contains six novellas and short stories—"The People Beneath the Ice," "The Eight Gates Beneath the Water," "The Woman Driver," "The Activist," "The Restless Youth," and "Eternal Blue Sky"—plus an afterword. The title comes from Hou Lei's statement of his creative intent: he "wanted to write not only the Beijing above the ice, but even more the Beijing beneath the ice." Above the ice is the glossy, internationalized metropolis that tourists see; beneath the ice lies the silent daily life of ordinary people frozen in time. The characters in these stories are almost all lower-class families in the hutongs: "Sixteen," whiling away his boyhood by Shichahai and longing to see the ice; "I," entangled at primary school with a classmate who is intellectually disabled; a woman who has driven for decades, from public buses to taxis; a neighborhood activist who knocks on every door and monitors the words and deeds of her neighbors; the "bad kids" drifting through the streets in the 1990s; and an educated youth who leaves a decaying extended family to join a reclamation team in Inner Mongolia. The timeframe stretches from the 1960s to the beginning of this century, with the fates of several generations threaded together by a single hutong. Hou Lei's language is concise and restrained, relying heavily on plain description and irony; he is skilled at entering his characters through the texture of everyday detail, neither dramatizing suffering nor offering the light of redemption. Writers including Yan Lianke, Liang Hong, Zhang Yueran, and Yang Qingxiang have all written recommendations for the book, regarding it as "taking root toward one's hometown" and as capturing another, obscured side of Beijing.