Beiliu

Beiliu is a novel that the writer Lin Bai completed after years of quiet work, running between 550,000 and 600,000 Chinese characters; the title comes from her hometown, the border town of Beiliu in Guangxi. The novel is introduced by the long poem "Flora" and structured in parts including the Annotation Volume, the Commentary Volume, Scattered Chapters, Later Chapters, Seasonal Notes, Variant Words, and the Final Chapter; borrowing the format of traditional annotation and commentary, it splices together poetry, prose, autobiographical narrative, memoir, and dialect dictionary, breaking linear time and allowing multiple genres to coexist within one work. The protagonist, Li Yuedou, looks back more than forty years later on Yulin, Liugan, Anlu, and other places, shuttling between twenty-first-century southern Guangdong and Hong Kong while seeming to move stealthily through the coordinates of different eras. The family history of the Liang and Li clans, the regional history of the city of Beiliu, and the processes of population movement and urbanization since the second half of the twentieth century intertwine; the lush flora of the south, the distinctive words of the Cantonese dialect, and the people and affairs of the farm and the homeland converge into an all-encompassing "poem of the south." The novel has received the Peking University Wang Morren–Zhou Anyi World Chinese Literature Award, was selected for the inaugural Yangtze River Chinese Literature List of outstanding novels, and appeared on lists such as the Shenzhen Reading Month "Top Ten Books of the Year."