Nanmen Lian

The novel turns its lens on an ordinary household in Tianjin in the mid-1960s: Qin Huiting and his wife, and their four daughters, named after melon, fruit, pear, and peach. There are no earth-shaking events here; what is written is the daughters' small daily round of work and commutes, matchmaking and romance, marriage and childbirth, and dealings with their husbands' families and their own, the comings and goings between neighbors, the comparisons and mutual help among colleagues, a breakfast of old-style tofu pudding with two fried dough crisps, soy milk rationed and years lived by careful calculation. All four girls are kind-hearted and without grand ambitions; their greatest wish is simply to stay with the person they love. The men around them—Siheyuan, Sandaomei'er, Muxu, Kouji'er, Bashi, Qiangguo—have names like nicknames and seem like people from the neighborhood, each of them flesh and blood.

The author deliberately does not set out the historical background, letting the conservative mores, scarce goods, and the political tension before the coming storm seep naturally out of human dealings and the oil, salt, firewood, and rice of daily life. The language is plain to the point of bare description and heavily uses Tianjin slang and local speech, so that it reads smoothly and is full of "Tianjin flavor"; critics have called it a genre painting of folk customs with a distinctive Tianjin lower-class coloring, and it has been seen as an "encyclopedia" for understanding how Tianjin people lived in that era.