Bringing the Lantern

Bringing the Lantern is Jia Pingwa's first novel with a woman as its protagonist. Her given name is Ying, meaning firefly; she names herself "Daideng"—Bringing the Lantern—as if carrying a lamp through the night, and the name itself foreshadows her fate: burning desperately to give light, yet destined to be faint. Daideng is the director of the comprehensive governance office in Yingzhen, a town in the Qinling mountains. Beautiful, aloof, and somewhat out of step with her times, she faces daily the petty disputes of village life and an endless stream of petitioners: neighbors' quarrels, boundary fights, claims over illness and injury. She does not want to hurt the villagers, yet she must maintain stability at the grassroots, performing her duties as a township cadre while torn between the two. The more chaotic reality becomes, the more her inner self refuses to sink; with nowhere to escape, she places her spiritual hopes far away, writing letter after letter to Yuan Tianliang, a fellow townsman she admires, entrusting her feelings and ideals to words. The novel consists of three parts—"Mountains and Fields," "Starry Sky," and "Ghosts"—interweaving meticulous everyday realism with poetic letters, revealing the complex ecology of rural China in transition through the cross-section of one township, and portraying a grassroots woman cadre's perseverance, hardship, and inconsolable pain. This edition is the 2025 new hardcover from People's Literature Publishing House.