Spring

Spring is a short-story collection by the writer A Yi, published in 2018 by Sichuan Literature and Art Publishing House. It gathers eight stories written between 2009 and 2012: "The Attic," "A Curse in Yang Village," "Spring," "The Glowing Little Red," "Bei Fan," "The Flower of a Small Town," "The Hunter," and "Model Youth." Most of these stories take place in small cities, townships, and the urban-rural fringe, and they are about people worn dull by daily life and then suddenly pierced through by old affairs and desires: Zhu Dan, who has walked the same road for ten years without change, is made prematurely gray by an old matter, and the secret in the attic finally emerges in all its ferocity; a middle-aged peasant woman in Yang Village brawls with someone over a trifle and curses them with fierce resolve, after which a process as inevitable as prophecy cannot be stopped; the corpse of a woman of the demimonde becomes cold material in the news, and the cause of her life and death cannot be confirmed. The title story, "Spring," consists of nineteen sections and revolves around the death of a young girl named Spring, showing how family, emotion, and fate turn a specific person into an event. A Yi's writing is cold, restrained, and sharp, advancing close to his characters' circumstances in a near-case-file narrative, and working on the ground of crime, death, and rural life to address dignity, shame, and futile struggle. He is regarded as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Chinese short fiction.