Floating Colors

Floating Colors is a novel by the poet and fiction writer Huang Fan, completed over six years and six drafts and published in November 2015 by Jiangsu Phoenix Literature and Art Publishing House. The title was originally to be Primary Colors, evoking the red, yellow, and blue from which the complete worlds of father and son are mixed; only at the fifth draft did it become Floating Colors, which the author explains as meaning that human civilization is but a smear of floating color on Earth or in the universe. The novel centers on the emotional bond between Lei Zhuangyou and his son Lei Shi, spanning from the 1940s to the new era and reaching into a Future City three hundred years hence. It opens with the father gravely ill: struck by a meteorite that hit a Buddhist temple, his body overloaded with heavy metals, he drifts between memory and hallucination, drawing out his youth and middle age from the 1950s to the 1970s. The son, estranged from his father in adulthood, only returns home by car after receiving a telegram asking to see him one last time; mishaps pile up along the road, and stream-of-consciousness thoughts keep returning to his adolescence, courtship, and marriage. By the time he reaches the hospital, his father has just died, and immense remorse brings him to a reconciliation in his heart. Told in two narrative lines, at once realistic and infused with a science-fictional parable, the novel entangles and mirrors figures such as Lei Zhuangyou, Yun Xia, and Shi Liulong with the inhabitants of the future world, exploring between historical realism and dystopian imagination the conflict between technological society and traditional ethics and the complex mutations of human nature, in a language that joins an Eastern aesthetic sensibility with scientific rationality. The book received the Zijin Mountain Literature Award.