Ben Hua

The epigraph consists of just a few lines: early in Benhua (Clumsy Flower), the novel states, "Clumsy flowers and foreign flowers are both cotton. Clumsy flowers are native, while foreign flowers come from beyond our borders. There is a village called Clumsy Flower." This full-length work is Tie Ning's fourth novel, spanning over 500,000 characters and polished over roughly six years. The narrative unfolds across nearly fifty years, from the late Qing dynasty and early Republic to the mid-1940s, set in a small village called Clumsy Flower on the Central Hebei Plain. It follows the Xiang family as its main thread, with the military career of the representative figure Xiang Xi serving as the narrative backbone.

Here, "clumsy" carries no derogatory meaning; it is an old term for native cotton, contrasted with "foreign flowers" introduced from abroad, suggesting an indigenous, slow, and resilient way of life. Tie Ning structures the book in the manner of a local gazetteer: grafting together historical fragments, rural seasonal rhythms, wedding and funeral customs, dialect and colloquial speech, and family ethics, so that the power struggles of warlords and cliques and the roar of the War of Resistance settle into village lanes and courtyards, becoming topics of conversation at the family dinner table. What she writes about are ordinary people and everyday matters—planting cotton, sheltering in huts, observing festivals, taking wives, fleeing hardship—and through these daily routines she reveals the turbulence of the times, capturing the survival wisdom and vital brightness of common folk amid difficult circumstances. The novel also reflects a shift in the author's narrative approach: she no longer focuses on delving into the inner lives and destinies of women, but turns her gaze toward a stretch of land and the collective portrait of several generations, with a plain, dense language that carries the solid, weighty atmosphere of the Yan-Zhao Plain.