Heavy Snow

Heavy Snow is a novel co-written by twin sisters Li Jing and Li Ying. It was first published by China Workers Publishing House in 2004, followed by a revised edition from Zhejiang People's Publishing House · Post Wave in 2016–2017, and was reissued in 2019 in the Contemporary New Classics Library (edited by Meng Fanhua) by China Youth Press. Told in the first person, the novel follows Sun Xiaoying, a female educated youth from Tianjin who leaves the city during the Cultural Revolution to settle in the Great Northern Wilderness. Her delicate, sensitive body and mind are repeatedly worn down by harsh labor and climate. Moving between a brick kiln, a reed field, and a water conservancy company, she meets Shu Di, a tall, robust, cheerful and optimistic fellow educated youth, and witnesses the differing fates of companions such as Ye Danrao and Lin Yimeng. Shu Di's friendship is like a glimmer of light illuminating Sun Xiaoying's dim and lonely youth; torn between collective discourse and personal feeling, the pure, snow-like, unnameable bond between the two must find room to exist amid the tests of the natural environment and the sweep of history. The writing is delicate and restrained, the narration low-key and poetic, without accusation or sentimentality, and critics regard it as a representative work of "personalized narrative" in educated-youth literature. The novel won the novel jury prize of the 19th United Daily News Literature Award in Taiwan, and has been highly praised by scholars and writers including Zhu Xining, Chen Yingzhen, Zhang Dachun, Shi Shu, Xie Mian, Li Jingze, Lei Yi, and Li Yinhe.