Restless

Tuzao (Restlessness) is the first novel in Jia Pingwa's Shangzhou series. Originally serialized in the first issue of Shouhuo in 1987 under the title Hehun (Soul of the River), it was later renamed Tuzao. Set in the countryside of Shangzhou, Shaanxi, during the early years of reform and opening up, the novel unfolds across Xianyouchuan, Liaocha Town, and Baishizhai County along the banks of the Zhou River. Centered on the relationship between the rural young man Jingou and Xiaoshui, it paints a social panorama of an era in transition. After serving in the army and returning to his village, Jingou organizes river shipping, then becomes a reporter for the Zhoucheng newspaper and exposes corruption among local power brokers. He later resigns to go into business running river transport, rising and falling several times in the tug-of-war between fame, profit, and moral conviction. His bond with Xiaoshui is repeatedly strained by class divisions and clan influence, while the narrative weaves in the overt and covert power struggles between the Tian and Gong families and Lei Dakong's profiteering in silver dollars. The book is divided into three volumes and thirty-two chapters. In his preface, Jia Pingwa describes the Zhou River as "the most restless and unsettled river in all of China," using it to capture the excitement, agitation, and spiritual dislocation of an age when institutional structures were loosening and the old order was beginning to totter. The title Tuzao is both a portrait of the protagonist's fate and the author's judgment on the emotional climate of the times. The novel attracted widespread attention upon publication, won the 1988 Mobil Pegasus Prize for Literature, and in 2018 was named one of the most influential novels of the forty years of reform and opening up.