Growing Up in Communist China - an Editorial Review of "The Winding Dirt Road"

Book Blurb:

Hoarded in the depth of memories of the past decades, this has been a work long overdue.

Written as an antithesis to all first-hand and second-hand propaganda written by both Chinese and foreign writers for China in the good part of 20th century in a fictional form, this collection, through different times and lands, gives insights into how human docile nature and characteristics are manipulated and brought about cultural and social corrosion over the century. The outcome thus sees "a monumental loss breathtakingly massive than any period that preceded it." Subsequently, it foreshadows a system that "would bring out not the best but the worst in people, against people, any people." (Event Horizon)

The first story is written as an introduction in addition to the prologue. From there, the collection proceeds with interrelated subjects or topics, building up causes and factors. At every turn, it gathers momentum and convenes halfway through the book to form the major components of critical perspectives at a juncture.

Extracts:

A man recounted that "despite seven decades, Chinese political orientation, even though after certain transformations, remains invariant." (Unforgiven);

A woman overheard every word " ... to the effect that the crime that aids and abets the enemy is greater than the crime that delivers." (Barrel Of A Gun);

The boy was constantly exposed to "the atmosphere abounded with tension and antagonism, with either party constantly looking for startling antitheses amid an otherwise tranquil life." (The Winding Dirt Road);

A man warned that "Because strict directives were being implanted in your mind, the moment you came to this life, you entered a lease contract on terms you could not dictate; you were part of a socialist mechanism without consent, without free will." (The Mother of All Antidotes)

Book Buy Link: https://geni.us/VwB3xZ

Editorial Review:

To read The Winding Dirt Road is to step into a long corridor of voices, some whispering, some abruptly silenced, all moving under the pressure of history. Jiu Da’s stories do not announce themselves as complete acts; they arrive instead like memories half-recalled, edged with uncertainty, asking the reader to linger rather than to conclude. Across the collection, the twentieth-century Chinese regime presses in—sometimes explicitly, sometimes like weather—shaping lives that feel provisional, interrupted, and perpetually unfinished. These are not tales that resolve so much as they haunt, leaving questions suspended in the air, where they continue to echo after the page has been turned.

The structure of the anthology—twelve stories framed by an opening prologue—mirrors this sense of incompletion. Some narratives pass swiftly, like glances exchanged in a crowd; others unfold with deliberate slowness, accumulating detail and moral weight. The longest piece, “The Winding Dirt Road,” attempts something particularly ambitious, braiding together two distant lives that appear, at first, to share nothing but silence between them. On one strand, Nin Yige’s secretive meeting with Xiao Yong vibrates with implication, its carefully measured dialogue suggesting a transaction involving their child that is never fully named. On the other, far from this tense exchange, a farmer named Taafeef discovers an abandoned baby by the Nile—an image at once startling and tender—and adopts the child, Dongfang, whose life becomes a study in displacement, fear, and the slow ache of not knowing where one truly belongs. As Dongfang grows, learning difficulties and emotional unrest gather around him, intensified by the ambiguous presence of his tutor, Gusha, whose lessons seem to reach beyond language. The story generates unease with real skill, yet its momentum falters at times, leaning too heavily on explanation where suggestion might have carried greater force. One senses that, had the characters been allowed to speak more through gesture and silence, the emotional current would have deepened.

Where the collection feels most assured is in moments of intimate exchange, nowhere more so than in “Event Horizon.” Here, Jiu Da distils the relationship between past and present into the figures of Siku and Waiwai. Siku, patient and grave, moves through the world with the knowledge of what damage remembrance can inflict—and what greater damage forgetting might do. Waiwai begins as light itself: curious, eager, buoyed by belief. Yet as truths are revealed, his transformation is rendered with quiet precision, the shift from innocence to reckoning unfolding through dialogue that feels both natural and quietly devastating. In this story, the author’s moral inquiry is inseparable from character; history is not argued but lived.

Throughout the collection, Jiu Da’s prose is formal, densely wrought, attentive to atmosphere and abstraction alike. At its best, the language builds a textured emotional landscape, heavy with implication and restraint. At times, however, the sentences thicken, turning inward upon themselves, and the narrative risks stalling beneath the weight of its own reflection. Idioms—often Western in flavour—occasionally jar against the cultural fabric of the stories, and authorial digressions on propaganda and oppression, though intellectually compelling, sometimes repeat what the fiction has already made clear. Even so, these moments feel less like flaws than symptoms of a mind urgently thinking, unwilling to let history lie quietly.

The Winding Dirt Road does not offer a single, unified vision of China’s past so much as a series of fractured impressions—lives bent, redirected, or abandoned under the force of ideology and time. Its power lies not in resolution but in its insistence on looking again, and then again, at what has been carried forward, and what has been left behind.

4 stars

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