Ninth Building
by Zou Jingzhi
translated by Jeremy Taing
Open Letter 2023

Longlisted for the 2023 International Booker prize, Zou Jingzhi’s novel Ninth Building, translated by Jeremy Taing, is a harrowing depiction of boyhood during the Cultural Revolution.

Born in 1952, Jingzhi has built a prolific career in the arts as a writer, poet, essayist, screenwriter and playwright. Despite his success, in the early 1990s, Jingzhi realized his childhood experiences were impossible to ignore. As he said in an interview with The Booker Prize, “I wrote this book to let go of my childhood.”

As such, the author returned to his journal entries of the time to compile a text consisting of two parts and an assortment of poems, which conclude the novel in the afterword. One might expect the text to dabble in the sentimental, yet Jingzhi and Taing maintain a prose style that is sparse and distant. These childhood and early adulthood memories are repackaged as a collection of dream-like vignettes that underlie the everyday tedium of life during the Cultural Revolution. Ninth Building is not a straightforward, linear novel nor is it a memoir; it sits somewhere in between.

In part one, the unnamed narrator recounts poignant scenes from his childhood in Beijing as one of the many residents of the Ninth Building in the years leading up to 1966. The recollections begin with a passage describing how the narrator and his band of friends pooled their money together to buy scraps of fabric which, once dyed red and tied securely to the arm, would mark them as members of the Red Guard.

This section of the novel is punctuated by death. The narrator and his friends routinely encounter the bodies of adults that have either been murdered or have committed suicide. Yet, the confusion and fear of the time, which hangs over the boy and his world like a shroud of darkness, does not stop him from experiencing childhood firsts. He is besotted by Xi Xiaomei, even the mocking of his peers will not deter him from spending time with her. Unfortunately, the only thing that can stop them from continuing their friendship is all pervasive and powerful. Their relationship is cut short once her family is transferred to the Zhongtiao Mountains. Her father has been sentenced to hard labor in the mines.

The most powerful scene in this section occurs during a spring day in the park when the narrator and his friends shout the word pointless over and over again. They run wild, exhausting themselves yet feeling ecstatic as they shriek pointless into the wind. However, the word takes on greater significance once one realizes that the suffering they will experience in their later years will have been just as pointless as the word itself.

The second half of the book, covering the years of 1969-1977, begins when our unnamed narrator, an “educated youth” travels to the Great Northern Waste with a cohort of boys who must also experience a “re-education through poverty.”

In the barren north, bombarded by snow and apathy, the boys despair. They fritter away their time the only way they know how: consumed by boredom, gambling, and dark humor. Bouts of futile manual labor, harvesting wheat and clearing fields, are interrupted by desperate schemes to garner medical leave. Their only real ticket to freedom.

One can place this novel within China’s scar literature tradition. This genre of fiction, beginning in the 1970s, portrayed the traumas that artists and intellectuals had experienced during the dark years of the Cultural Revolution. The literature of this time is notable for its fury and resentment. Yet, unlike the proponents of scar literature, Jingzhi does not delve into anger. Jingzhi’s focus is tedium, the quiet passing of time and the subtle erosion of the spirit.

Likewise, Jingzhi does not over contextualize his experiences. We never learn the specifics of his father’s imprisonment. We never learn the contents of the letters the narrator receives from his family. We never learn where and how the narrator meets his wife. It is through this absence of detail, I found myself wishing for more.

As we move through the novel, especially once we move into Part Two, the text is riddled with memorable scenes and snapshots of the time that read more autobiographical rather than fictitious. Yet, Jingzhi keeps the reader at a distance from his narrator. We are held at bay, unable to peer too closely at the fissures in the narrator’s psyche. It is this absence which leaves me yearning for more.

Kiran Gill is a writer from New England living in London.