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Nan Hu Tang has been getting a quite a bit of buzz in Chinese baihe fan circles lately, so I thought I would check out some of her work. The major title of hers that I keep seeing recommended is Taking a Concubine (纳妾, pinyin: naqie), but that's a whopping 966,341 words long, so I decided to try out Home for the Funeral (奔丧, pinyin: bensang), which she wrote right after finishing Taking a Concubine, which I've also seen multiple recommendations for and, more importantly, clocks in at a relatively slim 324,756 words.

Advertised as folk horror, Home for the Funeral begins with protagonist Fang Huaiye, a graduate student living in Shanghai, returning to her mother's home village in rural Hunan (which she's only visited for New Year celebrations) for the funeral of a relative, Fang Juanhuai, who died at the grand old age of 106. Fang Huaiye's presence has been specifically requested because she's one of the very few living people left who is technically from the same generation as the deceased (Fang Huaiye's mother was adopted as a baby by Fang Juanhuai's grandmother when Fang Juanhuai was a full-grown adult), and so having her at the funeral is desirable for various ceremonial reasons. The invitation had originally been for Fang Huaiye's mother (who, being a generation older than the deceased, has even more ceremonial weight), but her mother had insisted that Fang Huaiye go in her place instead.

Fang Huaiye arrives at the village, is introduced to the main members of her vast, vast extended family, and also meets eventual love interest (she doesn't know this yet, but the reader does) Fang Zhicui, an occult practitioner (in an environment where this is actually meaningful) and funeral director. Very soon, eerie things start happening: the deceased's granddaughter seems to be possessed by a spirit of some sort, a chicken and a snake have an ominous fight to the death right in front of Fang Huaiye, a photograph of the deceased starts weeping blood, the works. Fang Huaiye also glimpses a corpse hanging from a tree as she's being driven through some fields at night — but when she returns in the morning, there's no tree there, and definitely no corpse. Distressingly, she soon discovers that she's physically incapable of leaving the village: pain overwhelms her as soon as she sets foot on the main highway leading away from the village. With the aid of Fang Zhicui, Fang Zhicui's formidable teacher Fang Zhe, and a couple of other cousins, she tries to work out what is going on, because she doesn't really have a choice.

( spoilers to mid-book )

( spoilers for the end of the book )

The romance between Fang Huaiye and Fang Zhicui was so underwritten as to be practically non-existent. I'm not sure they even display on-page attraction beyond noting each other's attractiveness at a couple of points (and not even in a sexy way, just a matter-of-fact way). It's developed a tiny bit more in the extras, but not by much — and even then they're still in occult-mystery-solving mode, having stumbled across some mysterious happenings in a Miao village. I didn't find their personalities particularly well-drawn either: we're told what they are like as people a lot more than shown. While the (all-women) secondary cast is pretty large, I didn't find their personalities particularly well-developed either: the older generation (Fang Juanhuai & co) were tough and secretive and formidable, and the younger generation (Fang Huaiye, Fang Zhicui and a couple of distant cousins/friends) were plucky and determined, and that's mostly it. A couple of what should have been big emotional moments fell short for me because of this. The first is where one of Fang Juanhuai's co-conspirators accuses Fang Huaiye of actually being a cunning, highly manipulative person who's using an unwitting Fang Zhicui to carry out her ulterior motives. This would have had weight had I been given any substantial sense of Fang Huaiye's actual personality or any hints that she might be something different from what she seemed. The other is where the reader realises that Fang Huaiye's great love for and trust in her mother has basically saved her from having a full-on identity crisis once she learns the truth about her existence. Again, this would have been moving had the author made any serious prior attempt at building up that mother-child relationship, and given us a sense of what Fang Huaiye's mother was like (beyond generic well-educated professional woman).

While the horror/thriller parts of this novel gave me some nicely spooky moments, I can't say that it's exactly motivated me to tackle Nan Hu Tang's longer work, which is rather a pity.

I read the Chinese original of the novel here on JJWXC.