Sheng, “ Northern Girls,” about the sexual exploits of young women who migrate to the cities, passed on “Death Fugue.” Chinese editors decided the story line was too controversial. Publishers in China, including Penguin, which released an earlier novel by Ms. Over coffee at an outdoor restaurant near her apartment in Lido, one of the cool neighborhoods in Beijing, a mixture of boutiques and bars, with expensive sports cars out front, she added, “When I talk with friends, I reminisce about the ’80s, when everything was not so tainted by the pressure of money, when poets didn’t abandon their work.”

Sheng, 41, a petite woman in skinny jeans, a blue T-shirt and black stiletto heels with a sheath of long black hair around a slender face. “I am truly disappointed with present society,” said Ms. The place is free of bribery, and a young doctor says he does not have to deal with colleagues from his former life - China, in the late 1980s - who sewed up patients’ anuses if they did not receive the requisite payoff. Pregnancies deemed likely to produce children with low I.Q.s are terminated immediately, and nursing homes that seem welcoming on the outside are in fact crematories. She also creates a society, Swan Valley, that can be read as China today and in the future, where things seem superficially shiny and sleek, rich and productive.Įxcept in Swan Valley, there is no sexual freedom. In “Death Fugue,” she tells the truth about how the People’s Liberation Army extinguished the student protest. Sheng eventually fashioned that turning point in contemporary Chinese history into a stomach-churning, exuberantly written allegory, “Death Fugue,” which recalls Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.” Now a prominent novelist and a denizen of Beijing literary circles, Ms.

Sheng, sitting around the television knew no better. The official version portrayed the students as violent criminals. It was 1989, and the story that the world knows as the Communist Party’s military crackdown in Tiananmen Square was told in reverse on the grainy screen. BEIJING - WHEN her village was still lush with lotus plants, and a crystalline river sparkled in the fields, Sheng Keyi, a very clever and very poor 16-year-old girl, watched television on a tiny black-and-white set at a neighbor’s house.

Brave writer slingsot