Hunter – Shuang Xuetao

[Granta Magazine Editions; July 2025]

Tr. from the Chinese by Jeremy Tiang

“Once you start moving, you’ll never be able to stop – next thing you’ll be moving to New York, and then the moon.” – “Theatre”

Shuang Xuetao used to be China’s most anticipated emerging writer. His name is synonymous with “The Dongbei Renaissance,” a loose literary movement that explores the recent history of Northeastern China. Shuang does not believe that Dongbei writers need to “break out” from their home region. Instead he hopes to bring a “more honest, idiosyncratic” voice to China’s literary landscape. In the Anglophone sphere, he is largely known for Rouge Street, an anthology of three novellas set in his childhood neighborhood by the same name.

In recent years, Shuang has moved from Dongbei to Beijing, become a full-time writer, and ventured into screenwriting. Two novellas from Rouge Street have been adapted into films, and one into a TV series. His short story collection Hunter, originally published in 2020, is his most recent work of fiction and second book to appear in English. Transcending his hometown in the late 1980s and 90s, these eleven stories span from Beijing to London, from China’s Republican Era to a nondescript spacetime within a work of metafiction. In what might be read as a transitional work, Shuang showcases his literary ambitions beyond Northeastern China. As he experiments with unfamiliar genres, he does not abandon the spirit of the Dongbei Renaissance: alienation, abandonment, and the struggle with the all-too-powerful concept of destiny.

Shuang’s first-time readers will notice his unique style, in the iconic Dongbei accent that standard Mandarin speakers may find curt, playful, stoic, and at times theatrical. His prose remains equally compelling in English thanks to Jeremy Tiang’s masterful translation that preserves the Dongbei linguistic texture. From a translator’s standpoint, one passage in Hunter I particularly adore comes from a minor moment in the third story of the collection, “Up at Night,”

一只流浪猫大摇大摆从我们面前走过，姿态优美，顾盼生情。丫找伴儿呢，岳小旗说，他把烟头一弹，火花飞溅，猫灵巧地躲过，颠著小碎步沿著湖边跑了。

If word-by-word accuracy is prioritized, the excerpt would read:

A stray cat walks past us with swagger, its posture elegant, looking around with charm/love in its eyes. It [the gender-neutral pronoun is derogatory, colloquial, mostly used in Northern China] is looking for a partner [highly colloquial], Yue Xiaoqi says, he flicks his cigarette butt, sparks splash, the cat nimbly dodges and, in small trots, runs away along the lake.

Tiang’s translation, on the other hand, reads:

A stray cat sashays elegantly past us. She’s on the prowl for a mate, says Xiaoqi. He flicks his cigarette butt, sending a shower of sparks through the air. The cat nimbly dodges it and minces away along the lakeshore.

I immediately notice the crassness of Xiaoqi’s speech in Chinese and Tiang’s usage of “sashays” and “minces away” in English. Many words exclusively used in Dongbei cannot be directly translated, yet Tiang recreates their collective effect with simple, evocative English verbs. In Tiang’s translation, the extraordinary verb variety of English becomes the tailormade antidote for its relative shortage of diverse idioms and interjections compared with Chinese. Tiang allows readers to build trust with Shuang as a Dongbei-raised, Beijing-based writer who tells heart-felt stories with abundant humor and little outwardly emotional display. Even in passages least relevant to the plots and characters, readers still get to relish the linguistic collaboration between the flagbearers of Dongbei literature and contemporary Sinophone translation.

Like Shuang’s earlier fiction, Hunter documents the lives of people thrown off-balance by the tides of history. In the opening story “Heart,” the narrator contemplates his strained relationship with his dying father, a stoic former boxer from Dongbei, as they ride in an ambulance late at night. In “Yang Guangyi,” the eponymous martial artist protagonist becomes something of a folk hero wanted by the police during Dongbei’s lawlessness in the 1980s. At times, Shuang’s toiling characters find themselves stranded in magical realist settings. The narrator of “Heart” finds himself trapped in the speeding ambulance as his father experiences terminal lucidity while both the doctor and the driver have fallen asleep. In “Squirrels,” the teenage narrator is ordered by a soldier to fire at his male class captain who sexually harasses a classmate, only to witness the class captain collapse from heatstroke and the soldier disappear. In “Mars,” when the protagonist reunites with his middle-school sweetheart to review their decade-old love letters, items mentioned in the letters escape the wax-sealed envelopes, including a rope that strangles his sweetheart before returning to the envelope. Shuang’s occasional use of magical realism is inspired by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Murakami Haruki, two writers he has cited as important influences. Murakami’s magical realism can be read as a device that blurs the border between interiority and exteriority, and Macondo’s epic has taught Chinese writers to ‘avoid the pitfalls of realism.’ Shuang’s magical realism, on the other hand, contrasts with the unmagical realist settings of his stories and thus captures his protagonists’ confinement. They are shackled by the baggage of a traumatic past and by society’s systematic repression of those removed from the power center, especially when unanticipated reminders of their unprivileged origin tear open the peaceful façade of their existence. As Shuang creates a thrilling reading experience within a tight narrative space, he continues to demonstrate the strength that has won him praise: a sensitivity to neglected voices, voices muted by mainstream discourses and slowly washed away from the nation’s collective memory.

But Dongbei is only one aspect of Hunter­: half of the collection is set outside Northeastern China. In “Sen,” based in China’s Republic Era, between the 1910s-1940s, the Japanese director-turned war criminal Yamamoto survives an assassination attempt in Peiping (today’s Beijing), before turning his experience into a feature film and selling its screening rights to a Chinese director. The “Martial Artist” chronicles the life of academic Dou Dou, the son of an underground Communist Party member murdered by the Japanese, as he navigates China’s tumultuous political landscape from the years of Japanese occupation to the Cultural Revolution. In both stories, the protagonists appear to treat their past with bystander-like apathy, in the same way that the weight of their memories is dwarfed by the grandness of time. Shuang captures this dramatic tension in the stories’ final scenes. As Yamamoto remembers his assassination, he negotiates the rights of his film with the narrator’s boss and invites the narrator to drink and snack, “Now look, I’ll end up finishing all of these suncakes if you don’t have some. Won’t you help me out?” And while Dou Dou’s colleagues are thrown into cowsheds during the Cultural Revolution, he continues his search for his father’s assassin and, after spotting her at a variety show on his university campus, placidly whispers a spell to her that turns her into a puff of smoke: “I’m done for, you cruel man.” The story concludes with her exit: “The heat of the crowd wafted the smoke into the air, so she hovered for a moment above the stage, and then she was gone.” In these emotionally flat endings, the protagonists display an unfitting sense of oblivion, as though the memories that dictate their absurd and surreal actions belong to someone else. Indeed, their material comfort allows them to treat their past with a strange lightness. At the same time, Shuang’s characters seem to have lost control of their past, as if it is for their best either to exploit their experiences for profit and art or to follow what fate compels them to do while letting their agony slip away.

Shuang’s second experiment is in metafiction and showbiz fiction, accounts perhaps related to his life in Beijing. “Premonition” and “Daughter” feature full-time writers, while “Up at Night,” “Mars,” and “Hunter” examine the lives of actors off stage. Among the writer and actor protagonists of these five stories, four are men in their thirties, three come from Dongbei and drink heavily, two live in Beijing, one resides in Shanghai, and all of them have achieved modest professional success. An air of ennui and aimlessness permeates these stories. In “Premonition,” sci-fi writer Li Xiaobing goes fishing alone at night and meets a man named Andrew, dressed in suit and tie, who declares that his city is about to face the Last Judgment. In “Hunter,” actor Lu Dong spends most of his day lying prone on his balcony with a clothes-drying pole in order to learn his role as a gunman, until he is convinced that a random passerby is a terrorist. The state of these writer and actor characters is typified in the following interaction between Lu Dong and his director friend Zhang Yu:

What are you busy with? Zhang Yu asked. Running around, Lu Dong said, taking on whatever roles I can. You married? Yes, said Lu Dong. My daughter’s four. That’s good, said Zhang Yu, I’ve been divorced twice in the last decade. The second time was like a photocopy of the first – I remember back in the day you weren’t in favour of me getting married, but I didn’t listen. Turns out you were right.

The two men in their late thirties find themselves idling in a bar on a weekday evening, moving across the floor without causing a stir. They speak in the shortest possible sentences and discuss their insipid private lives with little emotion, as though talking about someone else. Neither seems enthused about their work in the entertainment industry, but both rely on the topic of acting and directing to fill the silence between them. Lu and Zhang make a comfortable living, but they don’t find much purpose and fulfillment in their practice. They both seem to have anticipated their dissatisfaction with themselves, and yet neither has a cure for it. The climaxes of these stories rely on a magical realist or absurdist experience. Li Xiaobing saves his city from the Last Judgment by uttering a spell; Lu Dong sprints downstairs and heroically tackles the passerby. While Shuang’s quintessential Dongbei narrative is rooted in the characters’ personal development and struggles to escape their circumstances, the works featuring writer and actor protagonists in Hunter are nevertheless driven by a Murakami-esque experience of emptiness culminated with a sudden spur of excitement. If Shuang’s early projects are stories, then Hunter may be called a collection of immersions, journeys, or even departures.

Chinese readers have responded to Hunter with mixed reviews: the book has received a rating of 7.3/10 on Douban (China’s Goodreads + Letterboxd), far lower than Shuang’s earlier fiction anthologies, Moses on the Plain (8.2) and The Aeronaut (8.0). Many readers notice Shuang’s transition from Rouge Street’s oral historian to a professional writer who also sells his work to entertainment companies. Some praise Shuang’s maturing craft and emboldened ambitions, while others long for the raw candor in his earlier works and lament that the stories in Hunter read as though manufactured on a pre-programmed assembly line designed by a technique-obsessed writer struggling to find his voice.

Rather than debating the validity of these arguments, it is perhaps more productive to investigate the emotional roots of these critiques. Shuang and the Dongbei Renaissance have been catapulted into the center of China’s cultural discourse by widespread economic and cultural pessimism. As people work overtime for modest salaries, and conscientiousness no longer guarantees long-term success, the Dongbei narrative affirms a collective sentiment of ‘lying flat,’ China’s equivalent of ‘quiet quitting.’ Dongbei stories resist a social Darwinism normalized after China’s recent economic miracle. When Shuang was an emerging writer, his primary focus was documenting the lives of those betrayed by their nation’s promise, and his stories offered many Chinese readers solace and company.

By the time Hunter was published, Shuang had become an established writer with a sustainable life in Beijing as a full-time artist. He has completed his exodus from Dongbei thanks to his literary career, and so his new struggles concern the growth of his art. The shift of his writing style perhaps appeals to a smaller readership sharing his experience of relocating to a metropolis, where their anxiety is not collective but atomized. Their emigration from the margin looms above their fragile urban lifestyle like a glass ceiling and an apparition, constantly reminding them that what they have earned can perish at any moment. A phrase from “Mars” captures this anxiety. The Dongbei-born protagonist realizes that, to his middle-school sweetheart, who has made a name for herself as an actress in Shanghai, he “represents the power of the past, which makes him the assassin of the present, a witness she has no defence against.”

Ultimately, Hunter and Rouge Street form a continuous body of work about fatalism and despair. As Shuang’s characters depart Dongbei proper, their material struggles are replaced by an existential dread. Whether historical figures treating their memories with dispassion or third-tier artists stranded in a creative bottleneck, they find themselves haunted by the past and disoriented by the haze of the future.

It is not easy to predict how readers residing outside China’s chronic pessimism will react to Shuang’s rebranding as a para-Dongbei writer. “When I began writing, it felt as if I was expressing an aspiration rather than truly changing in any way,” Shuang once told The New Yorker, “By 2018, though, I’d become certain that I was a writer …. After finishing [Hunter], I felt unburdened. I no longer belonged to any city or era. I had become the person I am now.” His departure from realism and his comfort with experimentation becomes even more apparent in one of his most recent stories “Uninterrupted People,” featuring two sentient AI characters. After he metamorphoses from a marginalized storyteller into a cosmopolitan experimentalist, what will he become next? A theorist, an alchemist, or a prophet? As a reader and translator of Dongbei literature, I look forward to following where life and literature take him, and I eagerly await his next collaboration with Tiang in the Anglophone world.

Tony Hao is a CT-based literary translator from Chinese to English. His translation of Dongbei writer Ban Yu’s fiction appeared in Granta’s China Issue in November 2024. Read more at tonyhao.com