A Homeland Scarred

Behind the levees of China's Jianghan Plain, water can be held back. History cannot.

In a rural village in Mao-era China, ordinary people are swept into collectivization, the Great Leap Forward, famine, political persecution, and the Cultural Revolution. Every national campaign reaches into their fields, kitchens, marriages, and bodies.

Mapo confronts power with a fearless tongue and an indomitable will. A tyrannical Party secretary rules through appetite, intimidation, and violence. Rusty Rake refuses the life assigned to him, while farmers, fishermen, women, children, and political outcasts struggle to protect their families and preserve the last fragments of dignity left to them.

Composed of nine interwoven stories, A Homeland Scarred can be read both as a linked story collection and as a panoramic literary novel. The stories stand independently, yet their characters, landscapes, and histories converge to reveal the fate of an entire village from the 1950s through the 1970s. Drawn from real-life counterparts, these intimate dramas show how political power enters the smallest units of daily life-and how people continue to love, joke, desire, endure, and resist.

Zhao Zhaochuan writes from the ground up, preserving the rough humor, vivid speech, anger, tenderness, and moral complexity of rural China. Suffering is never romanticized, and survival is never simple.

A work of translated Chinese literary fiction, historical fiction, and political fiction, A Homeland Scarred is an unsentimental, darkly comic, and deeply human portrait of ordinary lives lived under extraordinary pressure.