The novel comprises three books: Book 1, ‘Little Low Heavens’, which describes Zu’s childhood as a middle school student and son of two social outcasts, a “landlord’s daughter” and a former fighter for the Kuomintang, a party opposed to the Communists; Book 2, ‘Broad Sky Country’, which describes the consignment of social outcast Zu to a village to learn from the peasants’ example of toil and self-abnegation to the State; and Book 3, ‘His Long Travels in Pursuit of Tense’, which describes what might be a fantasy: an older Zu in an eerily idyllic Agios Nikolaos, enjoying the respect and womanly affection that eluded him so cruelly in youth. Throughout all, Ouyang appears to be deliberately embracing and employing Adorno’s concept of ‘late style’ – that is, a writing of fragments, dislocation and dissonance, haunted by the spectre of death. Concomitant with this is a preoccupation with bodily dysfunction and excreta. While these qualities are shared by Brian Castro’s Chinese Postman (2024), for example, the psychic intensity achieved in The Sun is more akin to the unmoorings of late-style Christina Stead, whose work Ouyang admires and whose The Man Who Loved Children (1940) he has translated into Chinese.

Indeed, while a Bildungsroman in effect, the novel depicts Zu’s youth as typified by death or, more specifically, a constant awareness of it, a dwindling away of one’s life force in loneliness, ugliness and sexual frustration. That the “sun at eight or nine” was Mao Zedong’s shining analogy for the promise of the Chinese youth to bring his vision to fruition – a vision which resulted, as the Author’s Note points out, in “a death toll of at least 3 million, if not more” – gives a key to the lambent glow with which Ouyang illuminates Zu’s formative years.

Book 1’s crepuscular air of shadows and ill-defined shapes introduces the Cultural Revolution as an unfolding national nightmare, perhaps best demonstrated by Zu’s earliest memory of himself as:

This scene of terrorised infancy, with its Beckettian bulb and spare furnishings, leaves the identity of the shadowy interloper undisclosed, but much later, in Book 3, Zu envisions himself as a “dead man walking… The night wrapped around him, like a dark cloak of thoughts” (pg. 270). Time, then, has collapsed in upon itself, the “windowpane” becoming a mirror to the future: as Ouyang continues to write of baby Zu, “The night was gathering around him, compressing the room into a tiny space of three: baby Zu, the bulb and the figure, facing him facing the face, whose mouth was moving, in imitation of his own” (pg. 22-23). Soon after this episode, Ouyang writes, “time had marched into the Cultural Revolution” (pg. 23). Thus Zu’s emergence – into being, into consciousness – becomes the dawning of an era and “the sun at eight or nine” is reduced to a murky lightbulb. This collapsing of time is enacted throughout the novel through temporal jumps conveyed through Zu’s memories and journal entries.

During this scene, Baby Zu calls for his mother: “‘Mama,’ he cried, his voice sounding hollow, unusually loud in the quiet of the night, accentuated by the absence of responses.” (pg. 22). In a sense, these unanswered calls permeate Book 1 as Zu yearns throughout childhood for the affection he believes that his mother withholds on grounds of his ugliness and gender: “He knew, though, that his mother didn’t approve of his looks. She had literally said that she wished he were a girl” (pg. 78). In another darkened room – these rooms beginning to multiply as unrepressed memories and dreams, retrieved through the praxis of Zu and Ouyang’s writing – a spurned Zu seeks to injure his mother by hiding, thinking as he does, “‘What if they can’t find me?’… Then he dismissed the thought. ‘Didn’t she say she didn’t want me? Then she wouldn’t have me and wouldn’t want to see me’” (pg. 85). Perhaps in retaliation for his mother’s thwarted hopes, Zu muses, “‘But my own mother… she’s in many ways like a man, smoking cigarettes, chatting with her male colleagues and playing ping pong with them…’” (pg. 87) Through this melding of gender, son and mother converge, their shared bad temper just another vexing sign to the boy of their hopeless synchronicity.

However misplaced, Zu’s sense of being unloved becomes, throughout the novel, a ravenous desire to be loved and sexually fulfilled by a woman. This desire goes unquenched in what is described in Chapter 15, ‘Unrequited Loves’, as the nation’s “purest time in history” (pg. 109). Although the Cultural Revolution predated the One Child Policy that would see a steep decline in the female population, the Maoist view of sex as a bourgeois, Western decadence is seen throughout the novel to stymie, time and again, relations between men and women. Zu is taught about the “corruption in the West and about the Westerners’ general depravity in things related to sex” (pg. 40), which indoctrination creates an invisible but all-pervasive bulwark: “In these metaphysical times, love was not a word that suited the lips” (pg. 111). As a consequence, males masturbate, or shouyin, together; a classmate of Zu’s recollects with an almost nationalistic fervour how, during a circle jerk, the ejaculate came “streaming out, thick and sticky and shining, white as white cotton flowers, collectively in a rush” (pg. 35). And so it is that when in Chapter 4, ‘He Swallows Himself’, Zu masturbates alone and ingests the ejaculate, his shame may be infused with disloyalty to the State.

By Book 2, having failed to satiate his independent yearnings, an 18-year-old Zu is desperate to prove his worth to the collective and the Communist regime. But here, he is only met with further frustration: as the son of social outcasts, he is rejected from the People’s Liberation Army. His only hope of impressing the State comes with his recruitment to the “nationwide campaign, shangshan xiaxiang, up the mountains and down the country, that poured the middle school graduates from cities and towns into the countryside” (pg. 121), the grand governmental scheme to immerse the Chinese youth in the patriotic struggle of the peasants.

While the shadows of Book 1 do lift with the rising of Mao’s “sun” – which burns Zu as he toils, with growing pride, in the rice paddies, a repudiation of his mother who would fawn, infuriatingly, over the whiteness of his skin, a trace of the girl that he might have been – Ouyang’s rendering of shangshan xiaxiang falls well short of Ostalgie. It becomes abundantly clear that the Chinese people are victims of the regime’s harsh biopolitics. They are the body politic which, though it weeps, finds no hope of release.

Han, a fellow student with whom Zu lives in Clear Water Village, boasts of past conquests but struggles in vain to find a woman. When Zu, Han and Len, a fellow male student, embark on a caidian – a journey of ‘treading spots’, whereby students travelled “from village to village, to see how other educated youths, like themselves, lived” (pg. 197-198) – the outlying countryside is equally unavailing. They visit fellow student-peasants whose resignation to village life has made them prematurely old. While “Old Xiao, a smiling man in his early 20s but who looked much older” (pg. 207), is an accommodating host, his male roommates, Old Zhao and Old Tang, are irascible, Zhao demonstrating a particular disdain for the boys’ hopeful, lustful caidian. Zhao’s celibate submission to the State is resolute: “Our production team is the best around the place, with the highest rate of productivity,” to which he adds dismissively, “If it is the girls you are looking for, there’s plenty in town” (pg. 208).

Later on, Zu and Han pay a visit to Xin, the son of a scholar-teacher killed by the Red Guards. Xin seeks to excuse the sexual urges of Mao with the aphorism, “Good people never pipan, great people do” (pg. 216), where pipan, “skin stumbling,” is a euphemism for sex. That night, Xin and Zu are forced by circumstance to sleep in the same cramped bed. It is here, in a moment of exquisite loneliness, that Xin tells Zu, “I find you someone to whom I can have a heart to heart talk… Can we become close friends?” (pg. 219). Spoken to the wall, the appeal goes unanswered as Zu falls into a sleep “so unbroken only the light of day could break” (pg. 219).

During these travels, women do appear but increasingly as apparitions, figments and chimeras. One such woman is Huishu, a secretary stationed on the hydroelectric project where Zu is sent to work in the winter. Her glance, though fleeting, proves earth-shattering for Zu:

Unspent longing is released in torrents by this mere recognition by Huishu. Zu takes a walk along the Sibai River which, all of a sudden, from a tranquil landscape, plunges:

A concatenation of memory and imagery – a Western woman in a movie seen by Zu as a child, the whiteness of Huishu’s face, the “semen, all shed for the thinking of the girl” (pg. 231) – culminates ecstatically in the Sibai. But even if Zu’s desire is like a “river as it rushes towards a bigger river,” he can never attain a commensurate release: after masturbating, “his body, vacated by the variety of images in connection with the girl, felt hollow and empty, like a grain sack with no contents” (pg. 231).

While Books 1 and 2 are certainly fragmentary, Book 3 disintegrates; recalling Beckett again, it is The Unnameable of the three. Zu is older and feted for achievements in literature which, though they promise a form of immortality, cannot prevent the contemplation of death.

As a boy, Zu would often be forced to write compositions at school condemning those who had failed to live up to Mao’s example, sometimes even ‘self-criticisms’ whose recognition by the teacher spurred a complex pride, morphing Zu’s self-loathing into patriotism. The regime had provided another avenue for young Zu’s self-hatred as depicted in an extraordinary scene in Chapter 11, ‘Down with Mother’, where, inspired by the cries of condemnation at a struggle meeting, Zu’s public denouncement of “DOWN WITH MRS ZU!” (pg. 84) hacks at the unbreakable bond with his mother, who is in many ways himself.

But these condemnations and compositions are reproached, rendered null, by the decomposition afforded by revivifying death in Book 3. Via la petite mort, death is the ultimate relief, and the geyser of the unrestrained River Sibai is evoked when Ouyang writes, “One’s body, in the final moment of thrills, gives a violent leap, like the lava, long suppressed, that bursts the thin crust of the earth, in a rushing surge, followed by the silence of the sea, like death, after the storm” (pg. 267). The woman with whom Zu now shares a bed asks if she can have a cigarette, causing him to remark, with a hard-fought equanimity, “My mom smoked all her life, you know” (pg. 268). With the benefit of age, Zu understands his mother was as much a product of her time and place as he, and he concedes, “That’s the style of the times Mao encouraged women to cultivate, in Mao’s own words: ‘Love the military uniforms, not rouged cheeks’” (pg. 268). There is a final acceptance of her hardness, tempestuousness, but also of her tenderness and love. And because these are also his characteristics, Zu achieves acceptance of himself.

Through its deployment of a beautiful poetic late style, The Sun at Eight or Nine may submerge us in decay, recrimination, failure both political and sexual, in fractured recollections filled with pain and lust and death, but it is only through these states of discomfort that a sense of our humanity might finally be regained. Ouyang Yu deserves the highest praise.