Understated and wry and at times unexpectedly poignant, and however deeply Chinese these novellas were they ended up reminding me most of Chekhov, that is to say, they are about human beings I recognize and who have universally understood challenges.

4 stars

Three masterfully written, interconnected novellas map the stories of a few Chinese families across generations, from the cultural revolution to the 1990’s. I really enjoyed this book!

[What I liked:]

•The characters are sympathetic with unique voices & motivations. I enjoyed getting to know them from various angles & perspectives.

•The narrative structure isn’t linear (switching between character POV’s, 1st & 3rd person, & with some jumps in chronology). However, this didn’t make the stories hard for me to follow. Rather, this structure allows crucial details to be revealed at key moments, changing the shape of past events in retrospect. It’s skillfully done!

•The stories are touching, at turns tragic & triumphant. There is inexplicable loss, revenge, redemption, childhood innocence, regret, hope for the future, & loyalty against great odds & pressures. The tragedies are understated, or rather, plainly stated, avoiding sentimentalism. The portrayals of human experience & feeling across time & through various characters’s eyes ring true.

[What I didn’t like as much:]

•In the third story, I got a bit lost on who was related to who & how. That’s mainly my fault, since I was listening to an audiobook & probably could have kept them straight if I saw them on paper. However, part of it was due to similar storylines in the interconnected novellas (mothers abandoning children, fathers losing jobs, etc.)

CW: physical assault, domestic violence, child abuse, murder, suicide

[I received an ARC ebook copy from NetGalley in exchange for my honest review. Thank you for the book!]

A Chinese American Wild West

Read about unfamiliar places and the assumptions you developed over time dissolve as reality comes into focus-- for better or for worse. Shuang Xuetao's "Rouge Street" sets three novellas in the area around Shenyang, referred to as China's Rust Belt. Of course they have had a rust belt, of course there are neighborhoods riddled with crime and financial hardship... this is a country transitioning through the same problems as everyone else: there is no escaping the iron swing of the economic pendulum. It is a given the poor never have a chance, but as ideologies change and revolutionary dogma is no longer in vogue, many formerly in respected positions tumble into disgrace. These falls through the cracks in the system are brutal, inevitable.

In Colin Barrett's recent short story collection, "Homesickness," we see the Irish people of County Mayo dealing with the repercussions of their Celtic Tiger crash, people swept off their feet in the social collapse. What both books share is the spirit, wit, and humor characters show in dealing with overwhelming adversity and bleak circumstances. Shuang's Shenyang and Yanfen Street settings are rougher and more cut-throat than Barrett's Mayo. While Barrett's people are small town country folk, the souls here are the victims of industrial abandonment, collateral damage.

The "Rouge Street'' stories are told from different characters' points of view. In "The Aeronaut" a young man invents a personal flying machine to escape this world. The second novella, 'Bright Hall', finds a young man tracking down the assassin of a preacher, only to be interrogated by a bizarre fish-man. In "Moses On the Plain" there is an investigation of the murder of taxi drivers... and it ties into a young girl's dream to set fire to a large field. The book's value goes far beyond these plotlines. This is a character driven journey with surprising humor and the occasional element of magic mixed in. In the Preface, the translator quotes Shuang, "For me, Yanfen Street was like the American Wild West, a place inhabited by the downtrodden, lawless and free, and therefore full of life.”

"Rouge Street" is a challenging read, with all its twists and turns, but a rewarding one.
Thank you to Henry Holt & Company, Metropolitan Books, and NetGalley for providing an Advance Reader Copy in exchange for an honest review.
#RougeStreet #NetGalley

I got to the second story and figured out that I’m not a fan of short stories. It can be because I’m a huge lover of well developed characters. Not many short stories develop characters well enough to feel connected to. The writing style didn’t help either. I felt like I was trudging through these stories.

There’s something charming about this book… almost child-like. A kiss of magic touches each each story from the attempted invention of a flying machine, to the near-death/afterworld experience. This book feels like a dream.

The dialogue is a little cold, which feels like something lost in translation. Characters are underdeveloped, which motivated my rating.

Thank you NetGalley and Henry Holt for the advance reader edition.

A set of three novellas by Chinese author Shuang Xuetao, Rouge Street is his first book to appear in English (translated by Jeremy Tiang). As someone who hasn’t read a lot of Chinese fiction, I defer to others to better contextualize this book (for example, Jing Tsu in her NYT review published today, and Tiang in the Translator’s Note), but in short, it is set in a rundown neighborhood of the city of Shenyang, which is situated in a region known as China’s Rust Belt (with the associated industrial and economic implications), in the decades after the Cultural Revolution into the near-present day.

Though some of the marketing for this book (as well as its very cool cover art) suggested to me a sort of sci-fi vibe, Xuetao’s stories are mostly defined by a kind of gritty realism. There are rare moments suggesting something akin to magic realism (mostly in the second novella), but overall the stories are defined by a down-to-earth character-focused approach that brings the reader into the lives of numerous people with different perspectives and motivations, though they are united by the intergenerational and situational burdens of their hometown, and cross paths with each other in unexpected ways.

Xuetao does a remarkable job of presenting his characters’ troubles as the course of their everyday lives, without impressing an undue degree of piteousness. An undercurrent of dark humor is part, but not all of what buoys them along; there’s also a common element of straightforward practicality in the face of circumstances outside of their control. The stories and the lives of Xuetao’s characters are as twisty and meandering as the streets of Shenyang, and I enjoyed being taken on the journey. I was also excited to learn of another kind of stove you can sleep on, a kang.

I will definitely be checking out more of Xuetao’s work when it is translated.

Thank you to Henry Holt & Company, Metropolitan Books for the NetGalley ARC.

This is a lovely collection of 3 novellas, set in a working class district in a city in northeast China. The plots are intricate, spanning multiple generations of interlocking families trying to navigate their through 40 years of history. All of the families are broken in some way: missing mothers or fathers, livelihoods destroyed by macro economic forces, alcoholism and despair. The wreckage left by the Cultural Revolution of the 1960's filters down through the generations. Yet the characters make their way; the stories are not oppressive, and even somewhat hopeful.

I can't speak to the faithfulness of the translation, but the English is evocative and lyrical.

I will certainly seek out more writing by this author.

This was an error of expectations on my part. I was expecting magical realism along the lines of Gaiman from the snippets in the synopsis, but it’s more like literary fiction which isn’t really my speed. It reminds me of the Cultural Revolution chapters from The Three Body Problem. From what I’ve read of it I think it’s very well written and will be compelling to readers who like this kind of thing, sadly not for me though.

I hadn't heard of this book before, but what sold me (and immediately made me wonder) were the comparisons to Ernest Hemingway and Haruki Murakami readers have made of this celebrated up-and-coming Chinese writer. I also thought the summaries of the three novellas of Rouge Street were pretty spectacular:

An inventor dreams of escaping his drab surroundings in a flying machine. A criminal, trapped beneath a frozen lake, fights a giant fish. A strange girl pledges to ignite a field of sorghum stalks.

I mean, how could I resist something so wonderfully odd?! I couldn't. I wouldn't exactly stack this against anything by Hemingway or Murakami, but I can see why it's gotten so much attention abroad. These novellas were recently translated to English, and I'm hoping I can scope out some of his other books.

Rouge Street is a collection of three atmospheric novellas originally written in Chinese by celebrated young writer Shuang Xuetao and translated into English. The stories themselves are quite different in nature, but they are all connected by location as each is set in Shenyang, an industrial city in northeast China that has been in serious decline since the time of the Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution. In particular, the focal point is Yanfen Street, an impoverished and crime-ridden district populated by men and women at the fringes of society who are struggling to survive. It is a sector of the city with a surprisingly rich history; for instance, we are told in an introductory note that the street’s name loosely translates to “rouge powder” owing to its bygone role in producing makeup for ladies in the imperial palace. It is also Shuang’s hometown neighborhood, making these tales very personal endeavors for the author.

‘The Aeronaut’, the first work in the volume, is a multi-generational saga told from the perspective of two large working-class families. A son of one family, who marries a daughter of the other, has dreams of inventing a flying machine, a poignant metaphor for rising above and escaping the hard, soul-crushing life they all lead. How that escape attempt plays out comprises the story’s resolution. In ‘Bright Hall’, two teenage boys, abandoned by their parents and living at opposite ends of Yanfen Street, are connected by a brutal crime. They eventually find themselves in a secret room at the bottom of a frozen lake being interrogated by a big fish disguised as a man. The final novella, ‘Moses on the Plain’, is essentially a detective story told from myriad perspectives and over a span of many years. It involves multiple unsolved murders, including those of a policeman and two government officials. At the center of things is a young woman who is being raised by her unemployed father after her mother has died.

These brief descriptions do not really provide an adequate sense of just how complex and interesting these stories really are. Shuang is a writer with an admirable talent for capturing the feeling of certain place and time, which is useful in this case as the setting and the history will likely be unfamiliar to many Western readers. While unique in their own way, each novella has a distinctly melancholic feel to it, with subject matter that inevitably involves broken families, betrayal, unfulfilled dreams, and death. They are also multi-layered tales in which time frames and points of view shift frequently, providing a backdrop that is at once dream-like and grittily realistic. The author’s work has been compared to that of both Hemingway and Murakami, which is high praise indeed, if somewhat premature. (Shuang’s language, though often direct, is far more convoluted than Hemingway’s ever was and the only real echo of Murakami comes in the fantastical conclusion to ‘Bright Hall’.) Nevertheless, Rouge Street was an affecting and engaging book and this is an author whose work I will seek out in the future.

My thanks to both NetGalley and the publisher Henry Holt and Company for an advanced copy of this collection of novellas from China.

Three very different novellas, each featuring the industrial city of Shenyang, located in the frigid area of northeast China, as the main character and primary muse in Shuang Xuetao's Rouge Street. Compared to such authors a Murakami, and Hemingway, Shuang Xuetao is a young writer that is making a name for himself in both the Chinese and world literary scene, along with the writer Yan Ge, who also writes of cities and the effects on its inhabitants.

The stories offer different views of the city and how it became and where it is going. Starting first as a town known for the manufacture of the emperor's makeup the city has seen revolution, cultural and new economies come and well not go, but stay and effect the people in different ways. The stories start with a theme, but move onto tangents, a man wants to build a flying machine, a criminal avoids capture but strange things happen, taxi drivers are the victims of crimes, while a young girl dreams of burning a field. Simple in idea, but in execution the stories range across a variety of themes, mostly the separation of families, friends, and colleagues that working for a large machine with will cause. Shenyang grows, but nothing around it changes, just a cold landscape that surrounds a colder story.

The stories are good, and though they might seem to meaner a bit, cover a lot of ground and time. Characters that seem important, disappear and others suddenly become the focus and the reason that things are happening. I am not sure how the translation by Jeremy Tiang is, however he did translate the book Strange Beasts of China which I also enjoyed, but I had no problems enjoying or following the story. The is much sadness in the book, characters seem to deal with family by referencing either drink or suicide. There are a lot of expectation of characters, and not a lot of hope that they will be met. There is a bit of remove in the characters and sometimes a bit of if not magic, but bit of supernatural, a bit like Murakami. I quite enjoyed all the novellas, something that is rare for me in collections.

I have found myself reading a lot more authors from China than I have in the past. Most of my reading was in the genre of science fiction, but I am finding a lot of new authors that I enjoy. The writing in Rouge Street is very good, with a interesting way of sharing themes that we all have in common. I am excited to read more by Shuang Xuetao.

Yanfen, (Rouge), Street Meets Cannery Row.........

I enjoyed this collection of three novellas very much, although possibly not in the way intended. All of the works tell the stories of the people dispossessed and abandoned by the transition from Mao's increasingly unbalanced version of Chinese Communism to a modern, private, and less ideological market economy. In Xuetao's only slightly fictionalized industrial neighborhood of Shenyang, which was left destitute by the change, there are drunks, petty criminals, violent brawlers, and all manner of desperate, dissolute, and hopeless characters. There are also moments of beauty, and people who have the grace and fortitude to battle and transcend, (if only briefly and perhaps fantastically), their bleak surroundings.


I admired Xuetao's style, and the simplicity, unembroidered directness, authenticity, and power of his language. (Think British kitchen sink realism meets Chinese Kang bed stove realism). American literature, indeed world literature, has a vast catalogue of authors and works that have addressed characters in similar social and economic circumstances. So the reader can go on a bit of an Easter Egg hunt. That part felt like Steinbeck; this bit smacked of Hemingway; was that an echo of Dreiser I heard there? Who's listening for Murakami and Camus and John Osborne? And so on.


The point isn't that Xuetao's work is derivative; far from it. The larger point, to paraphrase Tolstoy, is that "All happy countries resemble one another, but each unhappy country is unhappy in its own way. ". How Xuetao made this subject his, how he interpreted it for northern China, and how he expressed it as a Chinese experience, is what I found most rewarding and instructive.


So, whether you want to read stories about interesting people coping with dramatic problems in a foreign setting, or want to go all academic and scholarly, this is a book loaded with opportunities, worthy finds, and subtle but weighty questions.


(Please note that I received a free advance ecopy of this book without a review requirement, or any influence regarding review content should I choose to post a review. Apart from that I have no connection at all to either the author or the publisher of this book.)

Thank you to netgalley and the publisher (Henry Holt & Co) for providing me with a digital ARC in exchange for an honest review!

This was a really special set of novellas. They were all written by a highly acclaimed Chinese author and recently translated into English. The third novella (Moses on the Plain) was actually turned into a movie (titled Fire on the Plain). I'm not sure if there are English subtitles available yet for the film, but if there are I will definitely be watching it.

The first story (The Aeronaut), is about a man who wants to invent a flying machine, the second (Bright Hall), is about two children who chase a criminal into a frozen lake and fight a giant fish-person, and the third (Moses on the Plain), is about the mysterious murders of taxi drivers.

To be completely honest, it was difficult to even write the above paragraph giving a synopsis for each story. They are all so much more than one chronological plot-line. Each novella has multiple POVs and many characters. While this added depth to the storytelling, it also sometimes got a bit confusing. Just as I would start to orient myself and understand each characters backstory, the novella would end and move onto the next one. I don't necessarily think this is a bad thing at all - but I would've been happy to read three full novels for each of these stories.

While each novella has a completely different plot, they all had the same dark/sorrowful/realist atmosphere. Some of them are set near the real neighborhood in Shenyang known as Yanfen street (which is where the author grew up - and where the title originates). The Translator's note at the beginning was SO HELPFUL for setting the scene of the novellas and giving some cultural context. Yanfen street was described as a dull and muddy rough neighborhood (from what I can tell, in the 90s)- although today it is apparently a bustling metropolis.

In addition to the setting, I noticed a lot of Chinese history wound into the storytelling, with many references to the cultural revolution (1966-1976) and Chairman Mao Zedong. There's also a lot of conversation on the shift from communism to a market economy, and rampant poverty. If you have an interest and some background in Chinese history or economics/politics in general, I would highly recommend this book. I would say I have minimal knowledge on this topic, so a few times I did google searches to educate myself a bit more on historical references which added more depth to the experience. I am sure that if you already have this knowledge, some of the details and dialogue would would be much more clear and impactful.

The true beauty of this book is in the details, not in the overarching plot. Here are a few quotes from each novella:

The Aeronaut

"He saw how a big, tall man like himself could have a heart smaller than the eye of a needle."

"This kid is just like his father - eager to climb, doomed to fall."

Bright Hall

"I thought about my dad, but all that came to mind was drinking-his real family was booze."

"It's hard to walk away - and easy to come back."

Moses on the Plain

"Hope isn't evenly distributed. People like you hoard it all."

"The past has nothing to do with the present. People change-we eat and drink and sh*t it out, the new replaces the old."

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This is a set of novellas I would recommend for someone who is willing to cherish them and spend quality time reading. I spent about a month on them, and I'm honestly glad I did. They were a bit dense for me, and I think that is mostly because of the cultural references I did not always understand, and the large number of characters and storylines. Overall, the prose was really beautiful, the few magical realism elements were intriguing, the setting was bleak but compelling, and it was truly a gem to read!!

Rouge Street: Three Novellas by Shuang Xuetao is a series of stories of magical realism, mysticism, and noir, translated from Chinese to English, that take place post-Cultural Revolution.

The first story is about an inventor who dreams of escaping his surroundings with a flying machine. The second is about a criminal who gets trapped inside a frozen lake and has to deal with a giant fish. The third is about a girl who pledges to ignite a field of sorghum stalks.

I'm not really one for magical realism (I tried reading One Hundred Years of Solitude many years ago and I couldn't get into it) but something hit the spot with these novellas — I'm not entirely sure if it's because the length of the novellas helped capture my attention or that I relate to some of the mannerisms and culture as a Chinese descendant but this was a very interesting read.

My favorite story out of the three was definitely the last, "Moses On The Plain". The novella follows a group of people who are connected to one another and as we read on, the story unfolds to a mystery one of the characters is trying to solve. The way this was set up was absolutely wonderful and the ending was beautiful.

Thank you you to @henryholtbooks, #metropolitanbooks, and @netgalley for providing me this ARC. There is something magical about Shuang's writing, even though it was translated. This collection of stories may be short, but as I was reading, it was as if I grew up with Shuang's characters. I highly recommend this when it comes out in April.

I really enjoyed this trio of novellas - and I'm not normally one for novellas. I always tend to feel that they should have been shoved to either end of the spectrum - either cut to make a short story, or elongated to make a proper novel - but I didn't feel that at all here. Oh, to be sure, I thought the endings of the first two novellas were a little rushed (the ending of the third one, however, was pretty perfect), but it didn't bother me as much as it might have, and that's down to the strength of Shuang's writing. His writing reads quickly, and contains just the right amount of detail. And his characters - some of whom only get the bare minimum amount of page time - all feel realistically rendered. Although I do kind of wish the endings of the first two novellas had been fleshed out a bit more, I would still be interested in reading more of Shuang's writing.

Thank you to both #NetGalley and Henry Holt & Company/Metropolitan Books for providing me an advance copy of Shuang Xuetao’s English-language debut novel, Rogue Street in exchange for an honest review.

#RogueStreet is that novel from AP English class that you would not necessarily read if it had not been assigned, but after you do, you hold a special place in your heart for it and remember it forever. Rogue Street is certainly one of those novels that makes you think. It is also very well-written and uses some refreshing concepts for plotlines. I keep saying novel, but the book was actually more like three novellas combined.

Although I thoroughly enjoyed reading some good prose, I do need to warn prospective readers that some sections are dark and downright depressing. Despite a few fantastical elements, this is definitely more akin to literary fiction than magical realism.

Overall, the uniqueness of the stories is what really makes it worth the read. However, I would recommend reading it when you are in the mood for something cerebral. These are not stories that you can breeze through and you may miss the genius in them if you force yourself to do so.

Wow! This is a fantastic collection of novellas. It's realism with some fantasy elements and subtle dark humor set in a gritty area in Northeast China, which seems to transcend the stories and almost becomes a supporting character in all three novellas. Nostalgia plays a big role here, as does observing how everyday interactions, whether big or small, shape who we are.

Engaging translation, poignant stories.

This was a really interesting collection of novellas. Xuetao's writing is compelling and interesting and feels very fresh. I really didn't want to put this down.

Thank you to Henry Holt and NetGalley for this ARC in exchange for an honest review!

First off, as a person of Chinese descent, I am so happy to support the publication of a Chinese author in the West! There are so many authors who are making waves in other countries, but we never hear about them over here because their works aren't translated into English. I would love if there were more works in translation published here so that these authors can be just as well known as they are in their home countries.
Thank you again to the publisher for this opportunity!

Rouge Street by Shuang Xuetao is a collection of three novellas translated from Chinese to English. The first novella, The Aeronaut, is about a man who takes off work to visit his aunt, and he reminisces on childhood memories with his relatives. There's a sad ennui that permeates throughout this story, and I definitely see the Murakami comparisons. The second novella, Bright Hall, is a boy who has a quasi-religious experience involving a minister, which clouds his later actions in life. The third novella, Moses on the Plain, starts off with a man and a woman talking about books that they've read recently, which leads to them getting married and starting a family in post-Cultural Revolution China.

Here is a darkly humorous excerpt from The Aeronaut, the first novella:

"I called my supervisor and told him I wouldn’t be at that afternoon’s soccer game, then gritted my teeth and asked for a week off. I’d actually promised this vacation time to my mother—we were supposed to go to Hong Kong. She spent all day watching TVB dramas and wanted a trip to Hong Kong to try the packed lunches there. I was looking forward to it too, to be honest. I wanted to visit Disneyland and ride those machines that toss you through the air. Some people are scared of heights, but my family has never been. In fact, a weird thing about us: we actually enjoy being high up. When Pa was still around, every time he got upset with Ma, he’d go sit on the roof. Ma would say, What, are you a monkey in disguise?"

Overall, Rouge Street is an impressive collection of novellas that will introduce a major player into the world of literary fiction in the West. After reading this book, I am stunned by the talent of the author and the depth of his novellas. The official synopsis makes this book sounds Kafka-esque or like a blend of fantasy and realism in the vein of Kelly Link. Although there is a magical transformation, the true magic of these stories is in the tiny details, the short conversations that you have with someone you're related to but barely know. It's in the feelings you get being in a familiar place but feeling out of place because you're older now. This collection evokes both melancholy and nostalgic emotions. If you're intrigued by the excerpt above, or if you're a fan of short story collections, I highly recommend that you check out this book when it comes out in April!