For a long time during Shuang Xuetao’s early teenage years, he wondered what hidden disaster had befallen his family. His parents, proud workers at a tractor factory in the northeastern Chinese city of Shenyang, stopped going to work, and the family moved into an empty factory storage room to save money on rent. But they rarely talked about what had happened, and Mr. Shuang worried that some special shame had struck his family alone. It was not until later that he learned about the mass layoffs that swept northeastern China…
Murder and Magic Realism: A Rising Literary Star Mines China’s Rust Belt
