In “Heart,” the opening story of Shuang Xuetao’s collection Hunter, a son accompanies his unconscious father on an ambulance ride at night after a sudden heart attack. The father, a reticent person by nature, has had only one passion during his entire life: boxing. He has had no aspiration to actually fight, but he has trained relentlessly behind closed doors, away from his son and family, and his obsession has seeped into the working of his heart and his “flesh and bones.” As the ambulance speeds to the hospital, the son witnesses his father awaken, curl his hands into fists and box with a phantom opponent, as he has done every day for 40 years, and then die.

This is not the only time in Hunter that Shuang’s characters are consumed by their fixations. In “Up at Night,” a pregnant novelist is so engrossed by the unfolding story of a retired college professor arrested for rendering sex workers infertile with chemicals that she ends up miscarrying her own baby. In the title story, a self-described fifth-rate actor compulsively rehearses for his new role as a hit man in a movie to the point that he begins to have violent fantasies. An obsession that estranges people from their present circumstances is what unites the various characters of Hunter, Shuang’s third collection, and their insistence often transcends the slippery borders separating life and death, past and present, reality and fantasy. Published in China in 2019 and only recently translated by Jeremy Tiang, the book’s 11 stories largely take place in contemporary Beijing, with occasional dispatches from settings ranging from the Japanese invasion during World War II to China’s economic reforms in the 1980s. The protagonists, often working-class or downwardly mobile urbanites, find themselves grappling with the weight of both personal and societal history amid moments of uncertainty.

“Heart” echoes threads in Shuang’s earlier work, particularly “The Master” from his first collection, Moses on the Plain, which similarly features an unexpressive father with a lifelong devotion—in this case, to chess rather than boxing. Both men continued their passions during the Cultural Revolution—one boxing through his stint in the countryside as a “sent-down” youth, the other playing chess on the street while violent factional fighting raged all around him. In both stories, there is a heroism bestowed on these otherwise unremarkable men, whose singular obsessions are so intense that they seem to momentarily surpass the bleakness of their reality, even as they are bound by forces larger than themselves.

For Shuang’s characters, these private fixations are not simply a refuge from the traumas or dislocations of their generation but reflections of it. His work seems to ask: How did the momentous political, social, and economic transformations of 20th-century Chinese history reshape the very self-knowledge of the individual? How do such events transform how we imagine the future at all?

Shuang is considered a leading voice in the “Dongbei Renaissance,” a phrase coined by domestic critics to refer to a new generation of artists, writers, and filmmakers emerging from the northeast provinces of China, whose work mirrors the turmoil and traumas that the region faced at the turn of the century. Much of Shuang’s earlier—and most renowned—work takes place in his hometown, the city of Shenyang, in the late 1990s. At the time, following two decades of market-oriented economic reforms, China had overhauled its state-owned enterprise (SOE) sector drastically through restructuring, privatization, consolidation, and buyouts. With these changes came mass layoffs, and the northeast provinces of Liaoning (of which Shenyang is the capital), Jilin, and Heilongjiang—then the heavy-industrial hub of China—were the most severely affected. The damage caused by severe deindustrialization and long-lasting economic hardship in China’s “Rust Belt” persists to this day: The region is pockmarked with urban poverty and widespread unemployment. Shuang’s parents, both factory workers, were among the tens of millions who lost their jobs. He recalls his mother selling snacks, corn on the cob, and tea eggs in street stalls to make ends meet.

This transformation wasn’t just economic. Every aspect of social life in China—education, healthcare, entertainment—had been structured around lifelong employment in the factories, and with its collapse came the unraveling of a particular faith in the socialist experiment. This truth lives at the heart of Shuang’s early work, and his ability to illuminate this historical moment has won him recognition as one of the most celebrated authors in contemporary Chinese fiction. In the titular story of Moses on the Plain, Shuang writes about a group of old men—former factory workers—who assemble under a Mao statue about to be torn down and replaced, singing an old Communist folk song as their gray hair gleams in the sun. These are men who have been left behind as their country reinvents itself as a global power, and now they gather as the last symbol of a lost time—to which they had contributed their labor, their youth—as it is about to be destroyed. They sing, perhaps because words falter. There is another kind of obsession here: with a past that is unable to be articulated in contemporary language, rendering its previous disciples aphasic.

Shuang has spoken of the sense of responsibility he felt toward documenting the landscape of his childhood, and how the ordinary people he grew up around were affected by a historical rupture that resulted in a lost coherence. Like other writers of the Dongbei Renaissance, he frequently writes from the perspective of those excavating the trauma of their parents’ generation, one that had remained mostly unrepresented in the dominant narratives of China’s economic miracle. But Shuang’s Northeast is not only an archaeological site but also a fictional construction that has allowed him to explore the broader themes of marginalization, memory, and faith. It has been the defining label of his career, but he has since grown wary of its confines.

Many of the characters in Hunter are writers, journalists, theater directors, and actors who reside in Beijing, where Shuang has spent the past decade. If his earlier fiction focused on the Northeast’s disconnection from the financial and political capitals of Chinese life, Hunter is explicitly about the ways in which a different form of alienation has taken root, especially among the caste of middle-class creatives or knowledge workers who have emigrated (often from the Northeast) to the nation’s capital and feel a disconnect between their current lives and their origins. There is a general ennui that permeates the stories as the characters attempt to seek meaning through constructing (or deconstructing) narratives of their past, present, and future. The stories’ preoccupation with fiction and its inability to offer resolution, coherence, or escape is bound up with the anxieties of artistic labor itself.

This self-referential turn is apparent in the story “Theatre,” in which two friends attempt to reckon with the aftermath of a deadly apartment fire through the staging of a play that fails to resolve the generational entanglements of guilt and blame. In another story, “Daughter,” a novelist becomes enthralled by the writing of a brash young man, and while awaiting the ending to the young man’s unfinished story, comes to some realizations about his own life. The stories are explicitly intertextual, displaying at length the writing produced by their own characters: a screenplay in “Theatre,” a short story in “Daughter,” a movie script in “Hunter.” These intertexts at once deepen and disrupt our understanding of what really happened, sometimes revealing glimmers of a truth otherwise hidden, sometimes conjuring up alternative realities that lead us further from the present.

Nested narratives cast further uncertainty on the events at hand, as in “Squirrels,” in which two boys sneaking off to shoot squirrels during a class field trip to a cemetery unexpectedly encounter the ghost of a Chinese soldier from the Korean War. The ghost—under the impression that the war is still going on—mistakes a female student for a foreign soldier and orders the boy to shoot her. This story is relayed to our protagonist, a writer, by a friend at a bar, a conversation that ends with the protagonist saying he will turn it into a short story. Is the story we are reading what the writer wrote following the conversation? Was the field trip fictionalized by the friend, the writer, Shuang himself, or all three?