Told in three voices, The Northern Tomb is an ambitious novel revolving around three main characters and spanning eighty years of Chinese history in all its turmoils from the 1940s to the end of COVID-19 in 2022. In a traditional symphonic structure of four parts, the story frames a father and son, Mr Zhao and Zhao Jr, with the additional perspective of the former’s carer, Sister Fu, at either end, accentuating the importance of the feminine role of the storytelling.

Although Li provides no references, one can find a range of poets quoted throughout the novel, such as Bai Juyi (772–846), Li Shutong (1880–1942), Che Wanyu (1632–1705), and Liu Yuxi (772–842) — perhaps an attempt to emulate memory in which there’s no clear-cut boundary, similar to what WG Sebald had done in his The Rings of Saturn. Sister Fu, who works as a cleaner and carer in a hospital, tells her part of the story in a deliberately impassive tone, tending to wax lyrical with occasional flashes of ancient Chinese poetry in translation, thus executing an act of poetic introduction to a western context often hostile and apathetic to it. In Sister Fu’s self-biography — here I’m using the Chinese term “zizhuan” (自传) to describe her story — there are mundane details galore, most ostensibly of her starting off as someone ravaged in her early years, in which she “tried alcohol, cigarettes, partying, letting multiple people use my body at once”. When she refers to her hometown as “the breeding ground of gangsters, crooks, gamblers, thieves, child molesters, rapists, and neglectful parents”, one feels as if thrust right back into Australian literary representations of China and Chinese people pre-1990, following the Fu Manchu tradition in which little depicted about China and its people are positive. As I discovered and note in my book, Chinese in Australian Fiction: 1888-1988 (2008), Chinese Australian literary self-representation, such as in the hands of Brian Castro, has done much to lift the game and image. In The Northern Tomb, it becomes an extension of that literary past, not only in that negative representation, but also in that Mr Zhao’s two daughters are well-placed overseas in London and Australia.

But the story goes on nonetheless. A widow, Sister Fu serves Mr Zhao, a widower and a veteran army man in his mid-eighties. Both have sons, him Mr Zhao Jr, and her Dawei, all four forming an intricate relationship that is fuza 复杂 — complicated — till SARS, or what is known as the Novel Coronavirus Infected Pneumonia Epidemic, reappears. Interestingly, COVID-19, seemingly a major theme as described in the book’s synopsis, is glanced at rather than deeply engaged in. Although Dawei’s best friend Chunyu, goes to Wuhan to do in-situ research as a citizen journalist, nothing much develops thereafter — perhaps a strategy on the writer’s part to circumvent the ubiquitous literary censorship practiced under the CCP since 1949.

In Part II, Mr Zhao takes over and tells his part of the story. We find out he is originally from Shenyang — or Fengtian, also more authentically known as Mukden, though this is not mentioned in the book. Born in 1934 as the seventh of ten children to an opium-eating Manchu father and hardworking Han Chinese mother, he received an early education in Japanese around 1945 in Manchukuo, when Stalin ordered the Red Army — “notorious for raping women” — to invade it. But as he grows older, his life becomes an “abject reality”, with “four fifths of my stomach cut out”. Because of his dissatisfaction with “the haphazard health system, particularly the care structure of the hospital” in China, he ends up engaging Sister Fu to care for him, living a life of bitter memories that range over a number of issues, from the death of a few children in his family to the Korean War, as well as the Opium War and his dead wife. He is also plagued by recollections of the year 1991, when he was “diagnosed with gastric lymphoma” shortly after his mother’s death. It is his memory of Sister Fu’s warmth and ready help that makes his life bearable.

The father’s story is followed by that of the son’s. The most unruly and the least educated of Mr Zhao’s children, Jr has done time in the Great North Prison as a result of a street fight during the period of the Severe Strike in 1983. After being sentenced to twelve years in prison, he manages to achieve a philosophical “at least” attitude towards life as he settles for the bottom-line: “At least I wasn’t one of the three factory workers taken away, tied up in an execution style, who never came back”; “At least I was strong enough to withstand the beating until the handle of the broom disintegrated into a bundle of sorghum sticks”, and “At least I can still scratch…”, his conclusion on life being that it is “hedonism rather than idealism that keeps us alive”.

As the novel draws to an end in Part IV, the trajectory of COVID-19 also winds up, with Sister Fu’s voice returning to the fore. Contrary to what actually happened — as I can still remember from watching shorts on social media platforms which showed long queues outside crematoriums, with huge numbers of people reportedly dying from the infection — Mr Zhao and Sister Fu, both struck down by the virus, manage to survive it, bringing a hopeful tone to the novel’s world. In reading that, I was amused to think of Alex Miller’s The Ancestor Game, in which, towards the end in the 1970s, Lang Tzu is found to still be alive although the real character he is based on has long been dead. These very much resemble the popular literary strategy in 1970s and 1980s Chinese fiction, where a “guangming de weiba” (光明的尾巴 or “bright tail”) is brought to the dark story, a device meant to enlighten the reader and glorify life, echoing the ancient way of datuanyuan, or happy ending (大团圆).

When I say that The Northern Tomb is an ambitious novel, I mean that it is a novel that intends to address the issues of COVID-19 without directly addressing them, tackling its presence with absences. Apart from the last section of the novel where Mr Zhao is hospitalised, very little is written of China under lockdowns and the problems it caused during that period. In this roundabout way, as it does something that Wuhan Diary: Dispatches from a Quarantined City (2020) by Fang Fang was not able to do, The Northern Tomb achieves the status of the Chinese dictum, “yiqie jinzai buyan zhong” (“some things are better left unsaid”, or 一切尽在不言中) as it deliberately bypasses Wuhan as the epicentre of the global pandemic, instead focusing on each character’s private story, thus keeping the panorama of the problem at a minimum, creating a presence of it in memory that one keeps going back to, and renewing. The existence of coronavirus in the novel itself, though, is already an act of rebellion that invites censorship, as attested by what Kimi, one of China’s leading AI assistants, says in answer to my question “Can such a book be translated and published in China today?”:

Whether The Northern Tomb could be translated and published in China today depends on several factors. The novel appears to touch on themes of aging, caregiving, and human relationships in a Chinese urban setting, which are not inherently politically sensitive topics. However, if the narrative contains any implicit or explicit criticism of China’s pandemic policies, social conditions, or political environment — even subtly woven into personal stories — this could complicate publication. Chinese censorship operates on a case-by-case basis, and while literary fiction often enjoys more leeway than journalism, foreign-authored works with Chinese settings are scrutinised for how they portray the country. Without knowing the full content, it is difficult to say definitively, but the book’s trajectory would likely involve either careful self-censorship during translation, a smaller independent publisher willing to take risks, or publication in Hong Kong or Taiwan if mainland routes prove unviable.

Perhaps relatedly, a search for The Northern Tomb on Baidu returned no results despite the fact that Li’s Chinese name, Li Muyuan（李牧原）has work easily found there.

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The title of the novel, The Northern Tomb, is based on a real park in Shenyang, Northern Tomb Park (北陵园). This decision strikes one as sombre as it is evocative of the history and multiple deaths in Mr Zhao’s family over the course of eight decades, and symbolic, to a large extent, of the nationwide COVID-19 tragedy whose virulent details are purposefully eschewed, concealed underneath the bedrock of individual sadnesses, infightings, happinesses, unhappinesses, celebrations and other medical conditions across walks or meetings the main characters and their extended family members and friends have.

The way the stories are told resembles the running of a creek that meanders its course through a plethora of personal anecdotes, books exchanged and read and people run into. We encounter a Mongolian monk by the name of Master Fushun, and Aida and Wendi, an Uzbek couple, which points to Li’s interest in exploring what is rarely-discussed in literature focused on China, namely the relationship between Han Chinese people and non-Han ethnic minorities.

Because of her Chinese background, Li takes the English language to another level by coining new expressions based on direct translation or transliteration from the Chinese. When Sister Fu falls out with her parents at eighteen and runs away from home, they call her “stinky no face” and “a broken shoe”, which I could recognise straight away as “chou bu yaolian de”（臭不要脸的）and “poxie”（破鞋）. Later in the novel, the saying “People always pick the softest persimmon to squeeze”, shizi jian ruande nie（柿子捡软的捏）, has been well-adapted enough to make sense, meaning people who take the easiest target, with the expression a much more imagistic lending to the English language, thus enriching it. There are examples of pinyin used without explanation too, such as nainai (granny), huntun (normally known as wonton) and Laba Festival, with “Laba” literally untranslatable except through transliteration. As I read I kept wishing for more but they seem to peter out halfway through, other than one towards the end of the book: “An arm can’t twist a leg”（胳膊肘拗不过大腿）which doesn’t seem to have been appropriately used.

In some successful novels, such as Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (2001) by Chinese French writer Dai Sijie, and Waiting (1999) by Chinese American writer Ha Jin, western literary sources are employed to advantage, such as Balzac’s work in the former, and Hemingway’s work in the latter, signifying a genuflecting attitude towards western literary inheritances. But Li’s novel doesn’t do that — literary sources of inspiration consist of martial arts novels by Jin Yong (who, notably, isn’t even referred to as Louis Cha, his English name), popular songs like “The Boat Song of Ussuri River” 《乌苏里船歌》, “Battle Song of the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army” 《中国人民志愿军战歌》 and “Ayo Mama”, an Indonesian children’s song. There are Russian references too, such as How the Steel Was Tempered, the socialist realist novel by Nikolai Ostrovsky, and a Soviet film, An Ordinary Soldier, apart from the poetic sources I mention earlier in this review. This is a commendable effort; Li is faithful to the lost cultural past of China where literary references were either home-based or Russian-based. How Li eschews the typical foot-binding trope, too, is also noteworthy: Mr Zhao’s mother is described as “someone who was ‘spared the ordeal of foot binding because she was engaged to marry my father when she was three and he was just born.’” It would have had much greater commercial appeal if Li had foregrounded foot-binding as a way to curry favour with the Australian book market. Kudos to her for not capitulating to that.

As far as I am aware, there have been a number of books written about COVID-19 in the anglophone world, such as These Memories Do Not Belong to Us by Yiming Ma (2025), Severance by Ling Ma (2018), Day by Michael Cunningham (2024), Our Country Friends by Gary Shteyngart (2021), The Sentence by Louise Erdrich (2021), Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout (2021), Joan Is Okay by Weike Wang (2022), Companion Piece by Ali Smith (2022), Delphi by Clare Pollard (2022), Fourteen Days by Margaret Atwood and Douglas Preston (2024), and Dear Dickhead by Virginie Despentes (tr. Frank Wynne, 2024). Next to these, The Northern Tomb stands out through Li’s representation of the disaster, in which the pandemic is presented as a near absence. By not mentioning the 1989 June 4 Massacre, as shown in Jr’s encounter with a foreign journalist, Li manages to convey a sense of China in its dying days  with all its social and political problems unresolved since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949 — and not least the problem with its “haphazard health system”, allegorical through Mr Zhao’s lifespan. Despite this, the novel sounds an optimistic note by keeping both Mr. Zhao and Sister Fu alive at a time when COVID-19 deaths reached a crisis point before and shortly after the lockdown restrictions in China were suddenly lifted.

Admittedly, there are infelicities. When Sister Fu recalls her life, she refers to a time when her husband asked “before our marriage if it was acceptable that we didn’t have sex, I said yes”. This sounds far-fetched as someone who has lived in 1980s China, not to mention it unrealistically contradicts an early description of Sister Fu as someone who “let[s] multiple people use my body at once”. Elsewhere, when Mr Zhao leaves the hospital, he is given a taser “for emergencies”, which comes across as a glaring inaccuracy since tasers are not allowed to be possessed or used among ordinary people in China for any reason. What is most absurd, however, is a detail in the prison section, where Jr “made pancakes with shallots and smuggled them into their cells at night”. Readers are advised against such ill-informed imaginings by familiarising themselves with the Chinese prison system through books such as For a Song and a Hundred Songs: A Poet’s Journey through a Chinese Prison (2013) by Liao Yiwu and also his The Corpse Walker: Real Life Stories: China from the Bottom Up (2008).

As a poet, I keep looking for some kind of relief as I read. In one section, I actually handwrote in the margin: “这本书写得太满” (“The novel is overwrought, leaving no room to breathe”). Details in The Northern Tomb tend to pile up to a dreary degree. It could be a fleeting feeling on my part, but liubai (留白 ), or some kind of negative space or white space, would have worked better for this novel.

Still, I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend The Northern Tomb as a work which centres the personal histories of characters living through the COVID-19 era in China — ordinary lives worth exploring for their cultural, political and literary values. Puncher & Wattmann deserves credit, too, for its sustained commitment to publishing Chinese Australian voices, one that remains rare in the contemporary Australian literary landscape.

  
Image: a detail from the cover of the book  

This review is part of a series of critical essays supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.