Contemporary Chinese Realist Fiction and Music: He Dun’s We Are Like Sunflowers and Murong Xuecun’s Heaven to the Left, Shenzhen to the Right

Zofia Jakubów-Rosłan

doi:10.18290/rh26743.7

Published : 2026-06-01

Vol. 74 No. 3 (2026)

Contemporary Chinese Realist Fiction and Music: He Dun’s We Are Like Sunflowers and Murong Xuecun’s Heaven to the Left, Shenzhen to the Right

Zofia Jakubów-Rosłan

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8212-6541

DOI: https://doi.org/10.18290/rh26743.7

Abstract

Taking the intersection of literature, music, and society as its point of departure, this article analyzes two Chinese novels: He Dun’s We Are Like Sunflowers (1995) and Heaven to the Left, Shenzhen to the Right (2003) by Murong Xuecun. Employing a realist mode of writing, the authors depict, from the perspective of male protagonists, the shared problems experienced by two generations of Chinese people born in the 1950s and the 1970s. Music is an intrinsic component of the novels. “Red songs” from the time of the Cultural Revolution and popular music of the 1990s are closely connected to collective and social experiences, which cannot be fully expressed through language alone. Therefore, the writers chose to evoke time-specific meanings through references to music.

Keywords:

contemporary Chinese literature, He Dun, Murong Xuecun, popular music, red songs

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References

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