Shen Congwen Border Town

About Border Town

Shen Congwen's Border Town (1934) is one of the most beloved short novels in Chinese literature — a pastoral elegy set in the small river town of Chadong in Hunan, following the boatman's granddaughter Cuicui as she falls in love amid the river culture of western Hunan (Xiangxi). Written as a deliberate act of preservation for a disappearing way of life, the novel is suffused with a gentle melancholy that never becomes explicit. Shen Congwen was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1988 and is thought to have been the intended recipient; he died that year before the announcement. Suppressed after 1949 by the Communist government as politically irrelevant, he spent decades as a museum curator and was only rehabilitated in the 1980s.