A Private Life

About

A young woman grows up in China during the decades spanning the Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen Square protests, and the political upheaval outside mirrors a more private turbulence within. Ni Niuniu's inner life — her desires, her loneliness, her complicated relationships with the women around her — develops in tension with a society that insists on public conformity. Chen Ran was one of the first Chinese writers to center female interiority and same-sex desire in literary fiction, and this novel reads as both a political document and an intimate confession. Unflinching about the cost of living honestly in a country that punishes honesty, A Private Life is a novel about the space between who you are and who you're allowed to be.