Four generations of women. A rural setting in cold and often depressing northern China. A story of their joys and sorrows spanning 80 years.
This is the premise of The Ode of Loong and Phoenix, the latest novel from award-winning author Hu Xuewen. At its heart lies the divergent destinies of twins Zhu Deng and Zhu Hong. Zhu Deng, gentle and cautious, enjoys a smooth career, transitioning from serving as a public school teacher to working as the secretary of the county magistrate and as a newspaper director. His twin sister, Zhu Hong, by contrast, was born bold and dares to love and hate; after her marriage breaks down, she devotes herself whole-heartedly to the clothing industry and nurturing her children’s talents.
The twins’ different personalities lead them toward completely different destinies, creating a “Loong and Phoenix” tale that reflects the choices, perseverance, and fate of the second and third generations of farmers faced with urbanization. Throughout, readers glimpse life in rural China and its social upheavals.
The 676-page novel, published in April 2025 by Jiangsu Phoenix Literature and Art Publishing, which is a part of the Phoenix Publishing and Media Group, won first prize in the third Phoenix Literature Award in July 2024. The novel includes the author’s hand-drawn diagram of the relationships between characters, as well as eight hand-drawn color illustrations by Du Fan. For decades, Hu has written using pen and paper instead of on a computer—a decision that writer in 2002. He aspired to write about the region he was familiar with and to provide fresh perspectives on rural life in China. Instead of writing about the alleviation of rural poverty, which is the subject of many great Chinese novels, Hu focuses on the emotional and spiritual issues of people living in the countryside.
Epic novels that span decades and whose protagonists are women living in rural areas are his specialty. Hu’s novel Hope and Life, which won the Chinese Books of the Year 2021 and swept up many other literary awards, for instance, took him eight years to complete. This work, hailed as a new Chinese classic, has been translated into 11 languages, including Arabic, English, French, German, Korean, and Russian. The two-volume Kazakh edition, by Kazakhstan Eurasia-Astana, and the three-volume English edition, by New Classic Press, are available on the market, and the German edition from BW International GmbH is expected to launch in early 2026.
Hu has written several other novels, including Blood Plum Blossoms, The Jumping Carp, Private Files, and Running Moonlight, as well as 17 novellas, such as From Noon to Dusk, winner of the 2014 Lu Xun Literature Prize, Longmen, Suspicious Murder and Other Stories, and Wheat’s Veil. Many of his works, especially his novellas, have been adapted for television.
Like Hu’s other works, The Ode of Loong and Phoenix has received rave reviews from literary critics and writers alike. “This is a work about soul-searching,” says Jia Mengwei, vice chairman of the Jiangsu Writers Association and editor-in-chief of Yangtze River Literary Review. “The daily lives of parents and children gradually unfold over the pages. Inter-generational differences, the competition and cooperation within the same generation, and the difficulties and breakthroughs in life encountered by each generation are all presented brilliantly and effectively. The subtleties of human nature are exposed, often in silence, and are laden with artistic tension.”
For Xie Youshun, chairman of the Guangdong Writers Association and a professor at Sun Yat-sen University, The Ode of Loong and Phoenix “stands out because of its relatively complete vision, structure, narrative pursuit, and artistic ambition.” Rural literature “is a very important tradition in contemporary Chinese literary writing,” says Yang Qingxiang, a literary critic and professor at Renmin University of China. “In The Ode of Loong and Phoenix, Hu has made a new breakthrough in the writing of rural novels in a light and particularly imaginative way.”
