February Flowers
by Fan Wu
Picador ₤12.99, 256 pages
FT bookshop price: ₤10.39

Fan Wu’s February Flowers, the first offering in Pan Macmillan’s new Picador Asia imprint, starts off slight, but soon shows its mettle. The opening pages of the novel summon up the mood familiar to regular readers of ”China pain” fiction: a (usually) female writer pens her blood-and-tears memoir, mulling over the dark days of footbinding/concubinage/the Cultural Revolution while thanking her lucky stars that she has made it to the west, or at least some big city.

How dreadful China is, western readers think, lapping up this stuff as cheerfully as the Victorians feasted on comparable tales of suttee, belly-cutting and other sorts of Oriental barbarism. Few stop to consider, however, the extent to which China’s cataclysmic 20th century has become a tidy niche market for certain expatriate writers, who cheapen their past through flogging it to armchair enthusiasts of the bad old Middle Kingdom. February Flowers threatens all this for a while, with its intimations of autobiography and de rigueur references to intellectual exile in China’s bleak wastes during the Cultural Revolution. Thankfully, however, Fan Wu’s debut pulls itself back from the brink - and quite quickly too - becoming instead a novel that turns its eye away from imagined audiences and keeps it trained on the story at hand.

This story is of female adolescence in Guangdong province during the early 1990s. Set on the campus of a prestigious university, it begins as a tale of friendship between a 17-year-old girl and her older classmate. But it soon slips, with a lack of guile that mirrors precisely the naivety of its heroine, into a discreet account of homosexual awakening.

Chen Ming, the narrator, loves reading and the violin, and is so caught up in her own solitary world that she has no real friends, let alone a sweetheart. By chance, she catches the eye of Miao Yan, a senior student whose come-hither eyes, pierced belly button and rebellious ways do a poor job of masking her desperate past and terror of the future. Their bond is full of the passion and power plays of young female friendship, deftly drawn, and the line between adolescent crush and adult lesbian love is traced so ambivalently that the reader is almost as surprised as Chen Ming herself at the final truth about her sexuality. This, perhaps, is the core strength of the book: the ease with which it shakes off the voiceover of memoir, with all its intonations of latterly won wisdom, and enters the past as it was lived, in real-time and without the props of hindsight.

As compelling is the way in which the two friends become emblematic of China as it was then. Allegory of this kind is always a tricky game, with an overplayed hand only a metaphor or two away. Fan Wu manages, however, to make her characters resonate without turning them into mouthpieces for an obtrusive message. Miao Yan is the tacky heroine of Wei Hui’s Shanghai Baby in the making, as synthetic and greedy as the Special Economic Zones in which she yearns to get rich quick; yet her ethnic origins among the disadvantaged Miao minority, her childhood of abuse, and the utter recklessness of her pursuit of a better life speak of fissures that have only grown more cavernous under China’s double-digit growth. Like millions of others, she can smell the wealth, but never really touch it.

Chen Ming, meanwhile, hails from pedigree intellectual stock: she reads Chinese literary grandfather Lu Xun alongside Camus and Marquez, and although her parents suffered under Mao, she never frets about her future because she knows, intuitively, that people like her will do just fine nowadays. But her encounter with Miao Yan, China’s other side, derails her. Her budding sexuality brings with it a sudden apprehension of how divided her country really is; and this transition to adulthood leaves a once shining future frozen in time.

Margaret Hillenbrand is lecturer in Chinese studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London.