History is tricky stuff, particularly in China. Both of these novels are set in a passage of 20th-century history that has been the object of both state manipulation and censorship. Although they stand alone as works of fiction, their historical settings also offer clues to China's contemporary concerns.
The action of The Flowers of War (by Geling Yan, trabslated by Nicky Harman, Harvill Secker, £10) takes place during the dreadful months of the Nanjing massacre of 1937-38; Under the Hawthorn Tree opens in 1974, in the dying days of the cultural revolution. The authors are well established in mainland China, though both are resident in the US: Shanghai-born Geling Yan left her homeland after the suppression of the Tiananmen student movement in 1989, while details about Ai Mi – a pen name – are notably scarce. Her novel first appeared in 2007 on a website popular with émigré Chinese students. The website was blocked in China but the novel was sent to a Chinese publisher and became a bestseller in print. Both books have inspired feature films directed by film-maker Zhang Yimou, the choreographer of the 2008 Olympic opening ceremony.
The historical events of the cultural revolution remain sensitive for the censors despite the party's posthumous verdict on Mao Zedong, which ruled it a decade of catastrophe for which he was responsible. After his death in 1976, with censorship relaxed, it became the inspiration for an outpouring of literary emotion; at the time, this "scar literature" seemed refreshingly therapeutic, but the public eventually tired, China changed, and authors moved on.
Since then, the cultural revolution has been reinvented as kitsch for the younger generations, whom censorship keeps ignorant of the events themselves. It has become a favourite theme for restaurant décor; it is bathed in musical sentimentality at weekends as pensioners gather to sing songs of the time. The darker memories below the surface are contained by censorship and the passage of time. We do not know into which category – memory or nostalgia - Ai Mi fits, though her agent in Beijing, who has never met her, speculates that she had direct experience. Chinese-language sources, on the other hand, suggest that her book is based on its heroine's 1977 memoir, rejected for publication at the time because the characters showed insufficient "fighting spirit". In Under the Hawthorn Tree, the period is drawn with convincing detail, evoked to illuminate how political repression and strict social mores affect two characters engaged in one of China's favourite literary themes – the melodramatically doomed love story.
The young Jingqiu arrives in the village of Xiping as a pious revolutionary hiding a troubled family background: her father languishes in a labour camp and her mother is fearful that any transgression will bring further disaster. At the time, romantic love was labelled a bourgeois indulgence, but by the end of her stay Jingqiu is involved in a love affair with a charming young geologist with a relaxed view of political rules. Jingqiu's extreme innocence and the many obstacles in the way of their romance mean that the affair is conducted obliquely and is fraught with misunderstandings, leading to a poignant finale worthy of a Mexican soap opera. If there is a message here for contemporary Chinese readers, as the novel's high sales suggest, perhaps it is that human happiness can still be thwarted by an unjust state.
The background to The Flowers of War is familiar from several recent works: these include Ha Jin's Nanjing Requiem, and Lu Chuan's film City of Life and Death. All are set during the months after the Japanese capture of Nanjing, the Nationalist government's capital, in December 1937. Despite the well-attested horrors of mass murder, pillage and rape, this tragic period was little discussed until the 90s. Today it forms part of China's post-1989 official narrative of suffering overcome.
The 37 foreigners who had not escaped the city when the Nationalist government abandoned Nanjing to the Japanese occupiers enjoyed a vulnerable neutrality. They included a number of Christian missionaries and teachers, and used their neutrality to designate a safe zone in the city, where they gave precarious refuge to hundreds of Chinese civilians. Their role in protecting Chinese civilians has only recently been acknowledged in China, where foreigners are generally cast as pantomime villains in official histories. The Flowers of War, ably translated by Nicky Harman, tells the story of a group of Christian schoolgirls hidden in the attic of a school. They are joined by a group of prostitutes, who settle, symbolically and literally, in the cellar.
The novel is rewarding for its spare prose and subtle treatment of the conflicts, quarrels, racial ambiguities and acts of transcendent heroism woven into the story. It is unsparing in its account of the horrors of war and returns to a theme also found in other treatments: the enforced choice to sacrifice a few to spare the greater number. It explores, too, the story of the city's prostitutes at a moment when all the women of Nanjing were at risk of being reduced to occupying soldiers' whores. There are doomed love stories, amid the tragedies, but they are drawn from a deeper well and speak to the persistence of humanity in the grimmest of circumstances.
• Isabel Hilton is editor of chinadialogue.net
• Download the audiobook at audible.co.uk.