The Gray Kilns

“The Gray Kilns” (“Hui yaodi”) was written in September 1989, and was published in Tianjin Literature in 1990. The novella is based on the author Li Jing’s real-life story when she was a rusticated youth in Heilongjiang Province in North China between 1969 and 1976. The story revolves around the intimate “friendship” between two female rusticated youths: Lan Rubing and Hong Jingyuan. The same-sex intimacy they shared formed a temporary haven of escape from taxing manual labor. To this date, scholars have viewed Chen Ran’s 1991 story “The Birth of a Hollow Man” (“Kongxin ren de dansheng”) as the first literary work on same-sex relationships produced in mainland China, but the publication of Li Jing’s “The Gray Kilns” precedes Chen Ran’s story by one year. Li Jing’s narrative voice is delicate, vivid, reflective, and visceral, offering the readers a unique account of a forgotten part of history. In 1997, Li Jing and her twin sister, Li Ying, developed “The Gray Kilns” into a full-length novel named Sunken Snow (Chenxue), which won the Taiwan United Daily (Lianhe bao) Literary Award for Novel-length Fiction in the same year.