Can Xue

“I whole-heartedly detest writing to follow the crowd.” These are the words of Chinese writer Can Xue in a 2013 interview with the literary magazine Asymptote. At the time, she had already acquired a reputation as one of the most unique and challenging avant-garde authors in contemporary literature. American critic and novelist Susan Sontag had named her as a likely future contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature. Since then Can’s renown has only grown with such acclaimed works as the novel Love in the New Millennium (2013) and the short-story collection I Live in the Slums (2020), both of which were nominated for the International Booker Prize.

Can Xue is the pseudonym of Deng Xiaohua, who was born in Changsha, a city in the Hunan province, in 1953. In Chinese cánxuě means “residual snow.” More specifically, it describes “the dirty snow that refuses to melt” and “the purest snow at the top of a high mountain.” The contradiction in these meanings is an apt metaphor for Can’s visionary approach to her work and her singular voice among the generation of experimental Chinese writers who emerged in the 1980s.

A ruptured childhood and a self-taught student of the Western canon

One of eight children, Deng Xiaohua was born to intellectual parents who worked at the New Hunan Daily newspaper. In 1957 her childhood was utterly disrupted when her mother and father, like many other intellectuals and critics of China’s communist leadership, were accused of being “rightists” in a political purge. The following year her parents were sentenced to “reeducation” through manual labor in the countryside. Deng and her siblings were left in the care of their grandmother. Within the next few years, as famine spread throughout China and the Cultural Revolution began, her grandmother and three of her brothers died of starvation, tuberculosis, and drowning. Conditions were so dire that she and her siblings resorted to eating their father’s old clothes.

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List of Day Jobs of Famous Writers: • Can Xue: Tailor

Deng graduated from elementary school in 1966, but the rest of her education was self-taught. She immersed herself in the Western literary canon, reading the works of Dante, William Shakespeare, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, and the great Russian authors. When her father was allowed to return home for occasional visits, he taught her about Marxist philosophy and Western history. Later Deng studied the works of early-20th-century Chinese fiction writers Lu Xun and Xiao Hong.

In 1970 Deng began working as a “barefoot doctor,” a health practitioner who was provided training in basic health care. She was assigned to a clinic in a suburb of Changsha. Her services included acupuncture and the use of herbs that she gathered from a nearby mountain. After a year she was sent to work in a factory, where she remained for seven years. She also worked as a teacher and a tailor. In 1978 Deng married Lu Yong, a carpenter, with whom she had a son.

Beginnings as a writer

Then in 1983, when she was about 30 years old, Deng—or rather, Can Xue—began to write. In a 2015 interview with Electric Literature, she described her literary beginnings as if her skills appeared by magic:

I began writing at a sewing machine. A strange thing happened: I found that when I was writing fiction, I didn’t need to work out plots or a structure or anything beforehand. No matter, a short piece or a long piece, it was the same. I just sat down and wrote without thinking. That’s all.

Her “maiden work,” as she calls it, was a novella, Huang ni jie (Yellow Mud Street), which was published in 1987 and introduced Can’s unconventional narrative style. The novella concerns a strange event in a decrepit factory town, and it features comical and surreal elements as well as extremely graphic descriptions of the filth that has overtaken the town. Can proudly described the plot as “a perfect whole,” although many of her works in fact abandon conventional plot progression or linear storytelling.

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Works of fiction and “mind-stretching enchantments”

By the time Yellow Mud Street appeared, Can had placed a few short stories and another novella in Chinese literary journals. She continued to publish prolifically. Wu xiang jie (2002; Five Spice Street) was her first novel to be translated into English (in 2009), although it originated in the late 1980s as a piece published in the Chinese literary journal Xiaoshuo Jie. As with her first novella, it revolves around a street where remarkable and sometimes grotesque events happen and where the locals gossip about a mysterious neighbor called Madam X.

Her next novel, Zuihou de qingren (2005; The Last Lover), explored the relationships, guessing games, desires, and dreams of several characters, both Western and Eastern, who journey to real and imaginary places in different parts of the world. Noting the book’s “mind-stretching enchantments,” The Independent’s reviewer wrote, “One way of interpreting The Last Lover would be as a delirious cross-cultural hall of mirrors. The East dreams the West, which imagines the East as it conjures its own West.” In a 2015 Bomb magazine interview with the book’s translator, Annelise Finegan Wasmoen, Can discussed the novel’s surreal blend of cultures: “I’ve said that my writing portrays the essential qualities of humanity, or the essential qualities of nature, and this type of literature does not have national borders, because as humans, we are essentially all the same. It takes creative potential to read this literature.”

Can followed that work with Bianjiang (2008; Frontier), a fantastical coming-of-age novel set in a remote mountainside community with its own set of natural rules; many of the town’s residents have migrated there to work at the imposing and secret-ridden Design Institute. In Xin shiji aiqing gushu (2013; Love in the New Millennium) Can examines love, sex, and human communication through a fluid cast of characters, many of them middle-aged women. In 2019, the year after its English translation came out, the novel was nominated for an International Booker Prize. Two years later Can was nominated again for her short-story collection I Live in the Slums (2020).

Among Can’s other works of fiction are Chijiaio yisheng (2019; Barefoot Doctor), a fablelike story that draws from her experiences in the title profession; Miren de yilei shenghuo (2022; The Enchanting Lives of Others), a comic novel about a book club; and Mother River (2025), an English-language collection of some of her short stories and novellas.

Nonfiction works and literary self-experimentations

Can has published several books of literary criticism and commentary about her beloved Western authors, including Kafka, Shakespeare, Johann von Goethe, and Dante. In many interviews, she expresses a bold affinity with these particular writers. She told Bomb, “I’ve learned that the kind of literature I write belongs in a category with Calvino, Borges, Dante, Kafka, and writers like them. My literary works are the same as theirs: every piece has a solution, a taut emotional logic.”

In interviews Can often refers to herself in the third person, and she has published reviews of her own work. “To think that writers cannot critique their own novels is an outdated belief,” she told Asymptote. “As an experimental novelist with a strongly philosophical temperament (my method being ‘experimenting on myself’), I have the capacity to analyze my own work.…Everybody can present their own interpretation!”

Indeed, despite some opinions that her work had grown more accessible (as was noted about The Enchanting Lives of Others), other critics observe that Can’s writing has remained highly individualistic and experimental compared with many other Chinese writers of her generation, such as 2012 Nobel laureate Mo Yan, who shifted toward realism. Typically, Can shares this observation, telling Bomb magazine,

The vast majority of authors are trying to preserve tradition, rather than create new traditions. This is what tradition is like: if you try to follow it, if you try to defend it, you instead lose it little by little. If you rebel against it, if you throw it away, you discover you have, in the best way possible, inherited the finest aspects of it.

Indeed, likening her work to one of the greatest Chinese novels of all time, she added, “I am not at all embarrassed to believe that it is Can Xue, and not Mo Yan or others like him, whose work has inherited the best of the Chinese literary tradition since The Dream of the Red Chamber.”