An Yu’s third novel, Sunbirth (2025), begins with a love story. The story goes that a monk, Shan Qi, came upon a woman for whom he would give up his path if only she would return his love. To woo her, he wrote four poems, respective of each season. However, she still declined him. Yu writes:
In his despair, he surrendered to his desires and wrote a fifth poem. It was another about winter, the real one in his home towards the far north. There, it was cold and bleak and quiet—the kind of winter the woman had always dreamed of but never experienced. She was moved by it. She accepted Shan Qi’s love, he renounced his life as a monk and together they settled down.
In Sunbirth, humanity is living in this fifth poem – a world in which the sun is breaking off into pieces and disappearing, apparently irrevocably. The diminishing sun is “half bright, half warm, half full.” It has been diminishing for the past dozen years a slice at a time, but the dissipation has now accelerated.
The world is becoming colder. The flora and fauna are disappearing. The dissipating sun is taken for granted – like gravity, like air, like weather. In the telling, human survival is dependent on so much, in an inexplicable and mysterious world.
The place is Five Poems Lake. It is an isolated hamlet, surrounded by a deep desert.
There were no travellers here. Everybody who lived in Five Poems Lake was born here and had stayed. There was no one to stop us from leaving, only the endless desert.
The protagonist is a young folk pharmacist in her 20s. Her older sister is Dong Ji, a worker at a local spa. She knows her fellow villagers due to her role in making various traditional Chinese treatments available. There is Miss Pan, a pregnant woman soon to bear a child as a single mother, and there is a skinny girl of the Su clan, who skips school and is eager to experience life in all its possibilities.
Economically, sometimes, materials are much more important than money. It is enough, it seems, to get through the day. People connect with each other, but they are perhaps more a product of their natural environment:
As people grow up, childhood becomes foggy, but no matter who you ask, they always remember the weather. They forget the locations of their schools, the names of their best friends, the colours of their houses, but never the weather. Perhaps it is the tactility of air touching skin that makes it impossible to forget. We remember it with our bones, our muscles, our skin. So even though I had been living with the cold for over half of my life, if I just closed my eyes, I could still feel the full sun blazing over Five Poems Lake.
Dong Yiyao, a policeman in Five Poems Lake, is the late father of the Sunbirth‘s unnamed narrator. Dong Ji is her sister and last living relative; each has a different mother. As the novel proceeds, the various pieces of truths that the characters have about the strange phenomenon of the disappearing sun are revealed. People’s heads suddenly burst into radiating globes of light and beacons, as if people could self-sufficiently create heat and warmth in the absence of the sun.
The human condition is a fragile one. The narrator muses, at one point:
The mind is a dangerous construct. What a paradoxical state of existence we’re in, where our minds can stretch across dimensions, deep into reality and far into fiction, assign meaning to everything, yet our bodies are so small and limited that I can’t touch the roof of my room. Even a marble could kill us if it hit the right spot.
Sunbirth can be read as an apocryphal story. It can be read as a story of human-made faith, affirmed in part by the opening untitled poem about a Sun People who send a Blind man to find the Sun, the God of light…. The blind man returns and professes that he is only a man:
As the years went by,
as mountains eroded,
as rivers broke the soil,
the Sun People lost their God, the sun,
And believed, now, in the Blind.
It can be read as an allegory of how people self-organize around socio-political ideas to make sense of their worlds, but with the need to renew ideas for new paradigms over generations. The ideas spark among people, but they can also burn everything down if positioned in particular ways.
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Sunbirth is An Yu’s third novel. Yu is the author of Braised Pork and Ghost Music. She is a graduate of the NYU MFA in Creative Writing program. She lives in Hong Kong. She was born and raised in Beijing.
Shalin Hai-Jew has worked in higher education for many years. She has edited dozens of nonfiction educational books and authored a dozen with a number of publishers.
