Long Haul

"The Long Distance" is a novel written by the writer Zhang Ziping. It takes Tu Biyun, a rural girl from Lingnan during the Republic of China as the protagonist. Through her bumpy life experience, it shows the survival dilemma and destiny struggle of women at the bottom of society at that time. The story begins when Biyun leaves her hometown to visit relatives due to family poverty. She moves between her sister's home and her brother's home in the provincial capital, but is repeatedly treated coldly and discriminated against. In the process of struggling to survive, she successively tried to find a way out in different professions and had emotional entanglements with several men, but she was never able to escape the tragic cycle of being used and abandoned. The novel depicts Biyun's mental journey from a simple country girl to maturity, but also through vicissitudes of life. The work not only reflects the identity anxiety and moral dilemma faced by women at the intersection of tradition and modernity, but also implies a profound criticism of the social atmosphere, class differentiation and alienation of human nature at that time.