Chi Zijian’s literary narrative of northeast China over a century essentially embodies a serious and concrete historical record of the Chinese nation. It also makes efforts to explore the profoundness and vitality of history, the presence of northeast China, and the culture and spiritual philosophy of the region. Undoubtedly, such narrative is self-perpetuating, just as is the historical process of northeast China. Puppet Manchukuo (Wei Manzhouguo), The Last Quarter of the Moon (E’erguna He You’an), and White Snow and Crow (Baixue Wuya) written by Chi Zijian are all important contemporary literary works worth “rereading” time and again.
Chi Zijian’s stories connect to the origin of her life’s journey, which is the “Earth Spirit.” Such a connection renders her stories characteristic of “custom history” by demonstrating how the writer reflects reality from her own perspectives, voice, and methods of narration. The narrative style adopted by Chi Zijian is different from that of other modern stories in which nature is allowed to take its course. Chi Zijian’s short stories employ many “accidents” and “coincidences,” bringing the audience back to the storytellers’ time of Chinese classical novels. From a writing perspective, a majority of Chi Zijian’s stories are about lower-class society and are a custom history for the silent population in the north of China.
Chi Zijian's novel The Last Quarter of the Moon (E'erguna He You'an) is an excellent historical novel themed around the life of the Evenki people. It depicts the important theme of “looking back at home” and reveals a yearning for “poetic dwelling” shared by many contemporary people who feel lost. The novel’s unique perspective explores the “origin” of home and shows the close relationship between the lives of the Evenki people, the landscape, and their fate on the right bank of the Argun River. The unique grounds on which the novel stands can be found in its inquiry into the “uniqueness” of home, vividly describing the Evenki people’s special living “place” and their unique approaches to birth, death, marriage, and funeral. In this recollection, the novel shows us the unique ecological beauty of Evenki homeland, including the feminine beauty of harmonious well-being found between people and nature, as well as the masculine beauty of the struggle that exists between humans and nature, which are both reflected in the “ecological sublimity” of the primitive religious ceremonies carried out by two generations of shamans for tribal benefits.
In her novel The Last Quarter of the Moon, Chi Zijian, while narrating the history of the extinction of the Evenki people, constructs a “spiritual time” that contends with linear time and the “Third Nature” filled with the universal love of humanity, creating a “Fourth World” where humanity and nature come together in a spirituality that goes beyond life and death. This represents a profound ecological consideration and offers enlightenment for the psychological crisis of contemporary times. With poetic language, Chi expresses her estimation of the course of human civilization and the contemporary crisis of spiritual ecology, thereby constructing the ecological wisdom of the Oriental peoples with poetic aesthetics and imagination.
Nourished by the natural scenery of the Daxing’anling Mountains when growing up, Chi Zijian has grand literary beliefs and tends to build worlds filled with divinity to bridge ideals and reality in her literary creations. Her novel At the Peak (Qunshan zhi Dian), published in 2015, creates a poetic and distant place with an air of mystery. The most prominent feature of her cogitation on divinity in the novel is the depiction of a charming world where every being has a spirit and this is reflected in the transcendental mood of the language used in the novel. Together, these features constitute the unique aesthetic characteristics of the divinity narrative in Chi’s novels. In her works, active construction and passive deconstruction appear simultaneously, and the contradiction displays her respect for and concern about reality. Nonetheless, the romantic and poetic flavor of literature arises out of the crevices of pain precisely at the point where secularity and fairy tales collide and when despair reaches toward hope. This is the charm of At the Peak.
The short stories written by Chi Zijian always breathe life into the daily trifles of ordinary people with hope and compassion, exploring a spiritual power that overcomes suffering and universal love beyond life and death. Through the mysterious connection between humanity and nature, her stories attempt to paint a landscape of the real world of interconnection and inter-transformation. It is essentially a form of fairy tale narrative. Consequently, the essence of “poetry” is achieved in the dialectical unity between childhood and maturity, lightness and weight, constituting a foundational dimension of the artistic spirit.
In her latest novel, the Stories of Harbin (Yanhuo Manjuan), Chi Zijian strives to portray an urban life imprinted with her personal experience. In order to effectively connect the various aspects of urban life and showcase its liveliness, she creates three special elements of narrative devices: A volunteer ambulance, Yuying Courtyard, and a sparrow hawk “Little Harrier.” These elements are beyond ordinary things as they assume the narrative ethical functions of providing possibilities for the unfolding of storylines, summarizing general urban life experiences and uniting a community of common kindness. Chi depicts the architecture, culture and geography, as well as the residents’ daily life, hardships and destiny within the city. In addition, from outside the city, she shapes the image of Huang E, a unique child of nature, which not only enriches the character categories of Chinese contemporary literature, but also provides spiritual enlightenment to resolving the plight of urban life. The urban writing of Chi carries forward the spiritual guidance and the modern introspective consciousness embedded in her previous writing and blazes a new trail for urban writing in Chinese contemporary literature.