ABSTRACT
White Nights was published in 1995, less than two years after the publication of Defunct Capital. In sharp contrast to Defunct Capital ’s publicity bombardment, the publication of White Nights was a non-event – there were no public launches, no media interviews, no advertisements and no responses from critics until a few years later. After Defunct Capital, many Chinese readers simply stopped reading Jia Pingwa’s fiction and critics also deserted him. Although it may not be possible to generalize about the effects that the banning of and attacks on Defunct Capital have had on Jia Pingwa, it was no doubt enormous and long-lasting. Jia Pingwa wrote White Nights in the heat of the critical attacks on Defunct Capital, when he was burdened with the feeling that he had been crucified both by the authorities and by the unrelenting critics in Beijing.1 According to the research I have conducted, to date there has been no critical assessment of White Nights in the English language and only a few substantial articles in Chinese journals. Chinese critics tend to consider White Nights in the context of Defunct Capital. Lai Daren , for instance, specifically regards the works as ‘sister’ publications and says that White Nights is a continuation of Defunct Capital from subject matter to narrative devices (Lai Daren 2000: 135). Clearly, White Nights continues Jia Pingwa’s urban cultural mapping which he began with Defunct Capital, but in White Nights he broadens the narrative scheme to the extent that the information amounts to almost a cultural ethnography of Xijing city.
