Water, Fire, and Fungi: An Ecofeminist Reading of An Yu’s Transnational Fiction

Recent scholarship on Chinese feminisms has emphasized the need to account for globalized literary production while retaining attention to locally grounded gendered and ecological experiences. This chapter analyzes the fiction of An Yu (安於), a young and interesting voice in the contemporary Chinese literary scenario, through the framework of ecofeminism, offering a comparative reading of Braised Pork and Ghost Music. In both novels, An Yu portrays female protagonists whose creative and emotional lives are inhibited by marriage and social expectations. In her stories, rather than depicting nature as a symbol of life and harmony, the author emphasizes natural elements and non-human characters to represent the precarity of human life. Water functions as a suffocating, depressive space associated with loss, whereas fire emerges as a source of destructive power that symbolizes a complete rupture. Moreover, mushrooms, other than representing nourishment and local culinary culture, figure as forms of regeneration; more precisely, as invisible and non-anthropocentric modes of survival. Taken together, these elements construct an ecofeminist imaginary grounded in vulnerability that constitutes the lifeblood of An Yu’s work. Writing in English while remaining culturally and spatially connected to China, An Yu represents a generation of transnational Chinese writers whose production is marked by global circulation rather than exile or dissidence, and her feminist concerns are also contextualized globally. By situating her work within the framework of plural Chinese feminisms, this chapter argues that An Yu’s fiction expands ecofeminist discourse by translating local gendered and ecological experiences into a transnational literary form.