On June 23, 1999, Dong Junhui, with the help of her brothers, tied her husband, Wu Yanting, to a tree, doused him with gasoline, and lit him ablaze with a cigarette lighter. It was a shocking act of violence, but lurking behind it were years of threats, economic abuse, and domestic violence that Dong had suffered at the hands of her husband.

After interviewing Dong Junhui on death row shortly after the murder was committed, veteran Chinese writer Fang Fang participated in the scriptwriting process for a television program entitled Thirteen Murder Cases (Ming’an shisan zong), which shed light on a series of explosive murder cases. Eventually, Fang Fang would take the story even further, transforming it into a work of fiction entitled The Running Flame (Benpao de huoguang). More than twenty years after its initial publication in Chinese, The Running Flame is finally available in English translation. As the novel reaches a new group of readers, translator Michael Berry revisits the origins of the story with Fang Fang, who here reflects on her work and the place of women in contemporary China.

Michael Berry: The background of The Running Flame is quite interesting. At the time, you were working as a screenwriter for the television program Thirteen Murder Cases and had the opportunity to conduct face-to-face interviews with thirteen murderers in prison. Was that a project you initiated, or was it proposed by director Gao Qunshu? Could you introduce the background of this program?

Fang Fang: Prior to this, I had collaborated with director Gao Qunshu once before. That time, I was helping revise a TV script at the request of a friend, and Gao Qunshu was the assistant director of that drama. Since we worked well together, after returning from Beijing to Shijiazhuang, he conducted interviews with some murderers in prison and came up with the idea of producing a semidocumentary-style TV drama. He selected thirteen cases from widely known incidents and invited me to be the screenwriter. Because of our previous collaboration, as well as the fact that the royalties I was getting from my novels were quite limited—I needed that extra income from scriptwriting—I agreed.

This drama was a series—essentially, each case was a separate story, totaling thirteen. The number of episodes for each case was determined based on the narrative needs. The inmates were carefully selected and had received approval from the prison authorities. After arriving in Shijiazhuang, I immersed myself in the interviews. The entire process was recorded on video, and in the final broadcast, each case opened with a series of questions, most of which were voiced by me.

As soon as the interviews ended, we entered the scriptwriting phase, and the production timeline was extremely tight. They needed to shoot each case in just a few days. At the time, I was also the president and editor-in-chief of Celebrities Today (Jinri mingliu) magazine, which was facing some issues that required my attention. It was impossible for me to complete a script within just a few days. Moreover, such a rapid pace did not align with my normal approach to writing. After finishing the first script, I informed them that I couldn’t keep up with their schedule. Fortunately, since my interviews had been fully recorded on both audio and video, they hired someone else to write the scripts based on those. I have no idea when the series was completed or when it aired. Later I watched one or two episodes intermittently but never saw the entire series.

Berry: What were your feelings when you first stepped into the prison for the interviews?

Fang Fang: At first I felt quite nervous and uneasy. Not only was it my first time entering a prison, but it was also my first time interacting with criminals. My very first interviewee was a young man from northeastern China who had killed two people. Among all the prisoners, he was the only one who did not kill in a moment of impulse; for the second murder, he had carefully planned in advance.

When I began the interview, the prison guards and cameraman were in the room with me. The weather was extremely hot, and the room had neither air conditioning nor fans. Eventually, they couldn’t stand it anymore and stepped outside to chat, leaving only me and the prisoner alone in the room. This was a man on death row, sitting directly across from me, no more than two meters away. If he had wanted to take me hostage, it would have been an easy thing to do. The moment that thought crossed my mind, I felt a wave of terror come over me. I kept asking him questions while simultaneously trying to calm myself, forcing myself to stay composed. This situation lasted for about forty minutes. When someone else finally entered the room again, I heaved a sigh of relief.

That was the only time I felt such fear. Later, for the subsequent interviews, the rooms all had air conditioning, and the filming crew did not leave. After speaking with several inmates, we settled into a process similar to any other interview. Despite the fact that these people were murderers, in daily life, they appeared to be just like any other ordinary individual.

Berry: What were some of the other challenges you encountered over the course of the interviews? Facing these brutal cases and tragedies head-on must have been very different from other interviews you had conducted.

Fang Fang: The biggest challenge was the experience I just described with my very first prisoner interview. Before that, my impression of murderers was that they were ruthless and violent individuals. However, among the thirteen inmates I interviewed, most actually lived rather pitiful lives in their daily existence—some were even extremely weak and incompetent.

One particularly strange thing was that several of them killed in a similar manner: they just happened to have a fruit knife nearby and stabbed the victim, killing them instantly. Gao Qunshu and I discussed this phenomenon several times, but we couldn’t figure out why it happened. Of course, the prisoners themselves were always trying to find excuses to justify their actions.

The one case that left the deepest impression on me was the young man who became the prototype for a character in my novel Water Follows the Sky (Shui sui tian qu). He was a boy under twenty who had fallen in love with a woman and killed her husband in a crime of passion. When he learned that I had also interviewed the woman, he repeatedly emphasized at the end of our conversation that he alone was responsible for the crime and that she had nothing to do with it. Then, in a most pathetic manner, he asked me, “You’ve met her. Is she doing okay? I miss her so much.”

To be honest, I had very mixed feelings that day. Confronting the darker side of human nature is an unsettling experience.

Berry: What was the public reaction to Thirteen Murder Cases after it aired?

Fang Fang: As I mentioned, the production team had hired multiple writers who adapted the scripts based on my interviews. Maybe to save money or simply to meet deadlines, they were essentially writing and filming at the same time. After leaving the project, I didn’t pay much attention to the show and have never watched it in full, which I feel somewhat guilty about. But from what I heard, the series had a strong impact when it aired. At the time, using a semidocumentary format for a drama was quite innovative. Later, director Gao Qunshu made another TV series, Vanquish (Zhengfu), which became hugely popular nationwide. I feel that its filming style is quite similar to Thirteen Murder Cases.

Berry: Besides the TV version, you later turned these stories into several novellas, including The Running Flame and Water Follows the Sky. What made you decide to extend these stories into a series of fiction works?

Fang Fang: Because I conducted in-depth interviews with these individuals, each one’s personal fate left a strong impression on me. Behind each of these thirteen murder cases lay complex causes—it wasn’t as black-and-white as “the murderer is guilty” and “the victim is innocent.”

In the TV series, I had only written one case, so most of my material remained untouched. After my magazine Celebrities Today was shut down, I had more free time. These stories and people came back to my mind, so I decided to write a series of novellas using their fate as inspiration. Fiction was the form I was most familiar with.

Although the real-life individuals were mostly from the north, I was unfamiliar with northern life, so I set their stories in the south. In total, I completed four novellas. Besides The Running Flame and Water Follows the Sky, there were also Close Your Eyes and See the Darkness (Bishang yanjing jiushi tianhei) and It Cuts Deep (You ai wu ai dou mingxinkegu). The first three were quite close to the original cases—although I made many modifications, traces of the real individuals remained. By the time I wrote It Cuts Deep, the story had completely diverged from its real-life inspiration.

I had also outlined two more novels based on other cases, but I never wrote them because I became drawn to other subjects.

Berry: How does Yingzhi from The Running Flame differ from the real person? Can you talk about the adaptation process? Did you combine traits or details from different interviewees to create a composite in order to shape your characters?

Fang Fang: The Running Flame is the novel in this series that stays closest to the original case. I didn’t merge different interviewees into one character; instead, I modified the original individuals and changed the setting to the south.

In the novel, Yingzhi graduates from high school but fails to get into college. She becomes pregnant before marriage and is forced to wed. Her husband is irresponsible—he gambles, has no career, and doesn’t help with the farm work. After giving birth, she is mistreated by her in-laws. Wanting independence, she dreams of building her own house. She also has an extramarital affair. After experiencing domestic violence, she runs away but is persuaded by her family to return. Back at her husband’s house, the abuse continues, so she flees again. After drifting for a while on a boat, she returns to her parents’ home, only to learn that her husband had burned part of the house down.

When he hears she is back, he arrives with a tank of gasoline, but her brothers subdue him and tie him to a tree. He keeps hurling insults at her. Enraged, she takes the gasoline, pours it over him, and sets him on fire without thinking. The flames burn through the ropes, and he, engulfed in fire, chases after her. Her mother tries to stop him but gets caught in the blaze. She is severely injured and later dies despite medical treatment.

All these key developments in the novel are based on real events. However, the details of daily life, how the characters reach that point, how they meet their lovers, the settings, and the specifics of their conflicts are fictional. As I mentioned earlier, I wasn’t familiar with life in northern villages, so I placed the story in a southern rural setting. I constructed the characters based on a logical progression of their circumstances, giving them distinct personalities.

Of course, I also incorporated character traits from people I knew. For example, the village singing troupe in the novel was inspired by something I saw while attending a relative’s wedding in the countryside with my magazine’s driver. I interviewed some of the performers and found that their world fit well within the novel, capturing a slice of contemporary rural life—something that wasn’t part of the original case.

Berry: The moral perspective in The Running Flame is quite complex. You completely abandon a black-and-white approach and instead portray characters full of contradictions and complexity. How do you view Yingzhi as a character?

Fang Fang: Indeed, Yingzhi is a very complex character. Especially in rural areas, women often find themselves in difficult and awkward situations. There is an old saying: A married daughter is like spilled water—once gone, it can never be taken back. This means that once a daughter leaves her parental home, she is no longer considered part of the family. Even when families pass down secrets or traditions, they are shared with daughters-in-law, not daughters.

However, when a woman marries into another family, she leaves behind the place where she has lived for ten or twenty years and enters an entirely new environment. A marriage certificate alone cannot instantly make her feel at home. Moving from her familiar land to a new and foreign place at around the age of twenty—especially into a large, extended family—is not an easy transition. Deep down, she may struggle to see it as her home, unless she and her husband live independently from his parents. But in rural China, married daughters often have to live with their husband’s extended family.

Under these circumstances, women appear to have a home, but internally they may feel rootless. They may feel they have no place in the world at all. Their birth family has cast them out, and their new family does not fully accept them in the beginning. This creates a period of emotional limbo—a vacuum where they feel utterly empty inside. Yingzhi is one such woman caught in this state.

There is another old Chinese saying: A daughter-in-law of many years will eventually become a mother-in-law. It means that a woman can only gain a sense of authority and belonging once her son marries and she becomes a mother-in-law herself. Many women endure years of hardship in their husband’s home while waiting for this moment. But Yingzhi refuses to wait. She is a modern woman who longs for independence—she wants her own space, her own house, her own small, private family.

To achieve this, she is willing to do anything and give up anything—even integrity, dignity, and reputation. She fights with every means she has, but in the end, she still fails. She is tormented by her in-laws, beaten by her husband. She runs away, drifts for a while, then returns to her birth family, but they tell her that she must accept her fate—if she married a chicken, she should stay with the chicken; if she married a dog, she should stay with the dog. They insist that she return to her husband and endure.

With no way out, she ultimately chooses to kill her husband. She burns him alive. It is an act of extreme rebellion, but the outcome is tragic—no one wins. In my eyes, Yingzhi represents a new kind of woman emerging in China’s rural villages—women who are evolving, resisting, and seeking change. However, due to various limitations, including some of their own making, their resistance often ends in failure and tragedy. More than twenty years have passed, and there are now far fewer Yingzhis in rural China.

Berry: Although a full twenty-five years have passed since the first edition of the book, you once wrote a short essay titled “How Many Yingzhis Are There Around Us?” In 2022, the news of a “chained woman” shocked all of China, and when I read about it, I couldn’t help but think of Yingzhi. You just mentioned that there are now fewer Yingzhis, but in what ways has the status of women in China changed?

Fang Fang: The fate of Chinese women must be discussed separately for urban and rural areas. In cities, women are generally independent, and their lifestyles and mindsets have become quite similar to those of women in Western countries. The key reason for this is that urban women have greater access to education and a higher level of schooling.

However, in rural areas, the pace of change for women has been much slower. The main reason, again, is the lower level of education. It’s a complex issue with multiple contributing factors. In addition to the deeply ingrained preference for sons over daughters (zhongnan qingnu), poverty plays a significant role. Many farming families struggle financially, and when resources are limited, they prioritize the education of boys over girls.

Although rural women today are in a far better position than in Yingzhi’s time, they are still undergoing a process of transformation. Cases like the chained woman, and the broader issue of rural women suffering abuse while villagers turn a blind eye, are still not uncommon. The traditional preference for sons has persisted in China for too long, and how much longer it will take for rural women to fully break free from this cycle—I truly do not know.