"Tong Mo's prose gives the impression of a master wielding a blunt sword — plain in appearance yet radiant within. The slimness of New Continent feels like visual praise for its inner richness."
—Zhao Song, critic and writer

★An indispensable female voice in contemporary Chinese-language literature — a tender yet resolute avant-garde work.
★Once an active voice on millennial internet literature forums, the author has honed her craft over fourteen years into a writer with an international perspective.
★Twelve distinctive texts bearing witness to undercurrents of 21st-century Chinese writing: a journey of literary resilience and brilliance, restrained yet far-reaching, like a trek across glacial plains.
★With acute awareness of global contexts, masterful textual craftsmanship, and incisive depictions of spectacle society, these works exude exquisite estrangement.

The New Continent collects twelve short stories. The author explores the reconfigurability of characters’ inner experiences when confronted with external forces and the volatile dynamics between the two, leading to discoveries of the "self." These themes are embodied through sharp and reflective language awareness and experimental techniques.

Departing from the dogmatic aesthetic principles of modernist fiction such as those derived from the Nouveau Roman (French "new novel") and postmodernist literature, which were initially critical against the Chinese literary circles yet gradually rigidified, Tong Mo recognized early and broke away from the collective ethos that dominated groups of young writers and enthusiasts from the late 1990s to the first decade of the 21st century.

In works like The Cave and The Month of Blind Fog (La Wu Huo Liu), the author shifts from anthropological experiences to bare life in historical contexts, refusing to instrumentalize anthropology as a tool for self-typification. Instead, she directly channels ethnographic materials into non-theoretical literary themes. The Month of Blind Fog stands apart from her earlier short stories and acts as a prelude to her later works. Recent pieces like The New Continent and Total Eclipse mark a fully individualized departure, focusing on a post-globalized society undergoing radical transformations amid vast diasporic individuals and egoists.

Tong Mo’s style — unconcerned with regional affectations or linguistic flamboyance — recalls Doris Lessing’s ethos. Compared to writers obsessed with geographical stylization or shock value, her work demands recognition through what Ted Hughes called "the heart’s tone" — a holistic vision of thought and voice.
*"The heart’s tone," from Ted Hughes’ critique of Yehuda Amichai

Tong Mo
Born 1985, Jiangsu, China。Lives and works in Beijing, China。
Education：
2008-2012 Anthropology, MPhil, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
2003-2007 Journalism, Bachelor, Nanjing University
Published Works：
Men at The Center of The Earth, Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House, 2024
The New Continent, Hinabook & Sichuan Literature and Art Publishing House, 2020
Stories, Pulsasir, 2012
Just Open (A Multi-author Anthology), Horizon Books & Shanghai People's Publishing House, 2008

Awards & Nominations
Men at The Center of The Earth was shortlisted for the 7th Blancpain-Imaginist Literary Prize
Men at The Center of The Earth won the 2024 Annual Book of the 10th One Way Street Book Award
“Full Eclipse” (from The New Continent) was shortlisted for the 2020 Harvest Literature Ranking
“Suspended Nest” (from The New Continent) won the 13th Black & Blue

Fiction Award
Activities and Exhibitions
Resident writer, Aranya Jinshanling Art Residency Program 2025
Invited writer, ‘Fieldwork Writing Workshop: Ballad of Crossing the Mountain’, Times Museum × Sun Yat-sen University, 2022
‘Laib Yab, Laib Yab: Four Case Studies on Artists and Cultural Others’, Times Museum, 2021
Resident Writer of the TAIFUN Project: Lower Rhine Region Residency Program, Germany & Netherlands, 2018
Play script ‘Bắt đầu Từ Nay (From Now On)’, ‘Grain God Narrative II: The Grammar of Building’ (Group Exhibition), International Urban 2017 Images Festival, Shenzhen, 2017
Short story “A Ship of Ninghua Seed’, ‘Grain God Narrative I’ (Group Exhibition), 11th Shanghai Biennale City Project, Power Station of Art & Swatch Art Peace Hotel, Shanghai 2016–2017
Short story “Preface to the Niegao Ethnography”, commissioned work of Design Shanghai (in collaboration with artist Cheng Guo), 2015

The Cave | 1
The Daughter of Ganjiang & Moye | 13
Rauhoreum | 23
New Continent | 45
Total Eclipse | 87
Sangsang Quwu, or A Talent Like a Black Hole | 15
Midway Through the Haze | 23
Glass Fermentation | 149
White Candle | 61
Medium Flame | 83
Drunken Immortal’s Journey | 191
Hanging Nest | 201

"The Cave"

The war had finally ended. When the news arrived in early summer, she was brushing the horse in the courtyard. People wept, laughed, and threw their hats into the air. We're going home, they said. Only eight of them had survived. The next day, they would board a stifling freight train and leave this place. Their hearts ached for home.

That night, they slaughtered the horse. It was already emaciated beyond recognition. They ate it anyway. Dried mud from its mane still clung under her fingernails. The war was over; the horse was useless. It would die on the journey before they even left these mountains.

She was alive. She had been ready to die at any moment. Now she lay in the signalwomen’s quarters — the last one left. The room reeked of filth and rust, the stench of war, she thought. Lice bit fiercely at her ankles, but she didn’t stir. She felt blood surge into her stomach, pulsing there. For the first time in months, she felt full. She slept.

She dreamed. In the dream, Shuqin came to her. Two hollow pits marked Shuqin’s face. No one buried me properly, she said. The crows ate my eyes. As she spoke, Shuqin leaned closer, as if melting into her. Her waxen face looked just as it had during her illness. Yue’e, she said, I want to go home. So she carried Shuqin on her back and walked outside. Night hung low; the grass glowed strangely with daylight. Shuqin weighed nothing, made no sound. They crossed the field, which became a riverbank. Water rose, cold against her knees. Then she woke. She ran outside and vomited the horse meat. After months of hunger, this meal was too much.

Morning piled fog in the mountain pass, the air thick and damp. They set out. She shed her uniform for her own clothes. She took a pistol, bullets, a knife, a bag of millet, a bag of oats. Nothing else. They followed the mountain path. Along the way, she took shoes from a dead woman’s feet — her own had worn through weeks ago. By dusk, they crossed the final ridge and saw the town below.

From the mountain, they watched the valley. People streamed in from all directions: down slopes, along the river, through riverside woods. Valleys, ridges: the land’s barren folds, swarming with ant-like figures. Disaster had stripped their faces to stone. They walked, leaving barren fields behind, chasing food. They walked without pause, sometimes changing course mid-journey. By land, by water, dreaming in sleep of bountiful homelands, of steaming food in shelters. The earth teemed with refugees, uprooted like weeds. Those who wouldn’t see dawn collapsed by roads or in ditches. Infants were buried in rice fields by parents who moved on, mothers’ breasts still swollen with milk. The war had ended, but floods, malaria, bandits remained — an unbroken chain of suffering across the land.