Cocoon by Zhang Yueran (2016)

COCOON is a coming-of-age novel set in the eastern Chinese city of Jinan centering on the lives of two childhood best friends from the post-80’s generation, Li Jiaqi and Cheng Gong, and a dark secret that binds their respective families’ – and their own – destinies. 

The novel begins as a conversation between the pair in the present, with Jiaqi returning to South Yard after an abrupt departure eighteen years ago, when she left without being able to say a proper goodbye to Cheng Gong. Her well-respected heart surgeon grandfather is approaching his death. Jiaqi takes a walk and wanders to Cheng Gong’s old apartment, where she unexpectedly finds him sitting on the sofa. She invites him to the white building where her grandfather is. They observe him in a coma. Jiaqi’s cousin Pei Xuan is now a famous doctor in the U.S., she returned to Beijing just before the commencement of the novel to find Jiaqi in attempt to persuade her to participate in the filming of a documentary about her grandfather, which Jiaqi rejects because she knows the dark truth about her grandfather that her cousin is blessedly ignorant of. Jiaqi is a freelance writer with self-destructive tendencies including alcoholism, a trait inherited from her father. 

Readers follow their conversation back in history. After meeting Jiaqi’s mother in the countryside after he was sent down during the Cultural Revolution, Jiaqi’s father defies her grandfather and marries the beautiful, yet uneducated woman with whom he has no common language. Jiaqi grows up craving attention from her emotionally distant father, but never received it. A talented poet, Jiaqi’s father quits his teaching position at the university after a disagreement with a superior, and leaves for Beijing to become a merchant; his business takes him on frequent trips to Moscow, and Jiaqi is left in her grandparents’ care after her mother leaves to accompany her father. Jiaqi’s father eventually divorces her mother and marries Wang Luhan.