The Reconfigured Narratives of Class and Gender in Representing Social Changes: From the Full-Length Novel to the Television Series of A Lifelong Journey

Adapted from contemporary Chinese writer Liang Xiaosheng’s award-winning novel, the epic series A Lifelong Journey has proven to be a phenomenally successful Chinese television drama in 2022. In the form of family saga, both the novel and the television series actively address tremendous social transformations of China over the past 50 years. However, there are different social discourses in these two works in terms of class, gender, family, and nation. Adopting the methods of “symptomatic” and “intersectional” reading, this chapter explores the changed cultural politics and narrative strategies of class and gender, to elucidate the reconfigured meaning-making of social transition from the novel to the television series. It argues that, endowed with humanist concerns, the original epic story skillfully crafted a critical realist picture of the uneven impacts of China’s sweeping social changes for different social classes and regions (in this case Dongbei) and offered a valuable social critique of the disadvantages and dilemmas suffered by marginalized social groups. However, the television adaptation became a “main melody” melodrama, which replaced social perspectives with moral narratives while turning the realistic portrayals into idealist visions.