Xiaolu Guo tried to overcome the problem of her latest novel coming across as a piece of journalism by setting the action around a UFO sighting in 2012.
It's an interesting idea, yet aside from the date and the unusual context, the story reads like journalism - albeit from the perspective of those people affected by the events depicted. UFO in Her Eyes tells of how the lives of the mainland's rural poor are being affected by the country's economic development.
A village head sells off land for commercial and residential property development. Farmers are forced to sell their land for unjustified building projects; those who refuse find their livestock and crops poisoned by industrial waste. A butcher closes shop because he can't afford to buy a fridge in accordance with new hygiene rules. A woman leaves her grandfather to fend for himself after she's offered a job in the city.
If these stories sound familiar, it's because they are.
Anyone who has watched the mainland's fortunes grow in recent years will know there is a human cost of its rampant expansion. Guo attempts to distinguish her novel by setting events in the near future and introducing an 'alien', who turns out to be a lost American hitchhiker who goes on his merry way after being fed by a villager.
Then we have the UFO, or as Guo says, a symbolic representation of US economic and political power. It is all told in the reports of two policemen from the National Security and Intelligence Agency's Hunan Bureau sent to investigate the UFO sighting, complete with transcripts of interviews and notes in the margin.