Monthly), to attack literary groups that it considered “bourgeois” and “reactionary,” such as the Crescent Society. It was undisputedly the most influential literary organization during the 1930s. Although it was disbanded in 1936 in order to form the united front against the Japa- nese, its impact continued to be felt in the People’s Republic of China all the way through the 1970s. See also CHEN BAICHEN; DUANMU HONGLING; HONG SHEN; OUYANG SHAN; OUYANG YUQIAN; SPOKEN DRAMA; WANG LUYAN; XIAO JUN; YE LINGFENG; YU LING; ZHOU ERFU; ZHOU LIBO. LI ANG, PEN NAME OF SHI SHUDUAN (1952– ). Fiction writer. A native of Taiwan, Li Ang studied philosophy at the University of Chi- nese Culture in Taiwan and attended the University of Oregon in the United States, majoring in dramatic arts. She published her first story in 1968 while still a high school student. Influenced by Western modern- ism introduced to Taiwan in the 1960s and 1970s, Li Ang was interested in exploring the inner workings of the individual, such as described in the subtly erotic story “Hua ji” (Flower Season), about a teenage girl’s sexual fantasies. Li Ang is noted for her social writings about the fate of the individual when he or she comes into conflict with the established norms of society, particularly in the form of the clash of values between Western and traditional Chinese beliefs. As Taiwan underwent rapid modernization, Li Ang was increasingly aware of the horrific condi- tions of women who were victims of superstition, violence, and sexual brutality. Her best-known work is the controversial novella, Sha fu (The Butcher’s Wife), a gripping story about a peasant woman who learns to empower herself against her abusive husband. When the story first came out in 1982, it caused a great storm. While it won the prestigious Unitas Fiction Award, the work was criticized for being “immoral” and sensational because of its bold exposition of sexuality and its militant feminist stance. The publication of the book in English in 1986 made Li Ang an internationally recognized writer. LI BIHUA, A.K.A. LEE BIK-WA, LILIAN LEE (1959– ). Fiction and film script writer and essayist. Born to a big, well-established family, Li Bihua showed literary talents at an early age. She is a prolific writer, having published many collections of essays, including Hong chen (Red Dust), Jing hua (Flower in the Mirror), and dozens of fictional works, several of which have been adapted into films, including the internation- ally renowned Bawang bie ji (Farewell My Concubine), which won an 92 • LI ANG, PEN NAME OF SHI SHUDUAN award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1993. A major theme in her work is romantic love, and in her more recent stories she turns her attention to portraying men’s betrayal of love, a move influenced by feminism. No other story more clearly expresses this feminist stance than Yanzhi kou (Rouge), in which a ghost, a former sing-song girl, haunts the streets of Hong Kong in search of her lover, heir to a grocery fortune, who is supposed to have died with her in a double suicide. Other stories that treat the same theme include Pan Jinlian zhi qianshi jinsheng (The Past and Present Lives of a Seductress), Chuandao Fangzi (The Last Manchu Princess), Qing she (Green Snake), and finally Bawang bie ji, her most famous work. Li currently lives in Canada. See also WOMEN. LI ER (1966– ). Fiction writer. Known primarily for his novels Huaqiang (Trickery) and Shiliushu shang jie yingtao (Cherries Grown on a Pome- granate Tree), Li Er worked for several years in the academic field upon graduation from the Chinese Department of East China Normal Univer- sity in 1987. He is currently an editor at the literary journal Mangyuan (Wilderness). While in college, he was exposed to a wide variety of works by foreign writers, including Franz Kafka, Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, Milan Kundera, Saul Bellow, and Václav Havel. He was also influenced by his friend and mentor Ge Fei, then a young lecturer at East China Normal University. The main character (in absentia) of Huaqiang, published in 2001, is a man named Ge Ren, a translator, linguist, poet, and Communist revolutionary who died in the mid-1940s. In the vein of a detective novel, the work revolves around the mystery of Ge Ren’s death through the accounts of three narrators whose own lives intertwined at some point with the protagonist’s. The three versions of Ge Ren’s story are collected and compiled by another narrator, the only descendant of the protagonist. The first narrator, a doctor who once serviced the Commu- nist troops in northern Shaanxi, tells his part of the story in the 1940s as he escapes to Hong Kong as a result of a brutal internal purge within the Communist Party. The second narrator, a former underground Com- munist Party member being interrogated in a labor camp in 1970, re- calls Ge Ren’s family history and his early life as a romantic youth and progressive intellectual. The third narrator, a Communist army general turned Nationalist, delivers his version upon his triumphant return to China in 2000 as an honored guest of the party he once betrayed. The twists and turns of events in the lives of the narrators make mockery of LI ER • 93 the rivalries and wars between parties and countries. The novel suggests that if yesterday’s enemy is today’s friend, history has simply played a cruel joke (shua huaqiang) on all those involved in the zealous struggles in the past. It is no coincidence that the name Ge Ren sounds exactly like geren (individual) in the Henan dialect, which is the author’s native tongue, invoking the allusion that the story of Ge Ren is the story of every individual who has gone through the social and political upheav- als of modern China. The novel goes on to indicate that the notion of an individual in control of his or her own destiny is simply an illusion and coincidences and accidental choices leading to dramatically different consequences are the ultimate determinants of a person’s life. History, as the title of the last chapter points out, is “written by the victor.” Huaq- iang is thus a metaphor for the follies of politics, the fortuity of life, and the unreliability of memory, history, and reality. While Huaqiang deals primarily with the irony of history, Shiliushu shang jie yingtao (Cherries Grown on a Pomegranate Tree) addresses how traditional culture intersects with modern values in the present. The novel centers on the manipulation of influence in a village election in northern China. Everyone, from the current village head to the for- mer village head, from the director of security to the accountant, from the village doctor to the school principal, from the Communist Youth League secretary to the average villager, has a stake in the game and tries to steer the outcome in his or her favor. The campaign shows that rural politics is every bit as complicated as any presidential election and a peasant is as sophisticated as any big-game politician. What the novel focuses on, however, is not the political implications of a village elec- tion, which as a new phenomenon in China is interesting in itself, but on how traditional values, which have sustained rural communities, are at odds with modern concepts of fairness and ethics. The unexpected elec- tion result reveals some hidden forces at work that bring to naught the individual’s painstaking efforts to control the flow of events. Li Er uses satire, irony, dark humor, and paradox to highlight the fol- lies of human behavior. In many ways he is a philosopher of life who sees incongruity between intention and outcome, between words and ac- tion; his work questions the criteria for distinguishing right from wrong, truth from lie, and reality from fiction. Cherries grow on a pomegranate tree or a man bites a dog—ludicrous? Maybe or maybe not. In addi- tion to his novels, Li Er has published many short stories and novellas collected under such titles as Raoshe de yaba (A Talkative Mute) and 94 • LI ER Yiwang (Oblivion) as well as prose work. Some of Li Er’s works have been translated into German. LI GUANGTIAN (1906–1968). Essayist and poet. Born in Zouping, Shandong Province, Li Guangtian came under the influence of the May Fourth New Culture Movement while a student at the Jinan Number One Teachers’ School. He began writing poetry and prose after becom- ing a student at Beijing University. Hanyuan ji (Hanyuan Collection), a poetry collection that contains works by Li and fellow Beijing Univer- sity students Bian Zhilin and He Qifang, established his fame, though he later wrote more prose than poetry. In 1935, when he graduated from Beijing University, he returned to Jinan and continued to write while holding a teaching job. After the Sino-Japanese War broke out, Li wandered in Sichuan for several years before joining the faculty of the Southwest United University in Kunming. During this time, he wrote the novel Yinli (Gravitation), in addition to several collections of essays including Huisheng (Echoes), Huanxi tu (Picture of Happiness), and Guanmu ji (Shrubs). Li’s essays are characterized by simplicity and naturalness, and they impart a sense of freedom of movement and an earthy touch with reality. After the war, he taught at Nankai University and Qinghua University. He joined the Communist Party in 1948, and in 1952 he was appointed president of Yunnan University and moved back to Kunming. At the height of the Cultural Revolution, Li became a victim of political persecution and was found dead in a lake in a north- ern suburb of Kunming. See also MODERNISTS. LI GUOWEN (1930– ). Fiction and prose writer. Like many writers of his generation, Li Guowen’s career was interrupted by political campaigns. Li published his first work in 1957 but soon he was branded a rightist and sent to labor in a railway construction company. He did not resume his writing until 1976 at the end of the Cultural Revolution. After graduating in 1949 from the Nanjing School of Dramatic Arts with a degree in playwriting, Li worked for many years in the performing arts circle. He is, however, better known for his fiction and prose writings than his theater scripts. Dongtian li de chuntian (Spring in Winter), winner of the Mao Dun Literature Prize in 1982, covers a span of four decades of social change through the memory of a veteran revolutionary cadre who returns to the place where he fought as a guerrilla soldier to investigate the death of his wife, who was assassinated 40 years ago. Huayuan jie wu hao (Number 5 Garden Street), another novel, centers LI GUOWEN • 95 on a grand Russian-style mansion that has witnessed modern Chinese history through the lives of its influential occupants. His stories “Yue shi” (The Eclipse) and “Wei lou ji shi” (The Story of Unsafe Build- ings) have also won prestigious awards in China. In recent years, Li has devoted a significant amount of his energy to his prose work, pub- lishing several collections of essays, including Da ya cun yan (Elegant Rustic Talk), which won the Lu Xun Literature Prize, and Li Guowen shuo Tang (The Tang Dynasty), a collection of essays on the historical figures and events of that ancient era, one of his many publications that showcase his passion in revisiting Chinese history and civilization and drawing lessons from the past. LI HANGYU (1957– ). Fiction writer. A Hangzhou native, Li Hangyu is known as one of the pioneers of root-seeking literature. His article “Liyili women de gen” (Sorting Out our Roots), along with those by Ah Cheng, Han Shaogong, Zheng Yi, and Zheng Wanlong, all published in 1985, advocated a literature that sought inspiration in the nation’s ancient past. In the 1980s, he was famous for his root-seeking stories about the customs and cultures along the Qiantang River, fictionalized as the Gechuan River, which runs in the vicinity of his native Hang- zhou. The stories in his Gechuan River series including “Gechuanjiang shang renjia” (A Family on the Gechuan River), “Zuihou yige yulao’r, (The Last Angler), and “Shazao yifeng” (The Relics of Shazao) are set against the background of the economic reform era but reach back to the ancient history and customs unique to this region. Of particular im- portance is “Zuihou yige yulao’r,” which portrays a man alienated and marginalized by society but determined to stick to the old ways. Coming from a tradition that has existed for generations in the area, Fukui, the last fisherman, rejects modernization and the lifestyles it represents. As factories dump pollutants into the river, fish die, and the fishermen who rely on the river begin to lose their livelihood. The others find ways to adapt to changing times by farm-raising fish or working for the facto- ries, but Fukui refuses, despite being ridiculed by his fellow villagers. At the end of the story, he floats to the middle of the river in his small boat, content in the thought that he will die in the embrace of the river he calls his “mistress.” He is the last witness to a once beautiful and plentiful river, a world in which man and nature coexisted in harmony. Underneath Li’s descriptions of the local customs and traditions is a dirge for a bygone era forever lost to the irresistible and crushing forces 96 • LI HANGYU of modernity. In his Gechuan River stories, Li finds the soul of the river culture in its spirit of wandering and unrestrained flow. He uses symbol- ism and myths as well as the vernacular language of the area to capture that spirit. Li has devoted his entire career to creating a tableau of the way of life along the Qiantang River of Zhengjiang, including his most recent prose work on the history and customs of the city of Hangzhou. LI JIANWU, A.K.A. LIU XIWEI (1906–1982). Playwright and fiction writer. A graduate of Qinghua University and a member of the Literary Research Society, Li studied Western literature in college and spent two years in Paris in the early 1930s. A cofounder of the Shanghai Experimental Theater, Li was one of the key figures who promoted the modern speech play. After the founding of the People’s Republic of China, Li worked for 10 years (1954–1964) at the Literature Research Institute of Beijing University and spent the rest of his career at the Foreign Literature Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. A prolific writer, having published numerous books, both creative and scholarly, Li had a diverse career as a fiction writer, a translator and scholar of French and Russian literature, a playwright, a director, an actor, and theater critic. Many of his fictional works, including novels Tanzi (The Crock and Other Stories) and Xin bing (Worries), are about the urban working class and the 1911 Republican revolution for which his own father gave his life. His translations include works by Gus- tave Flaubert, Molière, and Maxim Gorky. To this day, his translation of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary remains the standard Chinese edition. Li was a noted essayist; one of his essays, “Yu zhong deng Taishan” (Climbing Mount Tai in the Rain), is a staple in middle school text- books. Nowhere, however, is his accomplishment more prominent than in the theater. In his student days, Li had already shown a strong interest in performing arts. While studying at Qinghua University, he served as director of its theater club and performed in many plays. He later wrote and adapted more than 40 plays and is considered one of the founding fathers of modern Chinese theater. Li was profoundly influenced by French playwrights, especially Molière, many of whose works he translated into Chinese. In the 1920s, Li wrote mostly one-act plays about the urban poor, such as Muqin de meng (A Mother’s Dreams). After his trip to France in the 1930s, Li be- gan to write multiple-act plays that dealt with a wide range of subjects, LI JIANWU, A.K.A. LIU XIWEI • 97 including important political and historical events past and present. He also paid more attention to the structure of his plays. Zhe bu guo shi chuntian (It’s Only Spring), considered his best work, interweaves a ro- mantic tale with a revolutionary story. The plot revolves around a police chief’s wife who manages to get her former lover a job as a secretary in her husband’s department, hoping to rekindle the old flame. The lover, however, turns out to be an underground revolutionary being pursued by the police. When his cover is blown, she bribes the police to get him out of the city. The power of the play derives from the high drama achieved through a clever manipulation of contradictions and complex relationships among the characters as well as a seamless structure and witty language. Created in the realist mode, Li’s heroes are multidimensional hu- man beings with flaws as well as virtues. The police chief’s wife, for example, is selfish and delusional but empathetic. The characters’ imperfections not only make them plausible but also give rise to ten- sions that inevitably lead to dramatic climaxes. Li emphasizes plot development and favors suspense and unexpected outcomes, relying on them to create dramatic moments. Because of the sophisticated artistry, Li’s plays continue to draw attention while the political plays by many of his contemporaries have been more or less forgotten. See also MAY FOURTH MOVEMENT; NEW CULTURE MOVE- MENT; SPOKEN DRAMA. LI JIEREN (1891–1962). Novelist and translator of French literature. For his love of French literature and its influence on his writings, Li Jieren was called the “Chinese Zola” and the “Oriental Flaubert.” Like his fellow Sichuanese writer, Sha Ting, he made extensive use of his native dialect, also earning him the reputation as a chronicler of the city of Chengdu. From 1915 to 1919, when the May Fourth New Culture Movement was gaining momentum, Li worked as an editor and chief commentator for newspapers and did his part in assaulting the old Chinese traditions and spreading progressive ideas in provincial Chengdu. He wrote a great number of editorials and essays and published about one hundred stories written in both classical and vernacular Chinese, brief sketches that expose corruption in the government. In these early works, Li’s gift as a storyteller is already evident. His presentation of realistic characters and events by making skillful use of the vernacular, his ability to create 98 • LI JIEREN a biting political satire, and his drawing on the elements both of classical Chinese and foreign literature made Li a unique talent in the early days of modern Chinese literature. In 1919, Li went to France to study French literature and began trans- lating works by French writers, including Gustave Flaubert and Guy de Maupassant, into Chinese. During his stay in France he wrote one novella, Tongqing (Sympathy), based on his stay in a hospital for the poor in Paris. After he returned to China in 1924, Li wrote more short stories, most of them satirical pieces that poke fun at local warlords. His main accomplishment, however, is his historical trilogy based on major historical events before and after the 1911 Revolution. Si shui wei lan (Ripples across a Stagnant Water), part 1 of the trilogy, encompasses the years between 1894 and 1901. The story takes place in Tianhui, the northern suburb of Chengdu, a sleepy town stirred up by the Boxer Rebellion. For its grand scale, its sophisticated artistry, its successful portrayal of characters, and its creative use of colorful local language, Si shui wei lan is arguably the best early modern Chinese novel. Another work, Baofengyu qian (Before the Storm), continues to trace the history from 1901 to the eve of the 1911 Revolution. Moving the stage from a small town to the provincial capital, the author describes the intensifica- tion of social problems that threaten the tottering Manchu dynasty and the changes of intellectualism in the impending storm of the revolution. A third historical work, Da bo (The Great Wave) centers on the 1911 Revolution. With the Railroad Protection movement as the key event, the novel focuses on the political and military affairs and important his- torical figures of that period. In all three novels, Li takes pains to situate historical events in a richly described social life, because he recognizes that there is a strong correlation between historical changes and human activities, between what happens on the national stage and what happens in a person’s private life. Despite his deep entrenchment in Western literature, Li does not show the usual Europeanized tendency found in many of the works of his contemporaries, including those of Lu Xun. For all the various com- parisons and analogies between his work and European fiction, all made on reasonable grounds, his characters are quintessentially Chinese. In his novels, there is a perfect fusion of Western and Chinese traditions, resulting in an art entirely of Li’s unique style. After the founding of the People’s Republic, Li held many posts in the government, includ- ing deputy mayor of Chengdu and vice president of the Association of LI JIEREN • 99 Sichuan Writers and Artists. During this time he revised his trilogy to make it more in tune with the new society, a move driven by ideological reasons instead of artistic vision. LI JINFA (1900–1976). Poet, fiction writer, and sculptor. Li Jinfa grew up in Meixian, Guangdong Province, in a large family headed by his peasant/merchant father who had spent several years in Mauritius run- ning a small shop. Educated in Guangdong, Hong Kong, and Shanghai, Li Jinfa later studied art in Paris, where he came under the influence of French symbolists, particularly Charles Baudelaire, whose “Les Fleurs du Mal” left a strong impression on the budding poet. The first symbolist poet in modern China, Li created some of the most obscure lines in early modern Chinese poetry, utterly confounding his readers. His poetry is known for its “bizarre” images and “irrational” asso- ciations. The poems collected in Wei yu (Drizzle), published in 1925, show evidence of symbolist influence in their abundant images of the grotesque, such as corpses, skeletons, bloodstains, cold nights, muddy roads, dead leaves, and so on. Like Charles Baudelaire, Li aestheticizes the unseemly and turns it into the sublime. “Ye zhi ge” (Song of the Night), “Qi fu” (The Abandoned Woman), and “Shenghuo” (Life) are among his best-known poems. He taught art in Hangzhou and Guangzhou, and in the late 1940s, he served as a diplomat stationed in Iran and Iraq for the Nationalist government. When the Communists won the Civil War, Li immigrated to the United States and made a living in New Jersey raising chickens. He died in New York. See also MODERNISTS. LI PEIFU (1953– ). Novelist. Born in Henan, Li Peifu began his liter- ary career in the late 1970s. He has written extensively about China’s northern countryside with its strong adherence to traditions and its per- sistent struggle to leave behind the poverty that has plagued the lives of its peasants for generations. Having lived in rural communities, Li understands the nature and the soul of the Chinese peasantry and his portrayals of country life are both realistic and profound. Yang de men (The Gate of Sheep), a novel banned by the government shortly after its release, paints a dark picture of what it is like when an agrarian com- munity achieves economic prosperity. The book’s negative portrayal of Chinese traditional society echoes the iconoclastic stance voiced in the works by Lu Xun and Ba Jin. The return to the critical tradition of the May Fourth Movement registers a revolt against the socialist realism 100 • LI JINFA of the Mao era, which glorified the peasants as enlightened revolution- aries. In Yang de men, Li’s Hujia Bao is a village controlled by one man, who rules his charges like “God watching over His flock,” as the title suggests. On the surface, Hujia Bao is a Communist utopia, with no exploitation, no corruption, and no poverty. Underneath the blissful surface, however, is the reality of the authoritarianism of the village head, who does not hesitate to crush the slightest sign of defection and whose political network built through decades of painstaking cultivation reaches all the way from his village to the capital. The novel portrays the villagers as well-fed, subservient sheep and the various levels of govern- ment officials as greedy wolves who use their positions only to serve their personal interest. Also concerning the countryside, Lishi jiazu (The Li Clan) is a saga that chronicles the rise and fall of a large clan. With the same focus on how power operates in society, Li has shed light on life in urban China. His novel Chengshi baipishu (White Paper on a City) is told from the perspective of a mad girl whose unusually acute senses allow her to uncover the absurdities and the lack of spiritual anchor of modern city life. Additionally, Cheng de deng (City Lights) depicts the arduous journey of country youths on the way to becoming urbanites. A more recent novel, Dengdeng linghun (Wait for the Soul), deals with the ruthless competitions within the business world and how power corrupts humanity. It portrays a businessman whose success and downfall are brought about by his personal ambition and hunger for power. A prolific writer primarily interested in portraying the nature of power in society, Li has written several volumes of novellas and short stories in addition to these influential novels. LI RUI (1950– ). Fiction writer and essayist. Born in Beijing, Li Rui lives in Shanxi, which features prominently in many of his writings. Widely considered one of the best writers in contemporary China, Li did not come to fame until the 1990s, even though he was already a published author in the mid-1970s. Houtu (The Solid Earth) is a series of short stories about poor peasants whose character traits contain both shrewd- ness and ignorance, which Li came to know intimately while working in the countryside as an educted youth during the Cultural Revolution. Also set in the countryside, Wufeng zhishu (Windless Trees) depicts a northern village inhabited by dwarfs whose calm life is disrupted by the arrival of two outsiders: an ardent revolutionary city youth and a beg- gar girl from the neighboring province. Li’s historical novel, Yincheng LI RUI • 101 . the fate of the individual when he or she comes into conflict with the established norms of society, particularly in the form of the clash of values between Western and traditional Chinese. underwent rapid modernization, Li Ang was increasingly aware of the horrific condi- tions of women who were victims of superstition, violence, and sexual brutality. Her best-known work is the. shang jie yingtao (Cherries Grown on a Pome- granate Tree), Li Er worked for several years in the academic field upon graduation from the Chinese Department of East China Normal Univer- sity in