"Historical Dictionary of Modern Chinese Literature" by Li-hua Ying - Part 29 pps

Sanguan in Xu Sanguan mai xue ji is also a sympathetic but unappeal- ing figure. Like Fugui, misfortunes reveal the human quality in him. When he is determined to sell his blood “all the way to Shanghai” to pay for his son’s medical treatment, he is redeemed as a loving father. In both novels, there is an unmistakable indictment of an uncaring system in which the little man pays a heavy price for the smallest pleasures in life. In the same vein, Xiongdi (Brothers), his latest novel, tells the moving story of how a family of four, formed by a second marriage, survives the Cultural Revolution. Yu calls this novel “Dickinsonian,” for its rich description of social mores and hu- man love and spirit. See also ROOT-SEEKING LITERATURE. YU JIAN (1954– ). Poet, essayist, and playwright. Born and raised in Kunming, a laid-back city in the southwestern part of the country, gen- erally not considered a hotbed for avant-garde literature, Yu Jian is one of the few poets who still possess the innovative spirit of Misty poetry. He has written some of the most interesting Chinese experimental po- ems, which are characteristically terse and concrete, but ambiguous. He adopts a syntax that contains few adjectives, with nouns acting as verbs. Some of his poems are politically provocative, notably “Ling dang’an” (File 0: The Archive Room), published in 1994 in the first issue of the foremost avant-garde literary journal, Dajia (Great Masters), which is based in Kunming. The poem is a biting commentary on dehumanized life in China under the constant watch of the state. From birth to death, a Chinese person’s life is condensed to a secret file, constantly updated and hidden, its content unknown to the individual in question. Yu’s work lends well to experimental theater. “Guanyu Bi’an de yici Hanyu cixing taolun” (A Study of the Linguistic Features of The Other Shore), his response to Gao Xingjian’s famous play, was staged by his friend Mou Sen, a renowned experimental theater director. Yu’s play takes out the dramatic metaphysical content of the original play and challenges the longing for the “other shore” it expresses. Yu also collaborated with Mou in turning “Ling dang’an” into a play, which toured several cities outside China. Yu won first prize for the 14th Unitas New Poetry Award in Taiwan. Yu lives in Kunming and is a member of the Yunnan Writers’ Association. See also GENERATION III POETS; SPOKEN DRAMA. YU LIHUA (1931– ). Born in Shanghai, Yu Lihua moved to Taiwan with her family in 1949. From the 1950s through the 1970s, Taiwan 252 • YU JIAN experienced an economic boom accompanied by a rush to modernize and Westernize. Students went in droves to America to study. Out of this generation emerged several writers whose works reflected this ex- perience. Bai Xianyong, Nie Hualing, Ouyang Zi, Zhang Xiguo, and Chen Ruoxi all contributed to this “overseas student literature.” Yu was the most representative of the group, owing to both the quantity and the depth of her works on this subject. Most of her “overseas student” works were written in the decade from the late 1960s to the late 1970s, including Yan (Flame), Kaoyan (Test), Fu jia de ernümen (Children of the Fu Family), Bian (Change), and You jian zhonglü you jian zhonglü (Seeing the Palm Trees Again), which won Taiwan’s Jiaxin Literature Prize. In describing the so-called lost generation of youths who struggled to define their identity, Yu focuses on their personal choices in love, family, and career. Faced with loneliness in a foreign land and hard decisions about whether to stay in America or to return to Taiwan, many of her characters are like Yu herself, having been uprooted many times in their lives, first in the mainland in the course of two wars, then moving to Taiwan, and finally to America. You jian zhonglü you jian zhonglü is her defining work. It features a journalism student who, with a Ph.D. in hand, returns to Tai- wan to find his former sweetheart married to another man. He decides to stay nonetheless, because it is Taiwan that holds his roots and soul. In Fu jia de ernümen, another important work of Yu’s, the five children of a well-to-do Taiwanese family represent four different types of overseas students: the Westernized ones who give up their ideals and cut off their ties to their Chinese roots in order to pursue worldly success; the ruined ones who fail to adapt themselves to American society; the disillusioned ones who, despite their professional success in America, cannot find spiritual satisfaction; and the awakened ones who return to Taiwan for a meaningful life, leaving behind the material comfort of America. In these characters, Yu emphasizes the sense of cultural belonging and the difficulty of maintaining one’s cultural identity in a foreign land. Her latest novel, Zai liqu yu daobie zhijian (Between Departure and Fare- well), depicts a group of Chinese American professors, some of whom have lost the vitality and moral fiber of their youth. Other than her work about the Chinese émigré community, Yu has also written about her early experiences in China. Meng hui Qing He (Return to the Green River in a Dream), a novel set in a small town in Zhejiang during the Sino-Japanese War, centers on the squabbles of a YU LIHUA • 253 large family of three generations and the tragic tale of a love triangle. See also CIVIL WAR; WOMEN. YU LING (1907–1997). Playwright. A member of the Left-wing As- sociation of Chinese Writers, Yu Ling was a progressive playwright and filmmaker in war-torn China of the 1930s and 1940s. When Japan invaded Shanghai in 1937 and the Chinese government abandoned the city, Yu Ling, together with Ouyang Yuqian and other artists who stayed behind, established Lan niao ju she (the Blue Bird Theater Club) and performed, among others, Cao Yu’s Leiyu (Thunderstorm) and Ri chu (Sunrise) as well as his own plays in the relatively safe French Concession district. Between 1937 and 1941, Yu wrote more than two dozen plays, some of which were later turned into films in Hong Kong and Shanghai. Yu’s works, characteristic of the times, overwhelmingly center on the theme of national salvation. Ye Shanghai (Dark Nights in Shanghai), which was staged in 1939 to mark the second anniversary of the Japa- nese invasion of Shanghai, portrays the chaos and destruction in Shang- hai following the Japanese invasion; Chang ye xing (Travel during Long Nights), a four-act play, presents the different moral choices people are forced to make under Japanese rule; Qiyue liu huo (Fire in July), a five-act play staged in 1961, focuses on the heroic resistance against the Japanese put up by the people of Shanghai led by the Communist Party. A prolific playwright with more than 60 plays to his name, Yu served, after 1949, as director of the Shanghai Film Studio and president of the Shanghai Theater Academy. See also CIVIL WAR; SINO-JAPANESE WAR; SOCIALIST REALISM; SPOKEN DRAMA. YU PINGBO (1900–1990). Poet and essayist. Born into an eminent scholar-official family, Yu Pingbo graduated from Beijing University in 1919 and briefly studied in England and the United States. As a mem- ber of several literary associations, including the New Trend Society (xinchao she) and Literary Research Society. In 1922, Yu worked with Zhu Zhiqing, Zheng Zhenduo, Ye Shengtao, and others to found Shi (Poetry), the first poetry journal since the May Fourth Movement. He was one of the major poets who advocated a “plebeian poetry,” one that drew from the Chinese folk tradition, used an everyday language, and ignored the metric regulations of traditional poetics. Nevertheless, Yu was a new poet with quintessentially traditional sensibilities, a stylist who paid meticulous attention to the use of words and images. The po- 254 • YU LING ems collected in Dong ye (Winter Nights), published in 1922, are char- acteristically concise, fastidious, and graceful. They expressed his love for his hometown and for his friends and family. Yu was also a noted essayist, having published several collections of essays written in differ- ent genres ranging from belles lettres to travelogues, from philosophi- cal musings to reading notes. His essays show traces of influence from Zhou Zuoren, with whom he shared a fondness for the individual’s aesthetic experience, rather than a strong social consciousness. Yu is best known as a distinguished scholar of classical Chinese literature who made significant contributions to the study of Ci, a sub- genre of classical poetry, and particularly to the scholarship of Hong lou meng (A Dream of Red Mansions), an 18th-century novel generally considered the best fictional work in classical Chinese literature. After 1949, he taught Chinese literature at Beijing University and worked at the Chinese Literature Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. See also NEW CULTURE MOVEMENT. YU QIUYU ( 1946– ). Essayist. One of the most popular writers in China today, Yu Qiuyu was educated in Shanghai and has spent a great part of his career teaching theater and drama in colleges. He rose to fame in the 1990s with a collection of essays on historical figures and events entitled Wenhua ku lü (A Difficult Journey across Cultures). Subsequently, he published more essays, which continue to draw a large readership. His work addresses a variety of topics, from ancient Greek culture to con- temporary Shanghai life. Running through his numerous essays is the theme of patriotism from the perspective of a Chinese intellectual whose sense of responsibility for his nation and its cultural heritage echoes the so-called anxiety complex of the traditional scholar-official in ancient China. A controversial figure and academic celebrity whose essays are written for popular consumption, Yu has drawn many detractors, who accuse him of peddling cheap sentimentalism and showmanship, evi- denced by his frequent television appearances and promotional events. In the meantime, however, his books are being sold in large quantities, making him one of the richest writers in China. In addition to essays, Yu has written books on the aesthetics of the theater. YUAN QIONGQIONG, A.K.A. YUAN CH’IUNG-CH’IUNG (1950– ). A product of the feminist movement that swept Taiwan from the 1970s to the 1980s, Yuan Qiongqiong used her writings to call attention to women in modern Taiwanese society. Her work reflects the social and cultural YUAN QIONGQIONG, A.K.A. YUAN CH’IUNG-CH’IUNG • 255 changes as women seek to achieve gender equality and self-identity by challenging the patriarchal tradition and its impact on women’s psycho- logical well-being. Focusing on women’s attitudes toward love and sexu- ality, Yuan paints women trapped in unhappy relationships, struggling to find their own voices. “Ziji de tiankong” (A Sky of One’s Own), pub- lished in 1996, traces the trajectory of the protagonist from a submissive and needy wife to a self-confident and financially independent woman after her divorce. Despite her sympathy for the feminist movement, Yuan did not see herself as a social commentator. In this respect, she is different from other feminist writers of Taiwan, such as Li Ang and Liao Huiy- ing, whose writings have greater social and political implications. Yuan puts the spotlight on the individual’s sexual or psychological frustrations. The best of her stories have a subtle and ironic tone. Her other published fictional works include short story collections Chun shui chuan (Spring Water Boat) and Huanxiang zhi chong (Fantasy Bug), as well as a novel, Jin sheng yuan (Predestined to Meet). In addition to fiction, Yuan also writes poetry, essays, and film and television scripts. She has won several literary awards, including Taiwan’s Unitas Literature Award. – Z – ZANG DI (1964– ). Poet. Born and raised in Beijing, Zang Di received his B.A. and Ph.D. in Chinese from Beijing University and is currently teaching literature at his alma mater. Zang began writing poetry in his freshman year. His first poem, “Weiming hu” (The Weiming Lake), appeared in 1983 in a Beijing University journal and since then he has published more than 20 poems in the same journal. His poems are char- acterized by their slow, deliberate pace made possible through images gleaned from daily life, which are then stretched and multiplied in a flowing, prosaic, linguistic play. This particular emphasis on style sug- gests that poetry as a form of art is capable of opening up a multitude of angles from which the world can be experienced; the task for a poet is not merely to express his or her emotions but to explore all possible ways in which poetry interacts with the world through imagination. In this respect, Zang is a truly modern poet in the footsteps of poets such as John Ashbery, whose poetry shows the potential of the human mind. 256 • ZANG DI Zang’s poetry is sophisticated and philosophical. Winner of the Poetry Prize awarded by Zuojia (Writers) in 2000, among other honors, Zang is a prolific poet, having published several collections of poetry and prose. He also edited a Chinese translation of poems by Rainer Maria Rilke and several collections of contemporary Chinese poetry. ZANG KEJIA (1905–2004). Poet. Zang Kejia was one of the most cel- ebrated poets in Communist China. He came from an educated family in Shandong and received a traditional early education in his home village. Later, when he studied in the provincial capital, Zang was exposed to modern literature and was inspired to write his own vernacular poetry. In his youth, Zang was a fervent believer in radical social change. In 1926, he made his way to Wuhan, the center of revolution at the time. Ziyou de xiezhao (Portraiture of Freedom), a collection of poems, reflects this critical moment in his life, as well as in the nation’s history. When the revolution failed, Zang returned to his hometown. From 1930 to 1934, he studied at Qingdao University and met many well-known writers, including Wen Yiduo, Shen Congwen, and Lao She, who were on the faculty. Zang benefited most from Wen’s guidance. In 1933, Zang published his first poetry collection, Laoyin (Branding). The following three years saw the publication of three more of his collections: Zui’e de heishou (The Evil Black Hand), Ziji de xiezhao (Self-Portrait), and Yunhe (The Great Canal). These poems reveal the conditions of the countryside and the sufferings of the peasants and expose corruption within the Nationalist government. Most of them are short poems writ- ten in a powerful, vivid, colloquial language, representing some of the poet’s best work. During the Sino-Japanese War, Zang joined the mili- tary as a civilian staff member. He wrote many poems to encourage the Chinese people in their struggle against Japanese aggression. In 1942, Zang arrived in Chongqing, the war capital, where he contin- ued to produce many collections of poems, including Nitu de ge (Song of the Soil) and a long poem “Gushu de huaduo” (The Flowers of an Ancient Tree). In 1945, a few days after he met Mao Zedong, who came to Chongqing for a meeting with Chiang Kai-shek, Zang wrote a poem in praise of the Communist leader: “Mao Zedong, ni shi yike daxing” (Mao Zedong, You Are a Big Star), which was published in New China Daily, the official newspaper of the Communists. He wrote many more adulat- ing political poems after 1949. Within the Communist government, Zang ZANG KEJIA • 257 acted as one of the enforcers of its policy on literature in his position as party secretary of the Chinese Writers’ Association and the chief editor of Shi kan, a poetry journal. ZHAI YONGMING (1955– ). Poet. Considered one of the best female poets in China today, Zhai Yongming grew up in Chengdu, Sichuan Province. She entered the Chengdu Institute for Telecommunications and Engineering to study physics, a subject in which she had little inter- est. After graduating, she worked for several years at a research institute but occupied herself in her free time with writing poetry, which resulted in several collections. In 1986, Zhai resigned from the institute. She lived in the United States for a year in the early 1990s with her artist husband, and the sojourn inspired her travelogue, Niuyue, Niuye yi xi (New York and West of New York). After her return to Chengdu, she opened a bar that has become a literary salon for local poets and artists. For her writings about the female body and the dark female conscious- ness, particularly the melancholy but rebellious sentimentality voiced in Nüren (Women), Zhai is regarded as a feminist whose language is sensual and exquisite, and whose images are alluring. While her early poems express feelings of alienation, rejection, distrust, sadness, and desperation, her later poems tend to embrace the delights of life and hu- man relationships. See also GENERATION III POETS; WOMEN. ZHANG AILING, A.K.A., EILEEN CHANG (1921–1995). Fiction writer. Better known in the West as Eileen Chang, Zhang Ailing is widely considered the most talented woman writer in 20th-century China and celebrated for her relentless dissection of the tragic ironies of human experience. By birth, she should have had a pampered life, with a grandfather who was a high-ranking official in the late Qing government and a grandmother who was a daughter of Li Hongzhang, an influential Qing official. However, wealth and family prestige did not guarantee happiness, but a lonely childhood might have contributed to the making of an author. Her first published work is about her experience of being beaten and locked up by her father. Zhang, a reclusive figure who died all alone in her Los Angeles apartment at the age of 74, was interested in exploring the interior landscape of the individual and the decaying traditional way of life, no doubt inspired by her aristocratic background. In many ways, she epitomizes, both in her own life and in her works, the glamorous city of Shanghai in the 1930s and 1940s, a metropolis where East and West, old and new, converged. 258 • ZHAI YONGMING Zhang graduated from a Christian high school in Shanghai in 1937, the same year the Japanese invaded the city. Her plan to study in Eng- land had to change because of the war in Europe. Instead, she entered the University of Hong Kong. During her third year at the university, Japan invaded the city. She returned to Shanghai and married Hu Lancheng, a writer and journalist later accused of collaborating with the Japanese. The couple eventually separated and Hu went to Japan while Zhang remained in China. With the excuse of resuming her studies in Hong Kong, she got permission to leave China in 1952. Three years later, she immigrated to the United States. There she married for the second time, to an American playwright. After he died, she lived alone until her death in 1995. Zhang arrived at the height of her writing career in the mid-1940s. In 1943 alone, she finished eight stories, including “Qing cheng zhi lian” (Love in a Fallen City), the first important work that brought her fame, and “Jin suo” (The Golden Cangue), generally considered the best of her work. “Qing cheng zhi lian” centers around the heroine’s life first as the mistress of a wealthy businessman, then as his wife, and finally as a divorced woman who is rejected by her own kin, who regard her divorce as a disgrace to the family. Zhang is skilled at presenting the complexity of the inner minds of women, and nowhere is that skill more evident than in the portrayal of Cao Qiqiao, the protagonist of “Jin suo.” Cao’s transformation from a lovely and innocent girl to a cold-blooded, neurotic widow is delivered with powerful psychological insights. Unlike most of her contemporaries, Zhang was not preoccupied with the “big” theme of China’s national salvation. Her lenses were always focused on the trivialities of life, the subtle feelings between men and women, and intricate manipulations within families. From these per- sonal and familial perspectives, the author reveals the dilemma of being a woman in a society gingerly inching toward modernity. Her fascina- tion with life’s small details sprang from an appreciation of popular art and classical novels, especially Hong lou meng (A Dream of Red Man- sions). Her works display a remarkable degree of psychological realism and narrative sophistication, and her use of imagery and symbolism as well as irony gives credence to her writing, making her one of the best writers in modern Chinese literature. In an essay entitled “Writing about Myself,” she expresses her admiration for Western modernism: “Mod- ern literature seems to be different from what we had in the past because it no longer stresses a thesis, but just tells a story from which the reader ZHANG AILING, A.K.A., EILEEN CHANG • 259 gets as much as he can or as much as the story can offer.” Her stories and novels are examples of this new aesthetic concept. In the 1940s, Zhang wrote many short pieces of prose, later collected in Liuyan (Gossips). While not all her stories and novels are autobio- graphical, her essays are all about her unhappy childhood, her parents’ divorce, her dreams, what she learned in her early years, and her reflec- tions on what she saw and heard. This collection affords us glimpses of the real Zhang, who loved the modern metropolis of Shanghai and its bustling urban life and played the part of a witty observer commenting on fashion, movies, dance, music, painting, and literature. Her essays show that she was intimately linked to the outside world, the variegated social sphere of Shanghai and Hong Kong in the chaotic 1940s. Some of Zhang’s later works, written after she left China in 1952, carry politi- cal subtexts. The Rice-Sprout Song, a visceral portrayal of the famine directly caused by the land reform movement in rural China during the early 1950s, and Naked Earth, which critiques the destructive power of the Communist Party over human relationships, were commissioned by the United States Information Agency and published in Hong Kong in the mid-1950s. She wrote both novels in English and Chinese. Dur- ing her stay in the United States from 1955, Zhang also tried to rewrite some of her early stories in English, including The Rouge of the North, an expanded rewrite of her much celebrated early novella—The Golden Cangue. In the 1970s, she wrote Xiao tuanyuan (A Small Reunion) but requested that the manuscript be destroyed in the event of her death. Against her dying wish, the novel was published in 2009 and has quickly gained recognition as among the best of her work. It is widely believed to be a fictionalized account of the author’s own life growing up in a declining aristocratic family, her passionate but disillusioned love affair with Hu Lancheng, and her pervasive feeling of depression and darkness. Like Zhang’s other works, the novel is also a perceptive study of human nature with all its contradictions and self-deceptions, tenacity and frailty, and all the good and bad that life brings to the indi- vidual. In Zhang’s long career, she also ventured into filmscript writing for the Hong Kong movie industry as well as scholarly work on Hong lou meng, a translation into English and modern Chinese of Haishang hua lie zhuan (Biographies of the Shanghai Courtesans), a 19th-century novel originally written in the Suzhou vernacular. Zhang’s influence on Chinese literature is enormous. Among her many progenies are Shi Shuqing, Zhu Tianwen, Zhu Tianxin, Wang 260 • ZHANG AILING, A.K.A., EILEEN CHANG Anyi, and Zhong Xiaoyang, all believed to have inheritated her legacy. A recent movie by the renowned diretor Ang Lee, Lust, Caution, which is based on Zhang’s semiautobiographical story about romance, politics, and betrayal during the Sino-Japanese War, thrusted Zhang into the limelight of Western popular culture, a notoriety from which the reclu- sive author would have probably recoiled. ZHANG CHENGZHI (1948– ). Fiction writer, essayist, and painter. Trained as an archeologist and a historian at Beijing University and the Chinese Institute of Social Sciences, Zhang has made a successful ca- reer in creative writing. This multilingual, multitalented scholar-writer rose to fame in the late 1970s with the short story “Qishou wei shenme gechang muqin” (Why Herdsmen Sing “Mother”), a romantic tale based on the author’s experience as an educated youth in Inner Mongolia be- tween 1967 to 1972, which informs many of his other stories, including his best-known novella, Hei junma (The Black Steed). Set against the background of the Mongolian grassland, Hei junma revolves around the life of the hero and his relationship with a young girl and an elderly woman who has adopted them. It is a simple love story that reaches into the deep layers of traditional practices as they come into conflict with modern beliefs. The hero’s profound love for his land and his people transcends his frustration with and disappointment in some of its an- cient practices, which he has come to understand as sources that have sustained their traditional way of life. Other noteworthy works origi- nating from Zhang’s life as a herdsman include a novel, Jin muchang (The Golden Pasture), and some short stories. Zhang studied the history of China’s northern ethnic minorities as a graduate student and appar- ently identified with many of the traits that define their characters, such as honesty, fortitude, and friendship. Beifang de he (The River in the North) represents his understanding of the spirit of the nation, as em- bodied in the river in the north—the Yellow River—with its energy and vigor. It is less a story than a long poem, largely carried by the stream of consciousness and subjective ruminations of the narrator, a college graduate who has spent years as an educated youth in China’s northwest and who is preparing to take an exam for a postgraduate program in geology. After Hei junma and Beifang de he, Zhang wrote an unconventional novel entitled Xinling shi (A History of the Soul), his most important work, which mixes fiction with poetry, history, and memoir. The main ZHANG CHENGZHI • 261 . (Between Departure and Fare- well), depicts a group of Chinese American professors, some of whom have lost the vitality and moral fiber of their youth. Other than her work about the Chinese émigré. of the Left-wing As- sociation of Chinese Writers, Yu Ling was a progressive playwright and filmmaker in war-torn China of the 1930s and 1940s. When Japan invaded Shanghai in 1937 and the Chinese. scholar of classical Chinese literature who made significant contributions to the study of Ci, a sub- genre of classical poetry, and particularly to the scholarship of Hong lou meng (A Dream of