Other than her work about the Chinese émigré community, Yu has also written about her early experiences in China.. Yu is best known as a distinguished scholar of classical Chinese litera
Trang 1Sanguan 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
Trang 2experienced 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
Trang 3large 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
Trang 4ems 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
Trang 5changes 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
Trang 6Zang’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
Trang 7acted 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
Trang 8Zhang 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 appreciafascina-tion 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
Trang 9gets 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
Trang 10Anyi , 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