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Wang Anyi (1954-) - written also: Wang An-yi | |
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Chinese writer who has in particular depicted Shanghai life. Wang Anyi represents the generation of writers whose formal education was disrupted by the Cultural Revolution. She is among the most widely read and anthologized authors of the post-Mao era, a breaker of taboos and a speaker for China's younger generation. Among Wang's acclaimed Shanghai novels is the nostalgic Changhen ge (1996). It follows the aspirations and muted sufferings of a beauty pageant winner, from 1940s Shanghai through the political storms of China. --'How was it in those years?' Wang Anyi was born in Nanjing. In 1955 she moved with her family to Shanghai, the native city of her mother Ru Zhijuan, a noted writer. In 1969 she graduated from junior high school. Because her father, a member of the Communist Party, had been denounced as a Rightist when Wang Anyi was only three, she was unable to continue her education. At the age of sixteen, a member of the "Urban Youth" generation, she was sent to the Anhui countryside, an impoverished area near the Huai River, where she was supposed to learn from the peasants. Wang ended in northern Anhui, but managed to leave the commune by joining a local performing arts troupe as a cellist in 1973. She had begun publishing stories in the mid-1970s. After the Cultural Revolution and the fall of the Gang of Four, she returned in 1978 to Shanghai to work for the magazine Childhood. In 1980 she became a member of the Chinese Association of Writers. Most of Wang Anyi's early writings are largely based on her personal experiences during the 1960s and 1970s, including the short story 'Life in a Small Courtyard', which depicted a group of actors and their relationships. The author has said: "I hope that my fiction has this effect-that people will read it and say, "Yes... this is the way things were once upon a time. These are lives that people led.'" Liushi (1982, Lapse of Time) portrays the humiliations and frustrations in the everyday lives of the back-alley residents of Shanghai. In the title story, which won the Prize for Best Novelette of 1982, the protagonist is a strong woman of bourgeois background, who holds her family together through forty years of hardships. Xiao Baozhuang (1985, Baotown) is an example of the school of fiction characterized as "seeking for roots." In the award-winning novella Wang explored the traditional values still alive in the countryside. The villagers of the story escape their everyday life in dreams, which unite people in a common bond of hope. After participating with her mother in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa in the United States in 1983, Wang's fiction moved away from socialist realism toward psychological exploration. Trips to various parts of Asia have also been a source of inspiration for her, but the most important influence on her work has been the city of Shanghai. The stories about everyday urban life often depict the struggle of the underclass. Her characters are not openly rebellious, but express their inner feelings with quiet self-confidence, and through their strong will for survival. In her "Love Trilogy" published in 1986-1987, Wang Anyi explored female sexuality and marriage. The short story 'Brothers', published in 1989, contrasted marriage and the emotional attachment between women. Wang Anyi's cool, existential spirit and, to the Chinese public, the unusually explicit depiction of sexual attraction was attacked by conservative critics. The first part, Huangshan zhi lian (1986, Love on a Barren Mountain), ends in a suicide pact between adulterous lovers. Xiaocheng zhi lian (1986, In Love in a Small Town) draws a portrait of an unmarried woman, who is physically and emotionally stronger than her lover, and who ends up as a confident single mother. Jinxiugu zhi lian (1987, Brocade Valley) starts with the words, "I want to tell a story, a story about a woman." Following a modernist technique, the narrator intervenes occasionally the story in which a young woman, bored with her husband, gains a new sense of identity through a fleeting extramarital affair. It has been noted that the work echoes Flaubert's Madame Bovary, one of Wang's favorite novels, but in Brocade Valley the heroine is more intelligent and self-aware. (Chinese Femininities / Chinese Masculinities: A Reader by Susan Brownell, 2002). In a speech in 1986 Wang said, "I firmly believe that an individual, and a people, must possess the insight and courage to engage in self-examination. This spirit of self-examination is what guarantees that individuals will become real human beings, and that a people will develop into a strong and worthy nation." (from a talk for the International Conference on Contemporary Chinese Literature, Shanghai, 1986) In the 1990s Wang turned her attention to her family genealogy, and published several works which crossed over the boundaries of mythology and history, personal memoirs and fantasies. Among these works, which critics have found hard to categorize, were Shushu de gushi (1993), a meta-fictional story about storytelling, Shangxin Taipingyang (1994), and Jishi yu Xugou (1994), which traced the roots of her mother's family from the distant past. Wang's bestseller, Changhen Ge, about the life a beauty pageant winner, Wang Qiyao, and changing times in Shanghai, was a winner of the Fifth Mao Dun Literature Award. The book, which was voted the most influential work of the 90s in China, has been adapted into a television drama series and a stage play. Its film version, directed by Stanley Kwan, was produced by Jackie Chan. Wang has also published essays, journalism, travel writings, literary criticism, and memoirs. She has been recognized as a writer with a quest for a friendlier, more egalitarian society. Wang's films scripts include Temptress Moon (1996), a tale of romantic intrigue, written with the director Chen Kaige. This period drama, starring Leslie Cheung, Li Gong and Kevin Lin, was set during the chaotic 10 years that followed the founding of the Republic in 1911. The original idea for the script came from the director, who later noted that "Wang Anyi's work reaches out to a very high spiritual level, which is also something I tend to strive for in my own work. So when you put us together, we are up in the clouds and it is very hard to get us to write a real, concrete story about real people." (from Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers by Michael Berry, 2004) In 2001 Wang was elected chairperson of the Shanghai Writers' Association. For further reading: Chinese Femininities / Chinese Masculinities: A Reader by Susan Brownell (2002); China in a Polycentric World: Essays in Chinese Comparative Literature, ed. by Yingjin Zhang (1999); The Encyclopedia of the Novel, vol. 2, ed. by Paul Schellinger (1998); Rewriting Gender by Ravni Thakur (1997); Wang Anyi by Hongzhen Ji (1996, in Zhong shen de xiaoxiang); Zwischen ausserer und innerer Welt: Erzahlsprosa der chinesischen Autorin Wang Anyi von 1980-1990 by Ulrike Solmecke (1995); World Autrhors 1985-1990, ed. by Vineta Colby (1995); Morning Sun: Interviews with Chinese Writers of the Lost Generation by Laifong Leung (1994); From May Fourth to June Fourth: Fiction and Film in the Twentieth Century China, ed. by E. Widmer and Wang D. Der-wei (1993) Selected bibliography:
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