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Zhang Xianliang (1936-) - also rendered as Chang Hsien-Liang | |
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Chinese novelist and poet, who has written about his politically related imprisonments in China's gulag. Zhang spent 22 years in jails and labour camps. His semi-autobiographical protagonist is Zhang Yonglin, whose emotional and intellectual development the author has charted in such novels as Mimosa (1985) and Half of Man Is Woman (1985), a controversial novel about a man's life in the camps and his sexual difficulties after his release. "The great majority of contemporary Chinese literary works neglect a most important law of artistry in the use of language: economy. Thus, our language lacks ambiguity, subtle nuances, and multiple meanings. It is short on understatement and humor. Because we try to write everything that is on our mind, we often fail to set readers off on associated lines of thought of their own. This makes it hard for readers to bring their own creativity into play when they enjoy a piece of writing." (Zhang Xianliang in Modern Chinese Writers, ed. by Helmut Martin and Jeffrey Kinkley, 1992) Zhang Xianliang was born in Nanjing into a middle-class family. His father was a Kuomingtang official and industrialist, who managed a number of large enterprises including a shipping company. At the age of thirteen Zhang Xianliang started to write poems, and had his work published. His literary and artistic education during the 1940s and early 1950s provided the foundation that was to sustain him during the year he later spent in the camps. Zhang's familiarity with classics from China and Europe is seen in many references to them throughout his oeuvre. In 1952 Zhang Xianliang's father was arrested and accused of spying. He died in a Maoist prison. Zhang Xianliang moved to Beijing, where he attended middle school. He joined a group called "Qi Xiondi" (seven Brothers), and was expelled from the school in 1954. He then moved to the northwestern region of Ningxia, where he was a farm worker. In 1956 he was assigned to teach at the Cadres's Culture School. Zhang Xianliang's poem "Da Feng Ge" (Song of the Great Wind) was published in 1957 and achieved a huge success. When Mao Zedong started his anti-rightist campaign, Zhang's poem was attacked by bureaucrats. He was accused of being rightist and sent to a labor camp for reform at the age of twenty-one. This started a long period of suffering in Zhang's life, lasting over twenty years. Between the years 1958 and 1979 Zhang was imprisoned several times. He was held in labor camps, state farms, and prisons. In 1961 he was released for a time and then sent to jail for three more years. During the Cultural Revolution he was labelled as "anti-revolutionary-revisionist" and he spent those tumultuous years in a Ningxia labor-reform camp and working on a state farm. These places he later described in Half of Man is Woman. In 1972 he was set free in the aftermath of the Lin Biao Affair – a plan to assassinate Mao. It was not until 1979 that he was formally rehabilitated. Zhang Xianliang started to write again in the late 1970s and joined the editorial staff of the literary magazine called Shuofang. It printed his first story "Ling Yu Rou" (Soul and Body), later known as "Mu Ma Ren" (A Herdsman's Story), which was made into a movie. Mimosa portrayed Zhang Yonglin's struggle during the early 1960s, in the time of a great famine. Zhang has managed to stay alive, fighting with rats over food. He is transferred from a prison camp to a state farm. He becomes engaged to a resourceful but illiterate woman, who helps him recover a semblance of normalcy, but he is thrown back into the camps before he can marry her. NANREN DE YIBAN SHI NÜREN (Half of Man is Woman) was set in the 1970s and caused a great deal of debate because of its sexual theme. In this and other works Zhang Xianliang examined how sexual behavior was repressed by the puritanical policies of the Communist authorities. In the novel Zhang Xianliang wonders if China's entire intellectual community has not been emasculated. The protagonist, the older and more sardonic Zhang Yonglin, spends some twenty years in labor camps. While he is working in a rural commune, he sees a beautiful woman, Huang Xiangjiu, bathing nude in the river. He meets the woman eight years later, they marry, but the romantic picture of the woman turns sour. On their wedding night Zhang suffers from impotence. His wife loses her patience and has an affair. Zhang shows his heroism during a flood and regains his sexual power. Getting Used to Dying, which appeared in 1989, is narrated by two voices which belong to the same person. It juxtaposes encounters with death and suffering in the Chinese camps on the one hand, and sexual relationships and self-indulgence in the West on the other. In one scene the narrator is brought into a town to be executed. Parents with children have come to watch the spectacle. Grass Soup (1992) – title taken from the prisoners' habitual evening meal – and My Bodhi Tree (1994) are diary passages from the 1960s with commentaries, when Zhang Xianliang was still in a labor camp, and could not write freely. In 1983 Zhang Xianliang became a committee member of the People's Consultative Conference, and in 1986 a member of China's Writers' Association. In 1985 the Communist party reaffirmed that its guarantee of creative freedom for writers was a firm and unshakable one. From 1986 Zhang Xianliang held a chair at Ningxia Federation of Literary and Art Circles.
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