Other Literary Forms

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Wang Anyi published a travelogue entitled Mu nü tong you mei li jian (mother and daughter traveling together in America) in 1986. Addressed to a Chinese audience, this book is essentially derived from notes and observations written during the author’s tour of the United States. Her first novel, Chang hen ge, was published in 1996.

Achievements

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Wang Anyi first started publishing her work in November, 1976; in less than a decade, she had already been recognized as a prolific writer of substantial achievement. Her short story “Ben ci lie che zhong dian zhan” (“Destination”) was chosen for the Chinese National Award for Short Stories in 1982, and her novellas Lapse of Time and Baotown won the National Award for Short Novels in 1983 and 1986 respectively. Baotown was the topic of a seminar hosted by the Writers’ Association of Shanghai shortly after its publication in 1985. The Three Loves Trilogy, written in 1986, has attracted attention as a controversial work because of its depiction of illicit or extramarital love affairs—a sensitive issue that, in China, is considered to be a “forbidden territory.”

Bibliography

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Hung, Eva. Introduction to Love in a Small Town. Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1988. Contains an overview of Wang’s life and career up to 1987, focusing on Wang’s views on women and the authorities’ condemnation of the sexuality in the Three Loves trilogy.

Hung, Eva. Introduction to Love on a Barren Mountain. Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1991. An informed discussion and analysis of the backgrounds, issues, themes, and techniques of the three novellas in the Three Loves trilogy both individually and as a progression. Argues that Wang Anyi has adopted a woman-centered attitude in her treatment of relationships between men and women.

Kinkley, Jeffrey. Preface to Lapse of Time. San Francisco: China Books and Periodicals, 1988. An introductory overview of Wang Anyi’s short fiction translated for collection in Lapse of Time. Focusing on the humanism by which Wang’s works are informed, Kinkley provides brief but useful analyses of their historical background and social contexts, as well as the author’s motivations, preoccupations, themes, techniques, and style.

Leung, Laifong. “Wang Anyi: Restless Explorer.” Morning Sun Interviews with Chinese Writers of the Lost Generation. New York: Sharpe, 1994. An insightful interview revealing how Wang searches for new subjects and different styles in fictional representation.

Li Ziyun. Preface to Best Chinese Stories, 1949-1989. Beijing: Chinese Literature Press, 1989. An extremely useful analysis of the development of short fiction as an engaging art form in the postliberation era. Major trends, along with representative authors and works, are identified and discussed in the context of the political movements in contemporary China.

See, Carolyn. “Cultural Evolution.” Review of Baotown, by Wang Anyi. Los Angeles Times, January 14, 1990, p. 1. Discusses Baotown, Wang’s fictional account of her exile to a small village during the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the 1970’s; discusses the quality of stubbornness and curiosity that underlies the survival of the workers and peasants there.

Tang Xiaobing. “Melancholy Against the Grain: Approaching Postmodernity in Wang Anyi’s Tales of Sorrow.” Boundary 24 (Fall, 1997): 177-199. Examines the origin and content of Wang’s tales of sorrow, most notably her critically acclaimed novella Shangxin Taipingyang, an imaginative rewriting of an earlier, simpler short story; argues that this rewriting is motivated by an unresolvable sadness, a global desolation that lies at the heart of Wang’s melancholy imagination.

Wang Anyi. “Biographical Note—My Wall.” In Lapse of Time. San Francisco: China Books and Periodicals, 1988. The author identifies the wall separating the neighborhood of the deprived from the neighborhood of the privileged (she grew up in the latter) as the spiritual source of her art. Wang explains how, because of the symbolic impact of the wall, she can be likened to an acrobat walking a tightrope both in her life and in her fiction.

Zhong, Xueping. “Sisterhood? Representations of Women’s Relationships in Two Contemporary Chinese Texts.” In Gender and Sexuality: Twentieth-Century Chinese Literature and Society. Edited by Tonglin Lu. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993. A detailed comparison of Wang Anyi’s “Brothers” with Jiang Zidan’s “Waiting for the Twilight.”

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Critical Essays