Bing Xin

Bing Xin the Chinese writer of fiction, essays and poetry for and about children (1900-1999) whose gentle, reflective prose made her a beloved voice of the May Fourth generation. She was a noted poet of the small forms, an essayist of family and nature, and a lifelong promoter of literature for the young.

Early Life and Education

Bing Xin was born Xie Wanying on 5 October 1900 in Fuzhou, in Fujian province, into a naval family that moved frequently in her childhood. She grew up largely in the coastal cities of Shandong and Fujian and was educated at a missionary school for girls, where she absorbed both classical Chinese letters and Christian hymns and English literature. She entered Yenching University in Beijing, where she studied literature and began to publish under the pen name Bing Xin, meaning heart of ice.

She graduated in 1923 and then went to the United States to study at Wellesley College, where she took a master's degree and where the letters she wrote home became the basis of her celebrated essays. These letters, collected as Letters to My Little Readers, were published in the 1920s and won her an enormous following among young people. In them she wrote about the sea, her family, her studies and the sights of America in a warm and simple voice that treated children as serious correspondents rather than as an audience to be talked down to.

Poetry and the May Fourth Generation

Bing Xin was a member of the group of writers who came to prominence after the May Fourth movement of 1919, and she was associated with the Literary Research Association, which favoured realistic and humane writing. Her early short stories examined the situation of women and the conflicts between individual feeling and social expectation. Her most influential poetry, The Stars and The Spring Water, published in 1923, consists of very short free-verse pieces, some only two or three lines, in which she wrote of love, childhood, the sea and the divine.

Their compression and their impressionistic imagery brought a new and delicate note to modern Chinese verse and inspired many imitators. Her style, praised as gentle and luminous, was influential in a period when writers were searching for a modern language. She preferred quiet observation and tender feeling to polemic, and she wrote with a serenity that stood apart from the more strident voices of her generation.

Writing for Children

Bing Xin is especially remembered for her devotion to literature for the young. Through the letters to her little readers and through many later essays and stories she created a body of writing that spoke to children without condescension and offered them models of curiosity, kindness and courage. She also translated and introduced foreign children's literature, including the work of the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, whose influence she acknowledged and whose philosophy of love and harmony corresponded to her own temper.

Her prose for children is admired for its clarity, warmth and sense of wonder. She believed that writing for the young demanded the highest honesty, and she refused to write down to her readers or to hide difficulty from them. In later life she continued to write essays on family life, on education and on the growth of children, and she took an active interest in the welfare of young people. Her essays of old age, spare and peaceful, are among the best-loved of her later works.

Family, Faith and Service

Bing Xin married the sociologist Wu Wenzao in 1929, and their household in Beijing became a meeting place for writers and scholars. Her writing often circles back to the theme of the family and of maternal love, which she treated as the deepest and most universal of human bonds, and her own family life was unusually harmonious. Her religious sense, formed by her missionary schooling and by her reading of Tagore, gave her work a note of compassion and faith.

She believed firmly in the power of love and gentleness to improve human conduct, and she was sceptical of violence and hatred as instruments of change. She served in many public roles related to literature, education and the welfare of children, and she lived to a great age, still writing and receiving visitors. Her example as a woman of letters who combined art with a life of service was important to the women writers who followed her.

Legacy

Bing Xin died in Beijing on 28 February 1999, at the age of ninety-eight, one of the last survivors of the May Fourth generation. Her long life reached from the fall of the empire almost to the end of the century, and she remained throughout a symbol of gentleness and integrity in Chinese letters. Her writings for children are still read in schools, and her short poems continue to appear in anthologies and to be quoted by readers who value restraint and tenderness.

The many awards and memorials established in her name testify to her enduring place in Chinese literary life. She is remembered as a pioneer of writing for the young, as a poet of the small and quiet form, and as a woman who upheld the values of love, patience and faith across a turbulent century. Her influence lies less in dramatic innovation than in the steady example of a humane and generous art.

See also

• Letters to My Little Readers
• The Stars
• May Fourth Movement
• Children's literature