Xiao Hong

Xiao Hong a Chinese novelist, poet and essayist (1911-1942) whose brief, turbulent life produced some of the most original fiction of theRepublican era. Her novel The Field of Life and Death, an unsentimental account of peasant suffering in Manchuria, is regarded as a landmark of modern Chinese literature.

Childhood and Flight from Home

Xiao Hong was born on 1 June 1911 in Hulan, a small town in Heilongjiang province in northeast China, into a landlord family. Her original name was Zhang Naiying. Her mother died when she was young, and she was raised largely by her grandfather, the one adult who showed her affection in a cold and hierarchical household. The town of Hulan and its countryside, with their markets, festivals and grinding poverty, became the material of her best-loved book.

As a young woman she resisted an arranged marriage and left home, an act of daring that cut her off from her family and left her dependent on her own resources. She went to Harbin and then to Beijing, where she struggled to survive, taking work as a servant and enduring hunger and exploitation. Her early years were marked by poverty, illness and repeated betrayal by the men in her life.

She began to write poetry and fiction in Harbin in the early 1930s, joining a circle of young writers and artists. Her talent was quickly recognised, and she formed a relationship with the writer Xiao Jun, with whom she worked and travelled. Together they became associated with the emerging anti-Japanese literary movement in Manchuria.

Shanghai, Lu Xun and Literary Fame

In 1934, under pressure from the Japanese occupation of the northeast, Xiao Hong and Xiao Jun moved to Shanghai, where they came under the patronage of the great writer Lu Xun. Lu Xun recognised her genius, introduced her work to publishers and wrote a preface for her first novel. His support transformed her fortunes and gave her a place at the centre of the Shanghai literary world.

The novel that followed, The Field of Life and Death, appeared in 1935 and at once established her reputation. Set in a Manchurian village, it depicts the cycle of birth, hunger, illness and death among peasants, and later their resistance to the Japanese invaders. Its fragmented structure, its lyrical descriptions of the landscape and its unflinching view of suffering set it apart from the more conventional realist fiction of the day.

Lu Xun praised the book for its unusual power and its freedom from sentimentality, and it became one of the foundational works of modern Chinese fiction. It was followed by a stream of stories and essays in which she continued to explore rural life, memory and the position of women. By the mid-1930s she was one of the most admired young writers in the country.

Wandering, War and Last Years

Xiao Hong's personal life was troubled. Her relationship with Xiao Jun ended amid conflict and unfaithfulness, and she formed other attachments that also brought her pain. She travelled to Japan and back, and when the war with Japan spread across China she moved from Shanghai to Wuhan, to the wartime capital of Chongqing, and eventually to Hong Kong, always seeking a safe place to write.

In Hong Kong, then a British colony crowded with refugees, she worked on her last and most ambitious novel, Tales of Hulan River, a memory of the town of her childhood. Written in illness and isolation during the Japanese occupation, it weaves together local custom, family history and the fate of women in a manner that is at once nostalgic and devastating. She also wrote essays about her life and her homeland while she was gravely ill.

She died in Hong Kong on 22 January 1942, at the age of thirty, of illness aggravated by the poverty and dislocation of wartime. Her body was cremated and part of her ashes were later interred in Guangzhou. She left behind a comparatively small body of work, much of it written under the pressure of flight and illness.

Craft and Themes

Xiao Hong's prose is distinguished by its lyricism and its freedom from conventional plot. She often abandons linear narrative for a structure of scenes and impressions, moving between observation and memory, between the natural world and the human world. Her descriptions of snow, rivers, fields and seasons are among the finest in modern Chinese writing.

Her central subject is the hardship of rural life, especially the suffering of women and children, and she writes about it without either sentimentality or political slogan. She records hunger, childbirth, infanticide and casual cruelty as facts of existence, and she finds in the landscape a source of beauty that does not soften the harshness of the human condition.

She was also a poet and an essayist, and her shorter pieces reveal a range of feeling from tenderness to despair. Her style has been described as feminine and inward, though the label understates her formal daring and the severity of her social vision. She wrote in a mode of her own, resistant to the categories of her contemporaries.

Reputation and Legacy

Xiao Hong's reputation has grown steadily since her death. She was celebrated by Lu Xun and mourned by her contemporaries, and later generations of readers have found in her work a rare combination of imaginative power and moral seriousness. She is regarded as one of the finest writers of the Republican period and a pioneer of modern Chinese women's writing.

Her life has been the subject of biographies, films and plays, and her image as a brilliant, self-destructive wanderer has at times overshadowed her art. Scholars have worked to restore attention to the writing itself, exploring her experiment with form and her subtle treatment of gender and memory. Tales of Hulan River is now widely taught and admired.

She remains a powerful symbol of the gifted woman artist struggling against poverty and a society that gave her little support. Her transformation of childhood memory into literature, and her refusal of easy consolation, have made her work endure far beyond the thirty years of her life.

See also

• Lu Xun
• The Field of Life and Death
• Tales of Hulan River
• Manchurian literature