Chinese Literature and Culture Volume 8: Lu Xun Prize Winner Zhang Yawen's Battle for Life

Chinese Literature and Culture, #8

Perhaps the best way to celebrate life is to fight for it. There is so much in life and there is so much to say, and here we are lucky to be involved with a writer who is filled with the zest for life and is never tired of telling its stories. A seventy-something? Yes, she is. Yet when it comes to telling life's stories, she tells them like a seven year old, with as much excitement, without guile, and yet one cannot help being affected. And you feel she is telling your stories and they happened yesterday. I am not unfamiliar with the surroundings in which Yawen grew up. The bigger story repeats itself though the individual stories that make up the bigger story differ from person to person in spite of the varying surroundings. Life is a gift and the gift should be appreciated. Very often a person specially gifted meets with greater adversity in her life and it takes courage and perseverance and skill to overcome it. It is the sense of mission that sets apart an individual from a crowd that can be unconscious, insensitive, or maddening. In a word, one needs to know what she is doing. In this volume, we have a short sketch "First Love at a Deathbed," a pathetic story of Yawen's Third Elder Sister regretting not having fought for her own life on her deathbed. "Dog Girl" is Ying Kong's English adaptation of excerpts of Yawen's early fight against fate in getting her limited education. "The Hawthorn Tree at the Beginning of My Life," translated by the smiling but serious translator Tina Sim, documents the hard life of the family life in a valley with its suppressed aspirations and feelings. "In Respect and Awe" is Vincent Dong's translation of Yawen's preface to her prize-winning biographical novel Playing Games with the Devil, for the writing of which she made many interview trips to Europe on her own. In "Zhang Yawen's Calling: Rising Against All Odds," Ying Kong gives an in-depth introduction to the Lu Xun Prize winning autobiography The Call of Life (translated as Cry for Life in an existing English translation) with a poetic summary of the author's life in the first person singular.