In mainland China, Wang Anyi has won a long list of national literary prizes for her novels, including Last Stop on the Line, Here No More, and Baotown. In 1990, Baotown brought her the prestigious L. A. Times Book Award, which in 1984 had been granted to the internationally renowned Milan Kundera.

Young Wang Anyi with her mother, famous author Ru Zhijuan. （courtesy of Rye Field Publishing Co.）

In Taiwan, Wang's Everlasting Regret and Truth and Lies were listed among the top ten books of 1996 by both the China Times and the United Daily News. Literary critics have also boosted her popularity in Taiwan by touting her as the successor to Chang Ai-ling, of the Shanghai School of literature.

During the Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong called upon youth to work in the countryside, and idealistic city youth answered his call in droves, altering the course of their lives and giving birth to a new literary genre.

How does this 45-year-old writer manage to captivate the imagination of readers on both sides of the Taiwan Strait?

A delegation of some of mainland China's most celebrated writers, dubbed by some as "the Dream Team," visited Taiwan in late October 1998. Included in the delegation were Su Tong (author of Wives and Concubines), Yu Hua (To Live), Mo Yan (Red Sorghum), Cong Weixi (one of the most celebrated of the many who have written about their experiences in prison during the Cultural Revolution), and Shu Ting (a major poet of the Misty School.)

Wang Anyi, who had ridden a wave of popularity in Taiwan on the strength of Everlasting Regret, was frequently compared during the visit to Chang Ai-ling. Wang, however, writes in a wide variety of styles, and merely chuckled at these comparisons, saying, "That kind of comparison should boost sales, eh?"

A literary family

Wang Anyi was born in 1954. Her recently deceased mother, Ru Zhijuan, was one of the most famous writers in mainland China during the 1960s. Her father, Wang Xiaoping, was a film director. The family moved to Shanghai when little Anyi was a small baby. Thanks to the literary atmosphere at home, she was able to recite classical poetry at the age of three or four. Wang's childhood was not as badly marred by the Cultural Revolution as those of others who grew up during that time. Mo Yan, for example, had to help a neighbor boy with his chores just to get his hands on a copy of an old book of traditional Chinese legends and myths. Another well-known author, Ah Cheng, never even heard of Chang Ai-ling until several years after the Cultural Revolution had come to an end. There were lots of books at Wang Anyi's home, and she says, "From a very early age I got into the habit of reading myself to sleep." During the Cultural Revolution she secretly read Chang Ai-ling novels from Taiwan printed in traditional Chinese characters.

Although her family was involved in literature and art, her father was branded as a rightist during the anti-rightist campaign of 1957, and was expelled from both the Communist Party and the People's Liberation Army. After the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, the writings of her mother were criticized for being too sentimental and romantic. In those turbulent times, it was rather dangerous to study liberal arts, so her parents urged her to study science and technology. "If it hadn't been for the Cultural Revolution, I would no doubt have gone on to university, and might have become a scientist or a doctor rather than a novelist."

A Junior High Student in 1969

The main character in her first full-length novel, A Junior High Student in 1969, is a girl named Wenwen growing up in an intellectual family. In less chaotic times, Wenwen would have received a good education, but the ten-year-long Cultural Revolution leaves her an uneducated, hard-luck woman scraping by under difficult circumstances. Near the end of the novel, Wenwen finds a job capping bottles on an assembly line. On her wedding night, Wenwen says to her husband:

"You know, it's crazy that we ever even met. If it hadn't been for the Cultural Revolution, I never would have been sent to Yuanming Junior High. I would have tested into Shanghai Junior High."

"Yeah, that's a fact."

"And if they hadn't sent young people to work in the countryside, you wouldn't have gone off to Jiangxi Province, and I wouldn't have started writing to you. If everything had just kept on a normal course, we never would have met."

"But what do you call 'normal,' anyway? Why isn't what happened 'normal'?"

"The Cultural Revolution never should have happened."

"But it did happen."

"Anyway, you weren't supposed to be my husband."

Thanks to the Cultural Revolution, Wang's math education didn't go past multiplication and division, and she never even touched physics, chemistry, or biology. "Literature is the one area of my education in which I've gone beyond what I learned in elementary school." Although as a young girl she had been on course to become a scientist or a doctor, Wang Anyi later found herself staring at the possibility of becoming a peasant for the rest of her life. During the hard, monotonous time she spent working in the countryside, reading books and writing her diary became all the more important to her. Indeed, they came to constitute a key focus of her life. Even though there was no conceivable hope of publishing, she nevertheless took her first step at that time toward a literary career.

For both Wang Anyi and Wenwen, "The Cultural Revolution fundamentally changed the lives of an entire generation." Wang acknowledges that the first half of A Junior High Student in 1969 is a virtual autobiography. Although the second half diverges from her own experience, it does in fact reflect what happened to most people in her generation. Perhaps it is the fact that she came of age in a time of historic upheaval that explains why the plot in Wang Anyi's stories so often seems to be guided along by a rampaging, immutable force of destiny.

A generation without ideals

In the late 1960s, Mao Zedong called upon youth to work in the countryside for the good of the motherland, and university students answered his call in droves. While life in the countryside was extremely hard, it held a strong appeal for idealistic city youth. Just past her 16th birthday, Wang volunteered to work in rural Anhui Province.

I only had a vague notion of what I was going to be doing. I left home with a very romantic view of the whole thing, but on the first day there I already wanted to go back home." For one thing, it was difficult to adjust to conditions in the countryside after growing up in a big city. For another, the village she went to had already been infected by a money-grubbing, dog-eat-dog mentality. The people there were not the honest, kindhearted peasants she had been expecting to find. "All of a sudden, I had no direction in life. I just wanted to get back home to Shanghai, but I had no idea when that would happen, or if I would end up spending the rest of my life as a peasant. I felt completely lost."

They were a bunch of children just getting started with their studies, yet they were asked to go and take up adult responsibilities. Many kids scheduled to start junior high school in 1969 ended up spending all six years of junior and senior high in the countryside. Just at the time when they should have been absorbing as much knowledge as possible, knowledge of culture had become an object of scorn. By the time they embarked upon their adult lives a few years later, however, the once-praised idealism that had prompted them to work in the countryside had become a subject of ridicule.

"The number 69, with one numeral rightside-up and the other upside-down, is symbolic of the chaos that my generation experienced. We are a generation without ideals or beliefs." Wang states that A Junior High Student in 1969 is about the people of this generation. In Last Stop on the Line, Wang tells the tale of the lao san jie, i.e., the generation of city youth whose education was curtailed when schools were shut down during the Cultural Revolution.

Members of the lao san jie generation had already received at least an elementary school education prior to the Cultural Revolution. Armed with this half-finished education, they entered China's political firestorm full of burning idealism. After the Cultural Revolution was over, these same city-born youth who had marched passionately off to the countryside found that the hardships they had suffered during China's ten years of chaos were of no benefit to them at all. One can imagine the disillusionment and pain they must have felt. They called on every connection at their disposal to get back to the cities, but by that time a decade of their lives had been wasted. They had not developed the skills to be competitive in the urban job market, yet the pressures and decisions of adult life were upon them.

Last Stop on the Line, which won a national short story prize, criticizes the Cultural Revolution by telling the story of a man trapped in precisely this situation. The younger of two brothers volunteers for the countryside so that his less robust older brother can stay in the city. (Families with two sons were allowed to keep one son at home while the other went to work in the countryside.) Ten years later, when the younger brother finally manages to make it back to Shanghai, he finds that his older brother, now married and raising a child, has no room to put him up comfortably. At the same time, he is deeply disappointed with the cold and scheming ways of the big city. Near the end of the story, the younger brother asks himself, "How am I supposed to get on with my life? I've got to think this through. Another train is leaving the station, but were is it headed? Maybe I never will find my niche."

Sung Ju-shan, a lecturer at Chinese Culture University, writes in her doctoral dissertation A Decade of Post-Cultural-Revolution Literature in Mainland China, "After shifting political circumstances debunked earlier values, the Red Guards who had devoted their youth to politics were faced with an urgent need to seek new meaning in life."

That an entire generation should have lost the flower of its youth to the Cultural Revolution was a tremendous tragedy for China. Wang Anyi was less badly affected than many of her contemporaries. She only spent two years in the countryside, and during that time she was able to visit home frequently. Even so, the sensitive young writer was deeply affected. According to Lu Cheng-huei, a professor in the Chinese department at National Tsinghua University, "These past ten years, as she has approached middle age, Wang Anyi has written almost exclusively about disillusionment."

Literature of the wounded

Wang Anyi had always played the harmonica, and in 1972 she used this skill to test into a performing arts troupe in Xuzhou, where she subsequently learned the cello. Life in the performing arts troupe was slow, and Wang gradually began to feel claustrophobic within the narrow confines of the troupe's routine. She began writing again. "When it comes right down to it, writing for me has always been a means of escape, whether from the lack of basic daily necessities, or from an unhappy situation."

Not only did she take up writing again, Wang also met her future husband in the performing arts troupe. He was the troupe director, Li Zhang. Wang longed to return to Shanghai, and in this she enjoyed her husband's full support. Li accepted a transfer to a new job in Shanghai, where he worked as an editor for a music magazine. For Wang Anyi, the move to Shanghai opened a new chapter in her personal and professional life.

In 1976, the Gang of Four fell from power and the Cultural Revolution came to an end. Then in late 1978 Deng Xiaoping came back to power and ushered in a new era of reform. Free at last of the tight political constraints of earlier years, writers were able to concentrate on the human condition instead of serving as the targets of demagogues or the instruments of political intrigue. The literature of mainland China entered a new era.

After ten years of silence and hardship, everyone had a story to tell. A flood of publications detailed the horrors of the Cultural Revolution. This new genre, known as the literature of the wounded, sparked a wave of interest in reading. A golden age of literature had arrived. Cong Weixi's The Prison, which describes the author's imprisonment during the Cultural Revolution, enjoyed spectacular success. It went through several reprints which eventually came to a total of 930,000 copies. According to author Zhang Wei, deputy director of the Shandong branch of the Chinese Writers' Association, "The things that got published back then weren't actually very mature, but they had a big impact."

The Falling Rain

Amidst the excitement and fury of a new tide of literary activity, 26-year-old Wang Anyi published The Falling Rain, a romantic short story about Wenwen walking through the rain in hopes of running across a boy she had once happened to meet. According to Sung Ju-shan, "Under the communist regime, with its stress on historical materialism, no one had ever before published a story that focused on the emotions of an adolescent girl. Wang Anyi's short story was a trailblazer, because it appeared at a time when communist ideology still held considerable sway in the literary sphere."

Wang feels that there is no need for a writer to play the part of a social scientist and use a novel as a means of criticizing anything. She has always focused on the individual. In all of her writings, she has been most concerned about telling a story from a particular individual's perspective, as in Here No More, The Story of Ah-Qiao, Till Death Do Us Part, Minnie, and Passion and Love in Hong Kong. That was why she refers to novel writing as the act of creating a "private, inner world."

After completing the Wenwen series, Wang left her introspection behind to write about the world around her. She began to tell other people's stories in such works as Last Stop on the Line, Symphony of Destiny, Baotown, and Liu Town.

Searching for China's Roots?

Eventually, there came a time when Wang had said all she had to say about bitterness and pain. New tasks awaited. The generation that had taken the lead in destroying reminders of traditional Chinese culture during the Cultural Revolution had to assimilate a huge influx of foreign culture. They also had to face their own shortcomings and begin the search for the roots of Chinese culture. Anything old, whether culture or customs, was a good subject for literature. For this generation, traditional things held the greatest novelty. Many writers began to color their writing with local flavor, as in Da Nao by Wang Cengqi Furong Village by Gu Hua, Shangzhou by Jia Ping'ao, and Red Sorghum by Mo Yan.

It was during this time that Wang published Baotown. The story begins in an ancient time with a devastating flood brought on by seven days and nights of continuous rain. The survivors of the great deluge settle in a new locality. They are ridden with guilt, for the flood had only happened because of their failure to carry out proper flood prevention measures. The story then skips to the present and a village called Baotown. It is the village that was settled after the ancient deluge, and it seems somehow as if the modern residents are still paying for the transgressions of their ancestors. The old have no young to carry on the family line, the men are married to insane hags, and the young have no prospects for marriage. Surprisingly, though, into this vale of tears is born a kind and pure-hearted youth named Laozha.

Another great deluge comes, and Laozha dies while struggling to save some old villagers who have no family of their own to look after them. His death, however, attracts sympathy and praise from far and wide, which in turn brings good fortune to the people of Baotown. It would appear at first glance that Wang Anyi has found human warmth and honesty in a rural setting, but Wang herself bridles at the fact that this novel has been categorized as a search for China's roots. She states that Baotown was actually intended as a criticism of how the unity of a kind and decent village is shattered in the end by the prospect of quick riches.

Smut peddler?

In 1986, Wang Anyi published a trilogy of love stories-Love on a Barren Mountain, Love in a Small Town, and Brocade Valley. With these novels Wang returns to her own inner world. "The 'Three Loves' trilogy springs from the same impulse that prompted me to take up writing in the first place. With my background, personality, and education, there is no way I could write principally about society. My main objective must necessarily be self-expression."

In Love in a Small Town, Wang intentionally avoids detailed description of the main characters' backgrounds or their social milieu. She also keeps narrative comment to a minimum. Instead, the carefully constructed mood of her story conveys the process by which two minor actors-young, spirited and in close physical proximity every day-discover, through force of instinct, their sexuality. Their awakening to sex, however, is accompanied by repression, fear, and ignorance, which in turn generate mutual dependence and recrimination. In both Love in a Small Town and a later work entitled A Century at My Post, the main characters hide away in an empty apartment for seven days and nights. Between the two of them, there is no connection but sex. These stories had a deep impact upon many readers, but they also ruffled a lot of feathers. "I took a lot of criticism for that novel, and some even called me a smut peddler." At the libraries of Beijing University and People's University, readers have secretly ripped out many pages from A Century at My Post.

Chen Sihe, assistant dean of the School of Liberal Arts at Fudan University in Shanghai, is very familiar with the work of Wang Anyi. Says Chen, "Wang Anyi doesn't look at sex through a moral prism. She looks at it as a life force, and from that perspective affirms its worth. Thanks to her, sex has now received fair treatment in Chinese literature."

The literary community in mainland China has for many years operated within a very tight straightjacket. For a long time, love could only be described in platonic terms. Where sexual desire was dealt with at all, it was only mentioned in order to pass criticism in some way. The works of Zhang Xianliang, for example, often dealt with lust, but he invariably used it to illustrate social problems or the sordid nature of politics. Most literary critics in the mainland felt it much more meaningful to write in this way than to focus purely on sex.

Says Wang, "That's very strange. In those days you couldn't make sex the main subject of your writing, as if it were too insignificant to merit such treatment. In reality, no serious writer of any depth can possibly avoid the subject of sex"-because any discussion of human nature cannot ignore love and passion, and once you broach these topics, you have to deal with sex. If you write about people but leave out sex, you can't go to the heart of the matter.

Of the Shanghai school?

Wang Anyi has long since stopped worrying about how people classify her writing. Once branded as a smut peddler, the publication of Everlasting Regret has prompted some to classify her as a member of the "Shanghai School."

In this novel, which runs to nearly 400 pages, Wang uses the story of an ordinary woman named Wang Qiyao to paint a portrait of Shanghai from the 1940s through the 1980s. The original impetus that sparked this story was a newspaper article she had read years earlier about a strange incident in which a woman in Shanghai was killed by a local hoodlum.

In the opinion of literary critic Wang Dewei, Everlasting Regret is about the complex relationship between a woman and the city in which she lives. "There are countless numbers of women just like Wang Qiyao in Shanghai. Their heyday and subsequent decline have a significance that goes beyond their own personal fortunes and choices; they represent what this city does for them and to them." The story is about a woman from Shanghai, but it is more than that. Through her, it recounts the history of an entire city.

Besides the fact that they both write about Shanghai, how does the work of Wang Anyi resemble that of Chang Ai-ling? In the opinion of Wang Dewei, "They both have a keen eye for detail, and are extremely good at portraying the emptiness and vanity of life." Wang agrees, and has written, "The portrait of Shanghai that Chang Ai-ling paints is deeply moving, but few people really understand her. Very few actually perceive the emptiness of Shanghai that she puts into every detail. Because she herself is perched right at the abyss of emptiness, she is compelled to reach out for the beauty in every detail of life."

For Chang Ai-ling, life is empty. After several decades of hustle and hurry, one's life ends in. . . nothing. Wang Anyi shares this view completely. At the same time, though, Wang also sees a difference between herself and Chang: "Chang Ai-ling is smarter than me. She has self-control. She sees the emptiness of life, and she accepts it. She doesn't allow life to get her entangled in its tentacles. I, on the other hand, can see the emptiness yet keep reaching out for something more in life."

At the end of Everlasting Regret, Wang Qiyao continues to reach out for love in spite of a lifetime of unhappy entanglements with all the wrong men. Battling against a younger rival, she attempts to secure the affections of a young lover by giving him a box of gold jewelry that she had owned for 40 years. Wang Anyi's character was unable to see through the vanity of romance. Everything she does reflects a vulgar and self-serving character. Chang Ai-ling's main character, on the other hand, maintains detachment because she sees through the vanity of everything.

Shanghai woman

Wang leads an extremely simple life. She generally spends her days reading and writing. She often goes to buy groceries at the market, where she bargains with the vendors. "I have always been very interested in the details of life. I feel that there is a beauty in the lives of everyday people, and that this beauty is to be found in what is most commonplace. Without the commonplace, there would be no novels."

Wang spent a period of time living in a detention center for prostitutes. (On the mainland, writers can apply for permission to interview persons under detention.) The women in the detention center had to dress in uniforms and were not allowed to wear makeup or curl their hair. They also had to perform manual labor. Wang had thought that people living under such circumstances would have given in to despair, but she discovered that the detainees were often reprimanded for grooming their eyebrows or manicuring their fingernails. "Little details like that are what beauty is all about, in my opinion." Wang eventually wrote a novel called Minnie based on a real story that she heard at the detention center. The novel tells how a woman who had originally intended to go to university veered one step at a time toward the life of a prostitute.

According to Wang, Shanghai holds a certain charm precisely because there is so much about it which is commonplace. More than in other cities, the people of Shanghai pay attention to little details. Women always dress with care, even after they have become mothers and grandmothers. These days, however, some young people wear their household slippers outdoors, at which Wang exclaims, "It's so slovenly!"

Truth and Lies

In a paper entitled Approaching a New Century, which Wang presented in Taipei at the Cross-Strait Conference on 21st-Century Chinese Literature, she expresses deep doubt and dissatisfaction about modernization, which she accuses of bringing us songs devoid of music, paintings bereft of art, and novels that tell no story.

In Wang's view, the mass production of modern culture has given everything the appearance of modernity, when in fact the essence of what it has given us is vulgarity. Says Wang, "Before I came to Taiwan, my father told me that there was once a time when even the simplest noodle dish of the sort sold by every street vendor was made with the best-quality broth, with the noodles boiled to just the right consistency, and the spring onions fresh from the fields. Those days are gone. These days you might have the money to buy a fancy bowl of seafood noodles, but you can't expect the seafood to be fresh."

Due to poor health, Wang Anyi took a year off writing the year before last and taught a course on fiction writing at Fudan University. Her friends say that she doesn't have the twinkle in her eye that she always had before, and she appears a bit troubled. She used to dress very fashionably, and liked to wear designer boots, but not any longer. During her visit to Taiwan, she was not outgoing like the other writers in the delegation, but seemed rather distant and unapproachable.

In the opinion of literary critic Lu Cheng-huei, "Wang Anyi has always been a very idealistic writer. Just like Wenwen in The Falling Rain, love is an ideal to which she adheres tenaciously. The tawdry cheapness of today's commercialized society doesn't sit well with her ideals, and she isn't sure how she wants to get on with her life."

Living to write, writing to live

Someone once asked Wang Anyi why she writes, to which she responded, "To make life better." And what does she live for? "To write better." For Wang Anyi, writing and living have become one and the same thing.

The anthology The Bitter Years contains some of Wang's best short stories. In Bengbu, a group of teenagers sent down to work in the countryside goes through an unexpected experience on the way there which shows just how unprepared they are for the adult world into which they've been pushed. In Backstage, a group of performers waste away their youth in an underfunded, lackluster performing arts troupe. In Sisters, one promising young woman after another is transformed by marriage from the apple of everyone's eye into just another boring housewife. In Truth and Lies, Wang Anyi traces her mother's lineage all the way back to prehistoric times. Although her stories cannot be considered autobiographical, Wang does weave details of her life into them. An expanded self roams about in the pages of her works, where it finds extra space for thought and exploration. This expanded version of herself in turn gives birth to even larger works of fiction. The head of Rye Field Publishing, Chen Yu-hang , comments, "It doesn't matter what is fact and what is fiction. It's all part of who she is."

From its beginnings, through the period of its creative climax, and on into its current state of decline, Wang Anyi has been a key figure in the new literary movement that has continued throughout mainland China's 20-year period of reforms. As she approaches a wintry phase of her literature and her life, one wonders what will become of Wenwen when spring rolls around again?

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Prolific mainland author Wang Anyi has won numerous literary prizes in Taiwan, where she has many fans. (courtesy of Rye Field Publishing Co.)

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A delegation of mainland "superstar authors" attends a literary conference in Taipei. Members include such big names as Su Tong, Mo Yan, Yu Hua, and Shu Ting.

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Young Wang Anyi with her mother, famous author Ru Zhijuan. (courtesy of Rye Field Publishing Co.)

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During the Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong called upon youth to work in the countryside, and idealistic city youth answered his call in droves, altering the course of their lives and giving birth to a new literary genre.

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Born and raised in Shanghai, Wang Anyi often depicts both the glitter and commonplace of that city across a broad historical sweep.

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On her face and in her conference paper, entitled "Approaching a New Century," Wang Anyi shows her strong dissatisfaction with modern society.

Born and raised in Shanghai, Wang Anyi often depicts both the glitter and commonplace of that city across a broad historical sweep.

On her face and in her conference paper, entitled "Approaching a New Century," Wang Anyi shows her strong dissatisfaction with modern society.