Chen Ran

b. 1962, Beijing

Writer

A writer of psychological novels, Chen Ran is known as the only Chinese woman writer who identifies herself as a feminist. Chen started to publish in 1985 and toured England, Australia and Germany before she returned and settled down in Beijing as a freelance writer. As one of the few writers of avant-garde/experimental literature in China, she presents herself as writing from the margin even after she became a member of the Chinese Writers’ Association in 1990. Since the publication of her short story The Disease of the Century’ (Shiji bing, 1986), Chen has held critics’ attention because of her modernist exploration of female subjectivity as well as her inventive style and perspective.

Chen diverges from the literary mainstream in that she tries to go beyond a social and historical interest in women’s experiences to write from an essential female subjectivity. Informed by dreams and fantasies, her analysis often focuses on the female body or domestic space. At the same time, Chen’s writing features a highly personal and sensual use of language: the abstract is described using words of sensual and sexual texture while multiple descriptions of physical reality offset the workings of the narrator’s psyche. This defiance of plot-oriented narration highlights Chen’s painstaking efforts to escape the accepted norms of literacy. Her amoral and apolitical approach to literature and her refusal to accommodate the public’s reading habits contribute to her singularity in contrast to other forms of woman-authored literature, which were increasingly submerged within ‘middle brow’ literature in the 1990s.

See also: Lin Bai; lesbianism in literature

Further reading

Chen, Ran (1995). ‘Sunshine between the Lips’. Trans. Shelley Wing Chan. In Howard Goldblatt (ed.), Chairman Mao Would Not Be Amused: Fiction from Today’s China. New York: Grove Press, 112–29.

——(2001). ‘Breaking Open’. Trans. Paola Zamperini. In Patricia Sieber (ed.), Red Is Not the Only Color: Contemporary Chinese Fiction on Love and Sex between Women, Collected Stories. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 49–72.

Huot, Claire (2000). ‘Literary Experiments: Six Files’. In idem, China’s New Cultural Scene: A Handbook of Changes. Durham: Duke University Press, 7–48.

Larson, Wendy (1997). ‘Women and the Discourse of Desire in Postrevolutionary China: The Awkward Postmodernism of Chen Ran’. Boundary 2 24.3:201–23.

Visser, Robin (2002). ‘Privacy and its Ill Effects in Post-Mao Urban Fiction’. In Bonnie S.McDougall and Anders Hansson (eds), Chinese Concepts of Privacy. Leiden: Brill, 171–94.

HE DONGHUI