Lu Xinhua

b. 1954, Shandong

Writer, businessman

Lu Xinhua became a household name after he published his first story ‘The Scar’ (also translated as ‘The Wound’) in Wenhui Daily (11 August 1978), when he was a freshman at Fudan University in Shanghai. He grew up in Shandong province where his father was an officer in the army. After graduating from middle school in 1968, he returned to his native place, Rugao county, as a ‘sent-down youth’ (zhiqing), joined the army in 1973, was discharged in 1977, and became a worker in Nantong briefly before he entered university, majoring in Chinese literature.

The Scar’ deals with a female Red Guard, Wang Xiaohua, who breaks off relations with her mother after the latter has been denounced as a ‘traitor’. She returns home from the countryside nine years later only to find her mother dead with a scar on the forehead. As the first work to deal with family tragedies inflicted by the Cultural Revolution, it aroused a great sensation. Similar works quickly followed, making Lu the founder of Scar literature. Lu continued to write stories, but none attracted such attention. He went on to study in the United States and obtained a Master’s degree. After working many years in there, he published a novella, Details (Xijie, 1998), which concerns the life of Chinese students studying abroad. It aroused some attention largely owing to the curiosity about what he had done during those years of silence.

See also: xiafang, xiaxiang

LEUNG LAIFONG