Nie Hualing

b. 1925, Hubei

Writer

Nie Hualing is a renowned Chinese-American woman writer. She was educated in Wuhan and Sichuan. After she graduated from the Department of English Literature of the National Central University in 1948, she went to Taiwan and became an editor for a semi-monthly, Freedom China (Ziyou Zhongguo), which was later closed down by Chiang Kai-shek’s government. Then she became an associate professor at Taiwan University and Tunghai University. In 1964 she went to the USA. In 1967 together with Paul Engle, an American poet who later became her husband, she founded the International Writing Programme at the University of Iowa. Under this programme several hundred writers from more than seventy countries were invited to Iowa for literary activities.

In 1976, 300 writers from all over the world nominated Nie Hualing and Paul Engle for the Nobel Prize for Peace. Twenty-two of her books have been published in different regions and countries, including stories, novellas, novels and essays. Mulberry and Peach (Sangqing yü taohong) is the most popular. Somewhat experimentally, it depicts a Chinese woman’s struggle for her life in mainland China, Taiwan and the United States. Nie Hualing’s prizes include an American Book Award and an Award for Distinguished Service to Literature and the Arts by fifty governors of the United States in 1981.

Further reading

Nie, Hualing (1998). Two Women of China—Mulberry and Peach. Trans. Jane Parish Yang with Linda Lappin. New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York.

Yu, Shiao-ling (1993). The Themes of Exile and Identity Crisis in Nie Hualing’s Fiction’. In Hsin-sheng C.Kao (ed.), Nativism Overseas: Contemporary Chinese Woman Writers. Albany: SUNY Press, 127–56.

WANG XIAOLU