Ouyang Zi

(née Hong Zhihui)

b. 1939, Hiroshima, Japan

Writer

Born in Japan, Ouyang Zi moved (back) to Taiwan with her family after World War II and began writing in 1957 when she went to study English at the National Taiwan University. She and her classmates Bai Xianyong, Wang Wenxing and Chen Ruoxi together founded Modern Literature, a literary bimonthly, where she published a series of critical essays and short stories under her pen name. In 1962, she went to study at the University of Iowa and later at the University of Illinois. After obtaining her MA in 1964, she moved to reside with her husband in Austin, Texas.

Ouyang Zi is both a literary critic and a writer. Well known among her critical works is Swallows before the Houses of Wang and Xie (Wang Xie tangqian de yanzi), where she closely analyses the short stories in Bai Xianyong’s Tales of Taipei Characters (Taibei ren) in psychoanalytical and New Critical terms. As a writer, she wrote her first collection of short stories, The Girl with the Long Hair (Na changtoufa de nuhai), in 1967. In 1971, another collection, Autumn Leaves (Qiuye), was published. Much influenced by the New Criticism, she pays special attention to the images, symbols and structures of her writings. Keen on examining human nature and dissecting human psychology, Ouyang Zi is good at portraying characters’ emotional vicissitudes and at analysing their psychology.

Further reading

Ouyang, Zi (1975). ‘Vase’ and ‘Perfect Mother’. Trans. Chu Limin. In Chi Pang-yuan, John J. Deeney, Ho Hsin, Wu Hsi Chen and Yü Kwang Chung (ed.), An Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Literature, vol. 2. Taipei: National Institute for Compilation and Translation, 345–56 and 357–74.

FU HONGCHU