Qiong Yao

b. 1938, Hengyang, Hunan

Writer

Qiong Yao is Taiwan’s most famous writer of love stories. She is also a playwright and lyricist. Qiong Yao was drawn to literature at an early age, and her maiden work debuted in Shanghai when she was only nine. By sixteen she had already published over 200 articles, one of which, ‘Outside the Window’ (Chuangwai), established her fame. When she was barely twenty, Qiong accomplished her first novel, titled Many Enchanting Nights (Jidu xiyang hong), set during the Anti-Japanese War. Qiong took up writing as a career after she failed her college entrance examinations. She finished a 200,000-word novel every four or five months.

All her novels, over forty in all, were published by Crown, her husband’s printing house. They include Romance in the Rain (Yanyu mengmeng), Misty Moon (Yue menglong, niao menglong) and My Heart in a Million Knots (Xin you qian qian jie).

Qiong’s love stories have enjoyed wide readership, and were especially popular among young readers in the 1960s and 1970s in Taiwan and in the 1980s in China. There, Qiong Yao’s popularity continued even into the late 1990s due to the adaptation of her novels as TV series. Princess Pearl (Huanzhu gege) was particularly successful. It is a representation of life inside and outside a royal compound revolving around the story of two pairs of young lovers. Qiong’s depiction of the princess Little Sparrow, however, triggered controversy as many critics were appalled at the misguided valorization of an ‘uncouth ruffian’ as the courageous and righteous heroine.

Further reading

Lang, Miriam (2003). ‘Taiwanese Romance: San Mao and Qiong Yao’. In Joshua Mostow (ed.) and Kirk Denton (ed. China Section), Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literatures. New York: Columbia University Press, 515–19.

HU MINGRONG