Zheng Yi

b. 1947, Chongqing, Sichuan

Writer

Zheng Yi is a dissident writer. He attended the middle school attached to Qinghua University, the originating place of the Red Guard movement. When the Cultural Revolution broke out, he became the Red Guard leader of a rebel faction. In 1968, he volunteered to go to the countryside in the area of the Luliang Mountains in Shanxi province as an educated youth. He entered Yuci Teachers’ Training college in 1978, and became an editor for the literary magazine Yellow River (Huanghe) after graduation.

Zheng Yi’s fiction concentrates on two areas: the Cultural Revolution and the peasants. His short story ‘Maple’ (Feng, 1979) was the first work to expose the violent fights among Red Guard factions. The death of two young Red Guards epitomizes the victimization of youth by Mao’s personality cult. His novella Old Well (Laojing) is a symbolic rendering of Chinese peasants’ Sisyphean struggle for survival, through generations of well-digging in search of water. Similarly, ‘Distant Village’ (Yuancun) depicts an awkward and painful marriage arrangement due to poverty.

Zheng was active in the pro-democracy movement in the spring of 1989. He was under arrest after the 4 June Massacre, and escaped to Hong Kong in March 1993. ‘Scarlet Memorial’ (1996), a piece of ‘reportage literature’ (baogao wenxue), documents the cannibalism in Guangxi province during the Cultural Revolution. He now lives in Washington, DC.

Further reading

Leung, Laifong (1994). ‘Zheng Yi: Well-Digging and Root-Searching’. In Leung, Laifong, Morning Sun: Interviews with Chinese Writers of the Lost Generation. New York: M.E.Sharpe: 259–69.

Zheng, Yi (1990). Old Well. Trans. David Kwan. San Francisco: China Books and Periodicals.

——(1998). Scarlet Memorial: Tales of Cannibalism in Modern China. Trans. and ed. T.P.Sym. Boulder: Westview Press.

LEUNG LAIFONG