Zhong Xiaoyang

b. 1962, Guangzhou

Writer

A contemporary Hong Kong writer, Zhong Xiaoyang is known for her precociousness. She began to write at the age of fourteen and published her first novel, Stopping by the Roadside (Tingche zhan jiewen, 1982) by the age of eighteen. The work was praised and compared to the early work of Eileen Chang. Zhong is also known for her legendary friendship with the young literary talents in Taiwan in the 1980s, including Zhu Tianxin and Ding Yamin. While her publications over the past twenty years include two novels, five volumes of collected short stories, and two volumes of essays and poems, Zhong’s literary activity decreased significantly after the mid 1980s.

A doctor’s daughter, Zhong Xiaoyang grew up in Hong Kong. She studied film as a college student in the USA, and emigrated to Australia in 1993. In her early stage of writing, Zhong Xiaoyang’s image as a prodigy, her unsophisticated adolescent poems and short stories set in northern China captured the cultural imagination of some Taiwan writers nostalgic for the lost mainland. Among them was the noted novelist Zhu Xining and the young contributors to the Sansan Magazine.

Zhong’s later works, however, have been largely viewed as ‘obsessive romances’ (qiqing xiaoshuo), and the potential depth of her work has been undermined by overly melodramatic storylines consisting of adultery, incest, murder, suicide, kidnapping, financial battles, disease, madness and death. Zhong Xiaoyang’s collections of fiction and prose include: The Passing Years (Liunian 1983), In Detail (Xishuo, 1983), Spring in the Green Wilderness (Chun zai luwuzhong, 1983), Beloved Wife (Aiqi, 1986), Eulogy (Aige, 1986), After the Flame (Ranshao zhihou, 1992), An Ordinary Life (Putongde shenghuo, 1992) and A Romance of Unending Sorrow (Yihen chuanqi, 1996).

Further reading

Zhang, Xiaoyang (1991). ‘Greensleeves’. Trans. Michael S.Duke. In idem, Worlds of Modern Chinese Fiction. Armonk: M.E.Sharpe, 206–21.

——(1993). ‘The Wedding Night’. Trans. Samuel Cheung. In Kao Hsin-sheng (ed.), Nativism Overseas: Contemporary Chinese Women Writers. Albany: SUNY Press, 211–20.

MING FENGYING