Wang Anyi

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Wang Anyi
Born:	March, 1954 Nanjing, China
Occupation:	novelist, essayist
Writing period:	1980-
Influences:	Eileen Chang

Wang Anyi (王安忆, born in Tong'an in 1954) is a Chinese writer, and currently the chairwoman of Writers' Association of Shanghai. The daughter of a famous writer and member of the Communist Party, Ru Zhijuan, and a father who was denounced as a Rightist when she was three years old, Wang Anyi writes that she "was born and raised in a oughfare, Huaihai Road." As a result of the Cultural Revolution, however, she was not permitted to continue her education beyond the junior high school level. Instead, at age fifteen, she was assigned as a farm labourer to a commune in Anhui, an impoverished area near the Huai river, which was plagued by famine.

Transferred in 1972 to a cultural troupe in Xuzhou, in 1976 she began to publish short stories. One story that grew out of this experience, "Life In A Small Courtyard", recounts the housekeeping details, marriage customs, and relationships of a group of actors assigned to a very limited space where they live and rehearse between their professional engagements. She was permitted to return home to Shanghai in1978 to work as an editor of the magazine "Childhood". In 1980 she received additional professional training from the Chinese Writer's Association, and her fiction achieved national prominence, winning literary award in China. Her most famous novel, The Everlasting Regret (长恨歌), traces the life story of a young Shanghainese girl from the 1940s all the way till her death after the Cultural Revolution. Although the book was published only 1995 it has already been considered by any as a modern classic. Wang is often compared with another female writer from Shanghai, Eileen Chang, as both of their stories often set in Shanghai, and give vivid and detailed descriptions of the city itself.

A novella and six of her stories have been translated and collected in "Lapse of Time". In his preface to that collection, Jeffrey Kinkley notes that Anyi is a realist whose stories "are about everyday urban life" and that the author "does not stint in describing the brutalising density, the rude jostling, the interminable and often futile waiting in line that accompany life in the Chinese big city".

[edit] Works

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