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Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China
Jung Chang
Memoir, 1991
Three generations of women's lives from warlord-era China through Mao's revolution and the Cultural Revolution, told as family memoir.
Books set in China
Six books by writers from China, set there, that give a real sense of the place, starting with Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China and Red Sorghum.
About the literature of China
China's literature stretches back over two thousand years, and Mo Yan won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2012. Li Bai and Du Fu, poets of the Tang dynasty, wrote in the eighth century, and Cao Xueqin's Dream of the Red Chamber is a great eighteenth-century novel. In the early twentieth century, writers began using everyday spoken Chinese instead of the classical written language.
Mo Yan's Red Sorghum is an earthy saga of villagers resisting the Japanese invasion in the late 1920s and 1930s. Lao She's Rickshaw Boy tells of a young puller struggling to survive in Beijing's streets. Jung Chang's Wild Swans traces three generations of women from the warlord era to the Cultural Revolution, while Dai Sijie, who wrote in French, sends two city boys to a remote mountain village for re-education in Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress.
By writers from China
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Red Sorghum
Mo Yan
Novel, 1986. Translated from Chinese by Howard Goldblatt
Shandong villagers resist Japanese invasion in a vivid, earthy saga of rural Northeast Gaomi township in the 1930s-40s.
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
Dai Sijie
Novel, 2000. Translated from French
Two city boys are sent to a remote mountain village for re-education during the Cultural Revolution and discover forbidden Western novels.
Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out
Mo Yan
Novel, 2006. Translated from Chinese
A landlord reincarnated as animals witnesses rural Chinese history from Land Reform through collectivisation to the market era.
Rickshaw Boy
Lao She
Novel, 1937. Translated from Chinese
A young rickshaw puller struggles to survive in 1920s-30s Beijing, capturing the city's streets, poverty and social pressures.
Wolf Totem
Jiang Rong
Novel, 2004. Translated from Chinese by Howard Goldblatt
A novel of herding life, wolves and the steppe ecosystem, based on the author's years living among Mongol herders.
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