 |
Born in 1953 in Hunan, Han Shaogong is one of the most prominent
and innovative writers in China. While replying on traditional Chinese
culture, in particular chinese mythology, folklore, Taoism and Buddism
as source of inspiration, he also borrows freely from western literary
techniques. He was once upon a time an enthusiastic Red Guard. Employed
at a local cultural center after 1977, he soon won recognition as
an outspoken new literary talent. His early stories attacked the
ultraleftist degeration of China during the Mao era; they tended
to slight "modernism." Yet he reemerged in the mid-1980s
as the leader of an avant-garde school of Serch for Roots."
Reader of Han's fiction cannot fail to note that he has himself
been influenced by Kafka and by the "magic realism" of
Garcia Marquez. In 1987, the young author publishes a Chinese translation
of Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being. PRC writers
have not been so polarized into modernist versus rural, provincialist
"camps" as the Taiwanese writers. Partly to escape the
death of economic and cultural opportunity in his native Hunan,
he journeyed in 1988 to China's underdeveloped and newly established
tropical island province of Hainan, where he opened a journal called
Hanan jishi wenxue (Hainan documentary literature). The magazine
was very successful. He and other Chinese writers visited France
in 1988, at the invitation of the French Ministry of Culture; Han
was invited back in 1989 but was denided permission to leace China
until 1991. |
|