In her grandfather's footsteps

Chinese-American writer Yan Geling has written about various women with dramatic stories. Now, she has switched her subject matter to a man for Inmate Lu Yanshi. In her latest novel, Yan narrates the ups and downs of protagonist Lu Yanshi's life over half a century. Born in Shanghai with a silver spoon in his mouth, Lu is disappointed with his arranged marriage. He goes to the United States to study and returns to teach at universities. During the political campaigns of the early 1950s, he is condemned as an anti-revolutionary and sentenced to life imprisonment in the country's northwestern wilderness. 

Lu gradually realizes how much he loves his wife during the years in prison. But when he is released after the "cultural revolution" (1966-1976), he finds it is impossible to integrate into his family once again. 

"The story has been in my mind for more than 20 years," Yan says. "Writing it was a process of self-discovery." 

She says Lu is based on her grandfather, Yan Enchun, who is precocious and straightforward. 

Yan's grandfather went overseas for graduate study at 20 and obtained his doctorate degree at 25. He was the first translator of Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Disillusioned with the political and academic conditions at the time, he committed suicide at 40. 

Yan says family members told her from an early age that she most resembles her grandfather, in terms of talent and temperament. 

"It made me curious about my roots," she says. 

Once a dancer, Yan still maintains a slender figure in her early 50s. Her strong will is easily detectable. 

Born in Shanghai to a writer father and an actress mother, Yan was a good storyteller even as a child. Physically weak, she was not good at playing games, but she liked to read classical stories, such as The Lady of the Camellias and Cathedral of Notre Dame, to her young friends in the neighborhood. 

"There were often times that I was not satisfied with the writers' characterizations, so I would improvise and tell the stories the way I liked," she recalls. 

She joined the People's Liberation Army at 12, performing as a dancer in an art troupe. She volunteered to be a war correspondent during the Sino-Vietnamese border conflicts in the late 1970s, interviewing wounded soldiers at a field hospital in Yunnan province. 

It was then that she began to write. Her first piece was published when she was 21. It was a short story about the arrival of a girl at a military station manned by seven young male soldiers in Tibet autonomous region. Most of her early works have a military flavor. 

After a failed marriage, she went to the United States for graduate study in 1989 and obtained her Master of Fine Arts in fiction writing from Columbia College, Chicago. She married Lawrence Walker, an American diplomat, in 1992. 

Yan describes her early days in the US as "traumatic", due to language and cultural barriers. "I felt like I was uprooted from the earth," she recalls. The insomnia she had suffered from since 23 worsened, and she once couldn't sleep for 34 days. 

But sensitive nerves became the spring of her literary creation. She submitted stories to newspapers and magazines in Taiwan, which won her numerous prizes. 

Yan is interested in fringe figures, such as robbers, prostitutes and illegal immigrants. "The marginalized follow fewer rules and are better material for a good story," she explains. 

Her heroines and heroes are mostly losers in life, because "winners all have the same face, but losers are different in their own ways". 

Several of her works have been adapted into films, including the award-winning Xiu Xiu: The Sent-Down Girl (directed by Joan Chen) and Siao Yu (directed by Sylvia Chang). Zhang Yimou's adaptation of her novella The Flowers of War is now being screened (see sidebar). 

She has also written scripts based on her own and others' works, including Forever Enthralled, directed by Chen Kaige, a biographical film of Peking Opera artist Mei Lanfang. 

But Yan says she still prefers writing novels. "The excitement of writing scripts can never compare with that of writing novels," she says. 

Yan lives in Berlin, Germany, with her husband and daughter, a 7-year-old girl she adopted from an orphanage in Anhui province in 2004. 

He's a Swedish poet, and the Chinese know it

Swedish poet Thomas Transtromer is arguably the best-known Nobel literature laureate in Chinese poetry circles. 

Transtromer has visited the country twice since 1984 and established close friendships with some of his Chinese counterparts, including his first Chinese translator, "Misty School" poet Bei Dao, and his Chinese translator, poet Li Li. 

Two days before the Dec 10 Nobel award ceremony at Stockholm Concert Hall, poets, translators and college students in Beijing gathered at Renmin University of China for a reading of Transtromer's poetry. More than 40 of his works were recited in Chinese, Swedish and English. 

Transtromer was born in 1931 and published his first poetry collection in 1954. 

He suffered a stroke in 1990, which left him partially paralyzed and hardly able to speak. He continued to write and publish poetry until 2004. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in October for creating "fresh access to reality" through his "condensed translucent images", the judges say. 

Bei Dao remembers his interactions with the Swedish poet in his essay Blue House (which is the name of Transtromer's country home). 

He says he first heard of the Nordic wordsmith in 1983, when a cultural attache at the Swedish embassy in Beijing handed him Goran Malmqvist's English translation of Transtromer's poetry collection The Wild Square. The attache also gave Bei Dao a letter from Malmqvist, a Swedish Sinologist, member of the Swedish Academy and a senior judge of the Nobel literature prize. 

In the letter, Malmqvist asked Bei Dao if he could translate Transtromer into Chinese. Bei Dao tried, and published six pieces in World Literature magazine in 1984. 

Transtromer first visited China in 1985 at the invitation of the Beijing Foreign Studies University. He attended a Swedish poetry seminar, visited the Great Wall and went to Shanghai. 

He started composing Streets in Shanghai, after returning to his homeland. 

Bei Dao remembers hearing him read fragments of the poem when he visited Sweden in 1985. The poem was anthologized into the 1989 collection For the Living and the Dead, after four years of revision. 

Transtromer visited China for the second time in 2001 - this time in a wheelchair - when he attended his reading at Peking University. He also traveled to Yunnan province's capital Kunming, where a cultural gallery- cum-cafe is named after him. 

Li, who has translated all of Transtromer's 200 odd poems, first read the Swedish poet's work when he was studying Swedish at Beijing Foreign Studies University in the early 1980s. 

"There are but a few modern poets who can pen poems in a fashion as succinct and accurate as Transtromer," Li says. 

Li says he received a phone call from Transtromer's wife, Monica, on his 50th birthday in January. Transtromer still managed to mumble congratulations on the phone. 

Over the years, literary exchanges between China and Sweden have been expanding. 

Earlier this month, a Swedish Writers' Union delegation visited Beijing. Five Swedish writers engaged in a series of cultural exchange events. 

Eva Ekeroth, cultural counselor of the Swedish Embassy in China, says the Swedish Writers' Union and the Chinese Writers' Association have agreed to host a writers' forum next year. 

This year, a Swedish literature translation contest was staged by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and the Swedish Embassy in China to discover talented Swedish-Chinese literary translators. More than 60 hopefuls participated. 

How a seed grew into Flowers

Film director Zhang Yimou says the script of The Flowers of War is the best he's encountered. 

Based on Yan Geling's 2005 novella of the same title, the film tells the story of an American priest, a group of Chinese schoolgirls, prostitutes and soldiers finding refuge in a church and risking their lives as they struggle to survive the Nanjing Massacre in 1937. 

Yan says the core of the story germinates from the diaries of Minnie Vautrin, an American missionary renowned for saving the lives of many women at the Ginling Girls College during the Nanjing Massacre. 

Yan has often taken part in events commemorating the Nanjing Massacre since 1993. "Each time I returned with an impulse to pen a story about it," she says. 

It was at those events that she met Iris Chang, the American historian and journalist best known for her 1997 The Rape of Nanking. 

Yan says Chang's account of the Nanjing Massacre was a "great help" to her, as it gave her a profound understanding of Japan. 

In 2007, one of her friends, who was working with Zhang Yimou, recommended the story to the director. Zhang was interested and decided to adapt it into a film. 

Zhang said in a previous interview that the story attracted him because of its unique perspective - delivering the theme of redemption through 13 prostitutes. 

Yan and scriptwriter Liu Heng worked on the script, producing several drafts, following Zhang's suggestions. 

Yan says working with Zhang was a happy experience from beginning to end. "He is easygoing and energetic," she says. "He likes telling stories, and some of them are really inspiring." 

She took advantage of the historical materials collected when revising the script, and turned the 40,000-word novella into a 120,000-word novel earlier this year. 

"I want to convey the idea that only after extreme events do men begin to know their real selves and complete their growth and transformation," she says. 

Yan's works in english

The Lost Daughter of Happiness 

Fusang, a 20-year-old woman, is kidnapped from her village in China, taken to San Francisco and sold into prostitution. Soon she becomes caught up between two men: a 12-year-old white boy named Chris and the murderous pimp Da Yong. 

White Snake and Other Stories 

This is a collection of one novella and five short stories. In the title novella White Snake, dancer Sun Likun is imprisoned during the "cultural revolution" (1966-1976). Worn out by time and imprisonment, she begins to receive visits from a mysterious commissar, who resuscitates her old self and erotic desire. But she gradually finds out that he is a woman in disguise. Short story Celestial Bath tells a sad and tender tale of educated youth Wen Xiu, who is sent to the countryside to work with herdsman Lao Jin and sinks into prostitution in a desperate attempt to return to the city. 

The Banquet Bug (published as The Uninvited in the UK) 

Laid-off factory worker Dan Dong goes to a fancy hotel in Beijing for a job interview as a security guard. But he is mistaken for a journalist and ushered into a banquet where he hears a presentation, eats a sumptuous meal and then receives an envelope full of cash for favorable media coverage. He then continues to pose as a journalist, eats banquets and collects the cash. But the secrets he overhears at these events eventually lead him down an intrigue-laden path.