Chinese Literature - Li-hua Ying 2010

WANG PU (1950— )
The Dictionary

WANG PU (1950— ). Fiction and prose writer. Born in Hong Kong, Wang Pu went with her parents to the mainland at the age of one. She received her Ph.D. in literature from China Eastern Normal University in Shanghai. In 1989, she moved back to Hong Kong and worked as a newspaper editor and a college professor. She currently lives in Shenzhen.

Wang’s writing career began in the early 1980s when her stories appeared in literary journals in Changsha, where she lived. Her first collection of short stories, Nüren de gushi (Women’s Stories), was published in 1993 after she had moved back to Hong Kong. Told in the first-person point of view, these stories deal with the elusive nature of love and how an emotionally deprived childhood intensifies the desire for intimacy and romance. Wang’s prose work Xianggang nüren (Hong Kong Women) invokes the heady, glamorous fusion of East and West in the ordinary lives of women of Hong Kong. Her award-winning novels Buchong jiyi (Supplementary Memories) and Yao Jiu chuanqi (The Story of My Uncle) are set against the background of mainland China and inspired by the memories of her childhood and youth. Another novel, Xiang Meili zai Shanghai (Emily Hahn in Shanghai), looks at the colorful life of the American writer, particularly her romantic entanglement in the 1930s with Shao Xunmei, a Chinese poet and publisher. Wang uses a refined language in both her prose and fiction. While her fiction contains the characteristics of her graceful prose, her essays read like short stories with well-developed plots.