Geling Yan, born in Shanghai, was inducted into the People’s Liberation Army at the age of twelve and served in both ballet and folk dance troupes. She began writing as a correspondent covering the Sino-Vietnamese border war. In 1989, following the massacre at Tiananmen Square, she left China for the United States. Her work includes Green Blood, Female Grasslands, Fusang, and five other novels, as well as three short story collections and several screenplays, including the screenplay for Xiu Xiu, The Sent Down Girl. White Snake and Other Stories is her first collection to be published in English. She has won many awards, both in China and the U.S. Yan lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Lawrence A. Walker (translator) is fluent in Chinese, Spanish, German, French, and Portuguese. After serving a little over a decade as a Foreign Service Minister, he returned to the United States to work as the Managing Director of the German-American Chamber of Commerce in San Francisco. He now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, Geling Yan Walker. |
White Snake Includes “Celestial Bath”, the basis of Joan Chen’s award-winning film “Xiu Xiu” (“The Sent Down Girl”). Geling Yan was awarded a Golden Horse in 1998 for her screen adaptation. In this collection of five short stories and novella, set mostly in China during and after the Cultural Revolution, Geling Yan presents us with unforgettable characters who have all, in one way or another, left home. Taking as her territory the disorienting space between home and away, Yan charts the unexpected and illuminating transformation of her characters' hearts and minds as they find themselves thrust into unlikely intimacy with strangers who embody different histories and different desires.
“Yan’s stories are very sensuous. One experiences and becomes immersed in her works instead of simply reading them. In my opinion, Geling Yan is the most exquisite fiction writer in the Chinese language.” —Joan Chen “Not only is Geling Yan a magnificent storyteller, but she is also a master stylist. Every character she creates on the page quickly springs to action with all of the complexity, contradiction, drama, tragedy and triumph of real life. Yan is one of the best of today’s writers…Every fan of first-rate fiction will finish this collection with a hunger for more of this talented writer’s magic.” —Larry Engelmann, author of Daughter of China “This superb collection of five stories and a novella by a prizewinning Chinese writer vividly dramatizes the varied human consequences of her country’s repressive and punitive ‘Cultural Revolution’…Translator Walker has appended extensive and informative ‘Footnotes’ to his admirable translation of Yen’s accomplished and seductively beautiful stories.” —Kirkus Reviews “Yan is an incredible writer—subtle, gorgeous, sly, and profound…this book, to put it simply, is a knock-out. Not only do the stories here describe an important moment in human history…they do what great literature has always done. They move us. They uplift us. They show us again that it is a strange and wonderful and terrible thing to be what we are.” —Ink, The New Times L.A.
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