Source: The Shanghai Literary Review (July 30, 2024)
“Writing a Letter”
By Ling Shuhua, introduced and translated by Nicky Harman
Introduction and translation by Nicky Harman
Ling Shuhua (1900-1990) was a talented Chinese woman modernist writer, much admired by Chinese luminaries such as the poet Xu Zhimo and the writer and activist Lu Xun. She was also a well-regarded painter. Most of her writing was produced during the 1920s and 1930s, with almost nothing being published thereafter, with the exception of her (English-language) autobiography Ancient Melodies (Hogarth Press, 1953). After the war, she left China and lived in Singapore and the UK and, possibly for that reason, her reputation faded in her home country. Recently, however, her work has been republished there.
Ling Shuhua’s Importance as a Writer
Ling Shuhua grew up in two very different worlds: she was the daughter of the third concubine of a high-ranking Qing (Manchu) official and was taught by one of the imperial court painters; in many ways, the kind of life she lived as a child had not changed for centuries. But Ling had a modern as well as a classical education, studying in Japan and in Yenching University in Beijing. As a writer in the 1920s and 1930s, she was active in contemporary literary and artistic circles. As was the case with others of her contemporaries, she had a cosmopolitan outlook and was influenced by Western writers, in her case Katherine Mansfield and Anton Chekhov. She understood and wrote about the old society, while at the same time she had modern sensibilities. Among Chinese women writers of her time, she was unique in having close connections with the Bloomsbury Group; she was a friend of Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell and Vita Sackville-West. Continue reading ‘Writing a Letter’ by Ling Shuhua
