Zhang Kangkang

Zhang Kangkang(simplified Chinese: 张抗抗; traditional Chinese: 張抗抗; pinyin: Zhāng Kàngkàng; born as Zhang Kangmei (simplified Chinese: 张抗美; traditional Chinese: 張抗美), July 3, 1950, Hangzhou) is a Chinese writer.

Background

Zhang was born into a family of Communist intellectuals. Her first name Kang-Kang means "resistance-resistance." She belongs to a generation affected by the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

Kangkang was among the few young people sent to the remote countryside to be "re-educated by the poor and lower-middle class peasants." Her family was regarded as "peasants of a new type with a socialist consciousness."[1]

At the age of 19, Kangkang was sent to the Great Northern Wilderness deep in Manchuria, where she faced a life marked by deprivation and abuse by the party cadres assigned to re-educate the new arrivals.

She returned to the city eight years later after the death of Mao Zedong and was allowed to resume her studies. In 1979, Kangkang published her first work, The Right to Love. The book reflects on freedom and resistance against an oppressor.

She is married to a fellow writer Jiang Rong, known for his 2004 novel Wolf Totem.[1]

Works
  • The Boundary Line (1975)
  • The Right to Love (1979)
  • Summer (1981)
  • The Pale Mists of Dawn (1980)
  • Aurora Borealis (1981)
  • The Wasted Years (Translated in Seven Contemporary Chinese Women Writers)
  • Selected Works about Educated Youth. (Includes stories 'The Peony Garden', 'Cruelty' and 'Sandstorm')
  • The Tolling of a Distant Bell (Translated by Daniel Bryant in Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 16.3 (1984): 44-51, and Contemporary Chinese Literature (see below): 98-105)
  • Northern Lights (Chapter 7 translated by Daniel Bryant in Chinese Literature, Winter 1988, pp. 92–102.)
  • The Invisible Companion (Translated by Daniel Bryant. Beijing: New World Press, 1996.)
  • The Peony Garden (Translated by Daniel Bryant, Renditions 58 (2002): 127-39.)

References
  1. Hill, Justin (2008-03-21), "Jiang Rong: The hour of the wolf", The Independent, archived from the original on 2022-05-07, retrieved 2008-03-25

Further reading
  • Richard King (ed. 2003) Living With Their Past: Post-Urban Youth Fiction. Hong Kong: Renditions Paperbacks, Research Center for Translation, Chinese University of Hong Kong. 2003. ISBN 962-7255-26-2
  • Daniel Bryant (1989) Making it Happen: Aspects of Narrative Method in Zhang Kangkang’s ‘Northern Lights’. In Modern Chinese Women Writers: Critical Appraisals, ed. Michael Duke, Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1989, pp. 112–34.
  • Contemporary Chinese Literature: an Anthology of Post-Mao Fiction and Poetry, ed. Michael Duke, Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1985
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