Xiao Hong
| Xiao Hong | |
|---|---|
Portrait of Xiao Hong in 1933.
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| Born |
2 June 1911 Hulan District, Heilongjiang |
| Died | 22 January 1942 (aged 30) St. Stephen's Girls' College, Japanese Hong Kong |
| Nationality |
 Republic of China
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| Spouse(s) | Duanmu Hongliang (m.1938) |
| Signature | |
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| Xiao Hong | |||||||||
| Traditional Chinese | 蕭紅 | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Simplified Chinese | 萧红 | ||||||||
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| Transcriptions | |
|---|---|
| Standard Mandarin | |
| Hanyu Pinyin | Xiāo Hóng |
| Wade–Giles | Hsiao Hung |
Xiao Hong or Hsiao Hung (2 June 1911 – 22 January 1942) was a Chinese writer. Her given name was Zhang Naiying (張廼瑩); she also used the pen name Qiao Yin.
Xiao Hong was born in Hulan County, Heilongjiang Province, on the day of the Dragon Boat Festival to a landowning family. Her mother died when she was young. She attended a girls school in Harbin in 1927, where she encountered the progressive ideas of the May Fourth movement as well as Chinese and foreign literature. In 1930 she ran away to Beijing to avoid a planned marriage, though was eventually followed by her fiance Wang Dianjia. In 1932, after she became pregnant her fiance abandoned her at a hotel in Harbin. She narrowly avoided being sold to a brothel by the hotel's owner by scraping together over six hundred yuan expenses.
Wretched, alone, and pregnant, Xiao Hong looked to the local newspaper publisher for help. The newspaper's editor, Xiao Jun saved Xiao Hong during a flood of the Songhua river. They began to live together, during which time Xiao Hong started writing. In 1933 she wrote short stories "Trek" and "Tornado", and in the same year she and Xiao Jun self-published a joint collection of short stories, Bashe (Arduous Journey).
In June 1934, the couple moved to Qingdao, where after three months Xiao Hong wrote a novel entitled Sheng si Chang (The Field of Life and Death). The book was a gripping account of the tortured lives of several peasant women, and one of the first literary works to reflect life under Japanese rule. In its foreword, Lu Xun declared the work "a female writer's meticulous observation and extraordinary writing." In October, the couple again moved, this time to Shanghai’s French concession. With Lu Xun’s help, Sheng si Chang was published 1935 by Shanghai's Rongguang Publishing House, bringing Xiao Hong fame among Shanghai’s modernist literary circle. At the time, Lu Xun declared that Xiao Hong would one day surpass Ding Ling as China’s most celebrated female writer.
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