Zhang Kangkang
| Zhang Kangkang | |||||||||
| Chinese | 张抗抗 | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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| Transcriptions | |
|---|---|
| Standard Mandarin | |
| Hanyu Pinyin | Zhāng Kàngkàng |
| Wade–Giles | Chang K'angk'ang |
Zhang Kangkang (born as Zhang Kangmei, July 3, 1950, Hangzhou) is a popular Chinese female writer, considered one of the most eminent writers of her generation.
She was born into a family of Communist intellectuals (her first name Kang-Kang means "resistance-resistance"), and belongs to the generation that was deeply affected by the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
She was one of the "educated city youths" who were sent to remote countryside to be "re-educated by the poor and lower-middle class peasants". They were destined to spend their lives as "peasants of a new type with a socialist consciousness".
At the age of nineteen, she was sent to the "Great Northern Wilderness", deep in Manchuria, where she faced a life of extreme harshness, marked by deprivation and bullying by the party cadres assigned to re-educate the new arrivals.
It wasn't until the death of Mao that she was finally allowed, after eight years, to come back to the city. She then resumed her studies and, in 1979, publishing her first significant work, The Right to Love. The book is a reflection on freedom, and resistance to the forces that oppress the individual.
She is married to fellow writer Jiang Rong, who attained international fame with his 2004 novel Wolf Totem.
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