Beijing Women
Stories
Wang Yuan
Translated by Shuyu Kong and Colin S. Hawes
2014, 194 pages
ISBN 978-1-937385-46-0 Paper $23.00
ISBN 978-1-937385-47-7 Cloth $45.00
“Wang Yuan reveals the moral and spiritual complexities hidden within the mundane daily dramas of women’s lives in a huge metropolis . . . It is the ambiguity and fragility of individuals that makes her stories so memorable, captured from a unique women’s point of view.”
—Dai Jinhua, Professor and critic, Peking University
“Here in four bittersweet stories is twenty-first century urban China, as it is lived by those on the margins of the new prosperity. In a landscape of colleges, night-clubs, taxis, and diners, it is everyone for him-, or more importantly herself in the competition for survival and success. This is sensitive and equivocal writing, elegantly translated, presenting the insecure lives of today’s Beijing women.”
—Richard King, Professor, Department of Pacific and Asian Studies,
University of Victoria.
“Wang Yuan is an important contemporary novelist, short story writer and essayist whose writings offer us powerfully sensitive insights from a woman's perspective into the tensions and conflicts that inevitably emerge when political, economic and social systems undergo dramatic changes. Shuyu Kong and Colin Hawes offer us the best kind of accurate translations: they don't read like translations. These stories are insightful, enjoyable reads.”
—Dr. Jan W. Walls, Professor Emeritus in Humanities, Simon Fraser University
Wang Yuan has published three novels, one collection of short stories, and one prose collection, and her works were nominated for the prestigious Lu Xun literary Prize in 1999. A contracted writer of Beijing Writers’ Association, she is currently living in Beijing and Los Angles.
Shuyu Kong teaches at Simon Fraser University. Colin Hawes teaches Chinese and corporate law at the Sydney University of Technology.
