LONDON — Since this fictional memoir was published in 1975, the telling of Chinese women's lives has become big business in the English-speaking world. Short stories, novels, memoirs and histories by women from China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and the Chinese diaspora, have proliferated to the extent that there seems to be more Chinese women's books translated into English than similar writing from other countries.
Hong Kingston writes in English, as does Nien Cheng, whose "Life and Death in Shanghai" (1986), an autobiographical account of her life under the Maoist regime, is, along with "The Woman Warrior," the template for subsequent fiction and nonfiction, inspiring works such as Ting-xing Ye's "A Leaf in the Bitter Wind" (1999), Anhua Gao's "To the Edge of the Sky" (2000) and Jan Wong's "Beijing Confidential: A Tale of Comrades Lost and Found" (2007).
However, it was the publication of Jung Chang's "Wild Swans" (1992), the story of the author's, her mother's and grandmother's lives, that exponentially increased the publication of works by Chinese women. "Wild Swans," also written in English, has been translated into over 30 languages and has sold more than 10 million copies — numbers to make publishers sit up and think.