Bai Yang's Memoirs - A Person Who Has Seen Hell and Come Back: A Person Who Has Seen Hell and Come Back

Author: Bei Yang
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2002-08-01
Features: Bei Yang, a renowned Taiwanese writer, is also hailed as a master of humanities. He began his literary career under the name Guo Yidong in 1950 and started writing essays under the pen name Bei Yang in 1960, exposing the ailments of Chinese culture and the dark side of Taiwanese society. Known as "a person who has seen hell and returned," he attended countless schools throughout his life but never obtained a diploma from elementary to university, even forging one. In his lifetime, he married five times, and each marriage was accompanied by a story as fleeting as smoke. He did not know his own birthday, once beat his stepmother, served in the military, had face-to-face encounters with both the Jiang family and the Soong family, attempted suicide multiple times, was expelled from schools and institutions countless times, and even served a decade in prison. In the 1970s, he was nearly executed. This book records a time of disaster, where individual lives were no better than ants in that era. It is also a microcosm of the life experiences of Bei Yang in Chinese society. Thus, the Bei Yang who survived opposed Confucian tradition, feudal monarchy, and the autocracy of scholar-officials. He supported simplified Chinese characters and even more so the romanization of Chinese, often delivering startling statements that reflected his independent thinking and humanistic analysis.