From Little Readers, About Women: Classic Collection

Author: Bing Xin (Xie Wanying)
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-08-01
Features: The author of this book, Bing Xin (1900—1999), originally named Xie Wanying, also known as Bing Xin Lady, was from Minhou, Fujian. She studied at the preparatory department of Union Women's University before and after the May Fourth Movement. In 1921, she joined the Literary Research Association. In 1923, she went to the United States for studies and returned in 1926, teaching successively at Yanjing University and the Women's College of Arts and Sciences at Tsinghua University. After the victory of the War of Resistance, she went to Japan and returned to China in 1951. She held positions such as member of the Chinese Federation of Literary and Art Circles and secretary of the Secretariat of the Chinese Writers' Association. The prose collection Letters to Little Readers expresses the author's care and support for children, as well as her hope for the future. Bing Xin rose to prominence on the new literary scene with "problem novels," with representative works such as The Solitary Suffering of a Person and Autumn Wind, Autumn Rain, Autumn Killing People, and thus became one of the earliest members of the Literary Research Association. However, she was even more renowned in the literary world for her poetry collections Starry Sky and Spring Water. These two collections imitated Tagore's Stray Birds so obviously, but the self-expression conveyed in the poems, their exploration of life, and their praise of nature perfectly aligned with the trend of the May Fourth Movement, thus pioneering the "Spring Water Style" of short poems and creating what is known as the "era of popular short poems."