Wang Meng 1934-

Born in Nanpi county, Hebei province. He joined the Communist Party in 1948 and worked with the Communist Youth League after 1949. He began writing in the 1950s, publishing his first novel, Qingchun wansui [Long live youth], in 1953. His short-story "Zuzhi bu lai le ge nianqing ren" [A young newcomer to the organization department] provoked a good deal of controversy, and in 1957, he was labelled a Rightist, expelled from the Party and exiled to a village in Xinjiang for twenty years. After 1973, he worked as a translator of the Uighur language. With the fall of the Gang of Four in 1976, he returned to Peking and published several prize-winning novellas which made use of stream-of-conscious techniques. He was rehabilitated in 1979; by 1986, he had been appointed Minister of Culture, a position he subsequently lost after the Tiananmen Massacre. Much of his work is available in English translation.

Works available in English:

  • 100 Glimpses into China: Short Short Stories from China (by Wang Meng,
       Feng Jicai, Wang Zengqi and others) (Xu Yihe and Daniel J. Meissner). Beijing:
       Foreign Languages Press, 1989.
  • Alienation (Nance T. Lin and Tong Qi Lin). Hong Kong: Joint Publishing Co.,
       1993.
  • Bolshevik Salute: A Modernist Chinese Novel (Wendy Larson). Seattle:
       University of Washington Press, 1989.
  • Prize-winning Stories from China, 1978-1979 (by Liu Xinwu, Wang Meng, and
       others). Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1981.
  • Snowball (Cathy Silber and Deirdre Huang). Beijing: Foreign Languages Press,
       1989.
  • The Butterfly and Other Stories (intro. by Rui An). Beijing: Chinese Literature,
       1983.
  • The Strain of Meeting (Denis C. Mair). Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1989.
  • The Stubborn Porridge and Other Stories (Zhu Hong). New York: George
       Braziller, 1994.

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