Bing Xin (1900-1999), born Xie Wanying, was one of the most prolific Chinese women writers of the twentieth century. She wrote in Standard Mandarin and is remembered above all for her lyrical prose, her brief poems and her writing for young readers, a genre she helped shape in China.
She was born in Fuzhou in 1900 and grew up in Shanghai and then in Yantai, on the coast of Shandong, where the sea left a lasting mark on her imagination. In 1913 she moved to Beijing and began studying science with the aim of becoming a doctor, but the May Fourth Movement drew her toward literature. She studied at Yenching University and then at Wellesley College in the United States, where she earned a master's degree in literature in 1926. Back in China she taught at several universities. During the war with Japan she published social commentary under a pseudonym, and after the war she lectured in Tokyo, where she became the first foreign woman to teach modern Chinese literature there.
Her work pairs personal feeling with a plain, intimate style. Her short poems, gathered in Spring Water and A Maze of Stars, are fragments of thought set down in a few words, a form she took partly from Tagore. Her letters to young readers, published from 1926, have a warm, teaching tone that reached generations and are seen as a foundation of Chinese children's literature. In fiction she often uses a first-person narrator and settings such as the sea, the night sky and the mountains to convey inner life. She also translated Tagore and Gibran into Chinese.
During the Cultural Revolution she and her family were persecuted, and she was sent to labour in the countryside. After that period she returned to writing with renewed energy, and in the 1980s she won a national prize for short fiction. Her legacy lives on in Chinese children's literature, in a museum devoted to her in Fujian province and in a children's literature award that bears her name.
Key works
- Spring Water (1923), brief poems in an almost aphoristic style.
- A Maze of Stars (Fanxing, 1923), a companion collection of short, fragmentary poems.
- To Young Readers (Ji xiao duzhe, 1926), prose letters addressed to children and young people that founded a tradition in Chinese children's literature.
- Superhuman (Chaoren, 1923), a short work from her student years shaped by the intellectual ferment of the time.
- About Women (Guanyu nüren, 1943), critical prose on the situation of women, written during the war.
Curiosities
A pen name from Tang poetry
Bing Xin literally means "ice heart", an image of moral purity taken from a line by the Tang poet Wang Changling.
A pioneering professor in Tokyo
She was the first foreign woman to teach a course on modern Chinese literature at the University of Tokyo.
Original Filopedia text based on Wikipedia (es) and Wikipedia (en) and Wikidata.