Geling Yan's Books
Jan.31.2012
The story takes place in December 1937 during the Rape of Nanking. A small group of girls is trapped in a Catholic school, looked after by an American priest and a deacon. A group of prostitutes takes refuge along with them, then soldiers of the defeated Nationalist army force their way in. They live together in disharmony until the carnage and rape outside the...
Oct.01.2011
In this epic Chinese-language novel, arguably the author's most significant to date, she explores the world of Chinese intellectuals over the past sixty years. Lu Yanshi, a man from a privileged Shanghai family, is forced into an arranged marriage with his cousin Feng Wanyu, then goes to America to earn a doctorate and lives the life of a playboy. He returns to China and a...
Jun.01.2011
The story takes place in December 1937 during the Rape of Nanking. A small group of girls is trapped in a Catholic school, looked after by an American priest and a deacon. A group of prostitutes takes refuge along with them, and soldiers of the defeated Nationalist army force their way in. They live together in disharmony until the carnage and rape outside the compound walls...
Feb.01.2011
Ocho adolescentes se convierten en viudas tras liberar a ocho guerrilleros comunistas de una muerte segura a manos de los japoneses. La novena viuda, Wang Putao, no recibirá los mismos honores que ellas. Huérfana desde muy niña, pasa a formar parte de la familia de Sun Huaiqing, un próspero comerciante, pero todo cambia tras el triunfo de la revolución comunista. De la mano de esta...
Feb.01.2009
In the period leading up to World War II, a young Chinese-American woman in Shanghai falls in love with a German Jewish refugee in the Shanghai Ghetto. In San Francisco, she sees another young man who looks just like him and lures him back to Shanghai to switch his identity documents and save the man she loves. But her feelings for the two men become conflicted, and the story...
Apr.01.2008
A young Japanese woman, Tatsuru, left behind after the Japanese defeat in Manchuria, is sold as a concubine to a Chinese couple to give birth to their children. After the Communist takeover, Tatsuru's identity is hidden, and she pretends to be mute. Family life continues peacefully, with the children unaware of Tatsuru's identity or the fact that she is their...
Apr.10.2007
The trials and tribulations of a woman in post-1949 China. The novel tells of the romance of an actress named Tian Sufei. At the age of 15, Sufei participates in the Revolution ignorantly. With her youthful vitality, she soon becomes a favorite actress of her performing arts troupe. She falls in love with Yu Ou-yang, a revolutionary youth from an old, established family in...
Jul.01.2006
Laid-off factory worker Dan Dong goes to a fancy hotel in Beijing to interview for a job as a security guard. Mistaken for a journalist, he is ushered into a banquet where he hears a presentation, eats a sumptuous meal and then receives and envelope full of cash for favorable media coverage. Dan Dong has found his new profession. He continues posing as a journalist, eating...
Mar.01.2006
This is the story of a simple village woman in an isolated part of China. As a child, Grape Wang loses her family flooding caused by Chiang Kai-shek's forces to oust the Japanese from their positions, and she is bought as a servant and future daughter-in-law by River Sun, a landlord and shopkeeper. The novel tells of the family's travails during the Sino-Japanese war and the...
Jan.01.2005
Collection of autobiographical coming-of-age stories based on author's experience from age 12 as a soldier in a dance performance troupe of the Chinese People's Liberation Army. Exists in traditional and simplified Chinese character editions and in Vietnamese translation.
Taiwan edition:
Mainland China edition:
Vietnamese edition:
Jan.01.2004
Jiang and Ming, a loving Chinese couple with two kids, disappointed by their inadequate material life in China, decide to divorce so Jiang can marry a rich but much older overseas Chinese, Humphrey, in order to enjoy a good life in America.After being in a wealthy but loveless marriage with Humphrey for ten years, Jiang is unhappy. She wants to buy a house and put her broken family...
May.22.2001
A young Chinese woman named Fusang is kidnapped and sold into prostitution in San Francisco in the late 19th Century. A modern Chinese author examines her, trying to make sense of her life and her times. Appealing in her simplicity and beauty, Fusang is pursued by a young, well-to-do white man and a charismatic Chinese gangster. Her story takes place at brutal and lawless time and...
Feb.01.2001
See also separate blog entry on the film This Side of Heaven based on this work:
http://www.redroom.com/blog/geling-yan/film-side-heaven
This novella is about a clever, pretty twenty-year-old village girl named Chiao-chiao who, as the story opens, is traveling by train with two other girls from her village, chaperoned by an older woman, Auntie Zeng, who is vaguely related to a...
May.15.1999
In this collection, set mostly in China during and after the Cultural Revolution, Geling Yan presents us with unforgettable characters who have all, in one way or another, left home. Yan charts the transformation of her characters' hearts and minds as they find themselves thrust into unlikely intimacy with strangers who embody different histories and desires.
Apr.01.1989
The novel Female Grasslands begins with a girl named Little One entering the grassland situated between Tibet and Sichuan as a vagrant and fugitive in the mid-1970s. She has fled there to escape a murder charge and the entanglement of an incestuous love affair. In the depths of the desolate and uninhabited grasslands, she sees the banner of the “Red Girls’ Horse-Herding...
About Geling
Geling Yan is one of the most acclaimed contemporary novelists and screenwriters writing in the Chinese language today and a well-established writer in English. Born in Shanghai, she served with the People's Liberation Army (PLA) during the Cultural...
Connections
Causes Geling Yan Supports
Chinese-American Mental Health Network...