The Golden Era

The writer we now know as Xiao Hong was born Zhang Naiying in Manchuria, north-east China. Her mother died when Xiao Hong was young and her estrangement from her tyrannical father sparked a long quest for an independent and emotionally satisfying life. She was rescued from destitution by hard-drinking fellow writer Xiao Jun, but their fraught and competitive relationship brought her more heartache than joy. She found a kindly and considerate surrogate father in the great writer Lu Xun. While evacuated to safer inland areas to escape the Japanese invasion of China – and on the rebound from what turned out to be the definitive break with Xiao Jun – she married another novelist from the North-east, Duanmu Hongliang. They fled together to Hong Kong in 1940. A month after Hong Kong, too, fell to the Japanese on Christmas Day of 1941, Xiao Hong died of tuberculosis at the age of 31. But several key episodes in her life remain obscure and disputed, even now.