The biography of a British revolutionary hounded by Mao is an underground hit
The story of an Anglo-Chinese couple who met at Oxford University and survived purges and imprisonment to become eminent translators of the classics has become a surprise hit among Chinese readers.
It is also the tale of a lifelong love between Gladys Tayler, the first graduate in Chinese from Oxford, and Yang Xianyi, whose wealthy family sent him to study there in the 1930s. The two returned to China and stayed on as admirers of the revolution after most foreigners left in 1949, the year the People’s Republic was founded.
Underground copies and internet editions of a biography of Yang Xianyi, published in Chinese in Hong Kong, are circulating widely among young readers in Beijing and Shanghai.
The couple, who were imprisoned during the cultural revolution and late in life bravely spoke out against the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, paid a high price for their commitment. Because of their defiance, the biography is officially banned in China and web censors are trying to delete sections of it from the internet.
Gladys died in 1999 but 93-year-old Yang is still alive in Beijing. In a telephone interview last week he said his wife had regretted almost nothing.
Read entire article at Times (UK)
It is also the tale of a lifelong love between Gladys Tayler, the first graduate in Chinese from Oxford, and Yang Xianyi, whose wealthy family sent him to study there in the 1930s. The two returned to China and stayed on as admirers of the revolution after most foreigners left in 1949, the year the People’s Republic was founded.
Underground copies and internet editions of a biography of Yang Xianyi, published in Chinese in Hong Kong, are circulating widely among young readers in Beijing and Shanghai.
The couple, who were imprisoned during the cultural revolution and late in life bravely spoke out against the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, paid a high price for their commitment. Because of their defiance, the biography is officially banned in China and web censors are trying to delete sections of it from the internet.
Gladys died in 1999 but 93-year-old Yang is still alive in Beijing. In a telephone interview last week he said his wife had regretted almost nothing.