Paper Draft

At long last, I produced a first draft of my reading paper for the ACCL conference.



Playwright, literary critic, translator, and biographer Yang Jiang has not to date been described as a "cultural icon" in English or as a wenhua yingxiong 文化英雄 in Chinese, but there is increasingly reason to see her as one. First, as with other pre-1949 literary figures such as Eileen Chang and Qian Zhongshu, Yang Jiang's popularity has increased in stages in the last 30 years: between 1949 and 1980, she was virtually unheard of; in the 1980s, she was a topic among elite intellectuals; by the 1990s, her readership had widened considerably. But what makes Yang Jiang practically unique among living writers is the fact that her 2003 memoir We Three (Women sa 我們仨) sold over a million copies before year's end. Yang Jiang, a 92-year old widow, a retired member of CASS, had produced a best seller. Since then, Yang Jiang has been the topic of hundreds of interviews, feature articles, blog posts, discussion board threads, reminiscences, and literary essays. Penetrating all of the discourse on Yang Jiang, popular and elevated, is a close association between the writer's work and her life story. Indeed, as the three book-length biographies of Yang Jiang show, Yang Jiang's life story has come to exemplify the best of everything Chinese, a mixture of progressivist and traditional values. This recently-acquired ability to represent a shifting set of values to an extremely wide readership is what makes Yang Jiang a cultural icon.