Through a glass, warmly

Author Hong Ying's new book, The Little Girl, reveals the warm episodes of her childhood. Wang Kun / For China Daily

Hong Ying has followed up on her two hit novels, inspired by her life experiences, with what she calls a supplement about the good things in her childhood. Yang Guang reports.

Arguably one of China's most international writers, Hong Ying published her third novel based on her life, The Little Girl, at the end of last year, after 1997's Daughter of the River and its 2009 sequel Good Children of the Flowers.

Resembling American writer Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street, The Little Girl is a collection of 57 short stories about a little girl growing up in her rundown neighborhood on the southern bank of the Yangtze River in the 1960s and 1970s.

"The Little Girl is a supplement to Daughter of the River and Good Children of the Flowers," the 50-year-old writer says. "It tells the warm episodes of my childhood, which are absent in the previous two books."

Born to a sailor's family in Chongqing, Hong Ying is the sixth child in her family of eight. Her mother worked as a bricklayer to support the family, as her father was too ill to work.

"Little Six" endured great poverty and hunger and, worse still, felt she didn't belong to the family. Her mother was strangely indifferent and her siblings treated her like an outsider. A history teacher awakened her emerging womanhood.

During the "cultural revolution" (1966-1976), she saw people arrested at school for writing big-character posters or being written into them.

"As a lonely girl, I was fascinated by the fact that you could draw people's attention just by writing a few words," she remembers. So she began to write, putting down her thoughts secretly in a notebook.

She finally discovered the truth of her birth on her 18th birthday - she was in fact the illegitimate daughter of a lover her mother took when her father was in prison. The history teacher committed suicide because of the persecution he suffered during the "cultural revolution" at almost the same time.

Determined to free herself from the past, she left home alone, swearing never to return. It was then that she changed her name from Chen Hongying (meaning "red hero") to Hong Ying (meaning "image of the rainbow") - inspired by lines from the ancient Chinese Book of Songs:

There is a rainbow in the east

and no one dares to point to it.

When a girl goes away (from her home)

she separates from her parents and brothers.

She spent the next 10 years wandering, drinking, dancing and having casual sex, as well as writing short stories and poems. In retrospect, she says the years "on the road" were invaluable in expanding her horizons and liberating her body and soul.

After a brief stint at the Lu Xun Literature Academy in Beijing and Fudan University in Shanghai, she moved to London in 1991 with her first husband, a university professor.

She shot to fame in 1997, with the fearlessly honest bestseller Daughter of the River, a widely translated autobiography that recounts her harrowing coming of age and the family history from the 1940s to the 1980s.

However, she was not happily married and wanted to return to China. She divorced and moved to Beijing in 2000.

Having left home at 18 and returned at 38, she says she finally understands her roots after the long and painful odyssey.

In 2009, she came up with a long-awaited autobiographical sequel, Good Children of the Flowers, prompted by her mother's death in 2006. It begins with the entire family gathering for her mother's funeral and unravels the secrets of how she ended up separating from her husband and how her mother spent her miserable last days.

It isn't easy to confront the darkness accumulated in the heart over the years, but she is aware that "you cannot live a happy life if you choose to ignore your scars".

She started writing The Little Girl a year ago, when she found her daughter Sybil liked these stories from her childhood. She told Sybil the story her mother told "Little Six":

"Left all alone in the world, a little girl makes her living by picking peas for a landlord. One day she runs into a fairy, who promises to realize one of her wishes. She asks for a family and finds herself in a cozy room when she opens her eyes. Dinner is ready and her parents and siblings are sitting at the table.

"'Little Six' cried and asked Mother whether she could be the little girl. 'You are my little girl,' Mother said."

Hong Ying says the book recalls the years spent with her mother and perhaps she is finally reconciled with her past.

She is now married to British writer and businessman Adam Williams and lives in Beijing. She is currently working on a novel that she expects to finish by the end of 2012 about how a 10-year-old girl searches for her lost mother.