Red Peonies: Two Novellas of China by Zhang Yihe

Series Editor Frank Stewart.
Guest-edited and translated by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping.

Red Peonies is a collection of two novellas by PRC writer Zhang Yihe. Zhang was twenty-eight when she was charged as a counter-revolutionary and sentenced to twenty-one years in a remote labor prison. While there, she became close to some of her fellow inmates, many of whom came from farms and lacked education.

In 2011, at age seventy, Zhang began to write and publish fictionalized accounts of some of these women. She intended to write novellas about ten women prisoners and thus far has written about the women Liu, Yang, Zou, and Qian. The novellas were quickly censored in China, but have become widely popular in pirated editions in the PRC, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.

Red Peonies includes the first two novellas—The Woman Liu and The Woman Yang—translated into English for the first time by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping. With sympathy and grace, Zhang tells the stories of Liu Yueying and Yang Fanfang, two women who were trapped in arranged marriages.

This volume also features the work of internationally known photographer and installation artist Xing Danwen, one of the few Chinese women artists to use photography as a medium.

208 pp., winter 2016 (28:2), $20
ISBN 978-0-8248-7287-8
Project Muse
ebook edition