CONTEMPORARY CHINESE NOVELS – Summer of Betrayal, by Hong Ying

Hong Ying is easily one of China’s best-known authors internationally. She was born in Chongqing on September day of 1962, towards the end of the Great Leap Forward. She began to write at eighteen, leaving home shortly afterwards to spend the next ten years moving around China, exploring her voice as a writer via poems and short stories. After brief periods of study in Beijing and Shanghai, Hong Ying moved to London in 1991, where she settled as a writer. She returned to Beijing in 2000. Her novels K: The Art of Love, Concubine of Shanghai and Peacock Cries, have all been published in English. Though she does not classify herself as a “feminist writer,” she is often received as an advocate for feminist causes by critics abroad, likely because her works tend to feature female characters. In the past few years, Hong Ying has also experimented with writing children’s books and fairy tales.

SUMMER OF BETRAYAL > Political powerlessness is paralleled by sexual rebellion as the shocked and bewildered students flounder, faced with a situation more serious than they had expected. Hong Ying’s Summer of Betrayal uses this as the backdrop for Summer of Betrayal in which the protagonist, Lin Ying, ricochets between the political fallout of Tiananmen Square and the tumultuousness of her personal life after she finds her lover in bed with his estranged wife. In 1989, protests in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square turned violent as the government responded in force. External turmoil is matched by Lin’s internal confusion as Hong Ying reminds the readers that behind public breaking news events are individuals for whom life must go on.

http://www.amazon.com/Summer-Betrayal-Novel-Hong-Ying/dp/0802135943