Wang Zengqi - the Last Chinese Literary Intelligentsia

2016-04-26  Source：Chinese Culture

Wang Zengqi (Chinese: 汪曾祺; pinyin: Wāng Zēngqí) (1920–1997) is a contemporary Chinese writer. He is famous for his short stories and essays. He is regarded as the successor of Beijing School Writers. He is also considered the last Chinese literary intelligentsia.

During the war and Japanese occupation, Wang Zengqi moved to Kunming (Yunnan), where he attended the lectures of Shen Congwen, whose views on literature had a deep influence. During the Cultural Revolution, Wang was assigned to write texts for revolutionary theatre. After Mao’s death, he published short stories, including‘A Tale of Big Nur’(Danao jishi, 1981) and‘Ordination’ (Shoujie, 1980), which are considered masterpieces and stand as major steps in the rebirth of Chinese literature in the New Culture era. He advocates a kind of ‘cultural literature’, by which he builds a bridge, through personal remembrances, between the past and present, as a way to assist people in the reconsideration of their Chinese cultural inheritance, and focuses on human relationships and feelings, such as generosity, loyalty, purity. Wang is also famous for his creative and theoretical essays. His taste for the Chinese language, after years of rigidification and impoverishment, is now highly appreciated, and his contribution with respect to this is significant. He also created a narrative form that broke through the strict barrier between stories and essays, and was willing to write in a natural, highly visual way, close in fact to some concepts of Chinese painting.

Main works

Collections of short stories

邂逅集(1948)

羊舍的夜晚(1963)

Short stories

骑兵列传(1978)

受戒(1980)

大淖记事(National Excellent Short Story Award in 1981)

鸡鸭名家

Collections of essays

蒲桥集(1987)

汪曾祺小品