Kenneth Hsien-yung Pai
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Kenneth Hsien-yung Pai (; born July 11, 1937) is a Chinese writer from Taiwan who has been described as a "melancholy pioneer". He was born in Guilin, Guangxi at the cusp of the Second Sino-Japanese War. Pai's father was the Kuomintang (KMT) general
Bai Chongxi Bai Chongxi (18 March 1893 – 2 December 1966; , , Xiao'erjing: ) was a Chinese general in the National Revolutionary Army of the Republic of China (ROC) and a prominent Chinese Nationalist leader. He was of Hui ethnicity and of the Musli ...
(Pai Chung-hsi), whom he later described as a "stern, Confucian father" with "some soft spots in his heart." Pai was diagnosed with tuberculosis at the age of seven, during which time he would have to live in a separate house from his siblings (of which he would have a total of nine). He lived with his family in
Chongqing Chongqing ( or ; ; Sichuanese dialects, Sichuanese pronunciation: , Standard Mandarin pronunciation: ), Postal Romanization, alternately romanized as Chungking (), is a Direct-administered municipalities of China, municipality in Southwes ...
, Shanghai, and Nanjing before moving to the British-controlled Hong Kong in 1948 as CPC forces turned the tide of the Chinese Civil War. In 1952, Pai and his family resettled in Taiwan, where the KMT had relocated the
Republic of China Taiwan, officially the Republic of China (ROC), is a country in East Asia, at the junction of the East and South China Seas in the northwestern Pacific Ocean, with the People's Republic of China (PRC) to the northwest, Japan to the northeast ...
after defeat by the Communists in 1949.


Chronology

Pai studied in La Salle College, a Hong Kong Catholic boys' high school, until he left for Taiwan with his family. In 1956, Pai enrolled at
National Cheng Kung University National Cheng Kung University (NCKU; ) is a public research university located in Tainan, Taiwan. The university is best known for engineering, computer science, medicine, and planning and design. As a top university in Taiwan, NCKU has played ...
as a hydraulic engineering major, because he wanted to participate in the Three Gorges Dam Project. The following year, he passed the entrance examination for the foreign literature department of National Taiwan University and transferred there to study
English literature English literature is literature written in the English language from United Kingdom, its crown dependencies, the Republic of Ireland, the United States, and the countries of the former British Empire. ''The Encyclopaedia Britannica'' defines E ...
. In September 1958, after completing his first year of study, he published his first short story "Madame Ching" in the magazine ''Literature''. Two years later, he collaborated with several NTU classmates—e.g., Chen Ruoxi, Wang Wen-hsing, Ouyang Tzu—to launch ''Modern Literature'' ( Xiandai wenxue), in which many of his early works were published. He was also known to frequent the Cafe Astoria in Taipei. Pai went abroad in 1963 to study literary theory and creative writing at the University of Iowa in the Iowa Writers' Workshop. That same year, Pai's mother, the parent with whom Pai had the closest relationship, died, and it was this death to which Pai attributes the melancholy that pervades his work. After earning his M.A. from Iowa, he became a professor of Chinese literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and has resided in Santa Barbara ever since. Pai retired from UCSB in 1994. Pai's cousin is Hong Kong radio personality Pamela Peck.


Major works

Pai's most famous work of fiction, '' Taipei People'' (, 1971), is a seminal work of Chinese modernism that mixes both
literary Chinese Classical Chinese, also known as Literary Chinese (古文 ''gǔwén'' "ancient text", or 文言 ''wényán'' "text speak", meaning "literary language/speech"; modern vernacular: 文言文 ''wényánwén'' "text speak text", meaning "literar ...
and experimental modernist techniques. In terms of his choice of themes, Pai's work is also far ahead of its time. His novel, ''
Crystal Boys ''Crystal Boys'' (孽子, pinyin: ''Nièzǐ'', "sons of sin") is a novel written by author Pai Hsien-yung and first published in 1983 in Taiwan. In 1988, this novel went into circulation in China; its French and English translations were publi ...
'' (, 1983), tells the story of a group of homosexual youths living in 1960s Taipei, largely from the viewpoint of a gay youth who is thrown out of his father's home. The novel's comparison of the dark corners of Taipei's New Park, the characters' main cruising area, with the cloistered society of Taiwan of that period proved quite unacceptable to Taipei's then KMT-dominated establishment, though Pai has generally remained a loyal KMT supporter.


Influence

Among other writers in Taiwan, Pai is appreciated for sophisticated narratives that introduce controversial and groundbreaking perspectives to Chinese literature. His major works, discussed above, have been widely influential. Further, Pai's writings while in the US in the early 1960s have greatly contributed to an understanding of the Chinese experience in postwar America. "Death in Chicago" (1964) is a semi-autobiographical account of a young Chinese man who, on the eve of his graduation from the English Literature department of the University of Chicago, discovers that his mother has died back home. "Pleasantville" (1964) explores the depressed state of a Chinese mother in the upper-class New York suburbs who feels alienated by the Americanization of her Chinese husband and daughter. Both "Death in Chicago" and "Pleasantville" subtly criticize America as a superficial and materialistic culture that can cause immigrant Chinese to feel lonely and isolated. In recent years, Pai has gained some acclaim in Mainland Chinese literary circles. He has held various lectures at Beijing Normal University, among others. In the ''Beijing University Selection of Modern Chinese Literature: 1949–1999'' published in 2002, three of Pai's works are included under the time period 1958–1978. These stories reflect the decadence of Shanghai high society in the Republican era. This subject matter constitutes only a small segment of Pai's diverse work, yet it fits particularly well with orthodox renditions of pre-1949 history taught on the Mainland. In April 2000, a series of five books representing Pai's lifework was published by Huacheng Publishing House in Guangzhou. This series is widely available in Mainland bookstores. It includes short stories, essays, diary entries, and the novel ''Niezi''. A lengthy preface in Volume 1 was penned by Ou Yangzi, a fellow member of the group that founded the journal ''Xiandai Wenxue'' in Taiwan in the 1950s. Pai was born
Muslim Muslims ( ar, المسلمون, , ) are people who adhere to Islam, a monotheistic religion belonging to the Abrahamic tradition. They consider the Quran, the foundational religious text of Islam, to be the verbatim word of the God of Abrah ...
, attended missionary Catholic schools and embraced Buddhist meditation practices in the United States.Peony Dreams
Retrieved June 12, 2008.


References


Portrait


Bai Xianyong. A Portrait by Kong Kai Ming
at Hong Kong Baptist University Library


External links



{{DEFAULTSORT:Pai, Hsien-Yung 1937 births American people of Hui descent American writers of Chinese descent Chinese emigrants to the United States American gay writers Hui people Chinese former Muslims Living people Nanyang Model High School alumni National Taiwan University alumni National Cheng Kung University alumni People from Guilin Taiwanese Buddhists Hui Buddhists Taiwanese former Muslims Taiwanese male novelists Taiwanese people of Hui descent LGBT writers from Taiwan LGBT Buddhists Converts to Buddhism from Islam Recipients of the Order of Brilliant Star Male novelists Chinese Civil War refugees Taiwanese people from Guangxi Taiwanese male short story writers 20th-century Taiwanese writers Scholars of Chinese opera