Liu Hong

Liu Hong grew up in the north-eastern province of Liaoning, close to the Chinese border with North Korea.  A degree in English literature, and work in Beijing as an English teacher and translator, brought her to England in 1989 on a scholarship to do Women’s Studies. She went on to do an MA at Oxford in social anthropology. It was here that she met her English husband. Ten years later she wrote her first novel, Startling Moon, published by Headline Review in 2001. Texto publishes her novels in Spain and Portugal and Quills in Indonesia. Her second novel The Magpie Bridge came out in 2003 and then The Touch in 2005.

Startling Moon is the story of Taotao, or Peaches. We see China through the eyes of a six year old girl. Sent to live with her grandparents, it is only later in life that she learns of her father’s fall from grace during the Cultural Revolution and of the pain her mother tried to protect her from.

“I wrote it partly as a reaction to the perception of China and Chinese people by the people I met when I first arrived in England. Post Tiananmen, there were a lot of negative reports about China and because I taught in many schools I was appalled by how little people seemed to know about the real life of Chinese people. It seems you had either to be a hero or a villain. I had to choose between being Red Guard, a democracy fighter, or a victim of some sort. But I know many lives are not like that. Everyday life can be just as heroic, cruel and dramatic as big political events. I wanted to write about ordinary people and make the Chinese more human than they had been portrayed to be.” - Liu Hong

“Fascinating… a story of everyday life in China, which for us is absolutely extraordinary…There have been so many works of fiction and non-fiction from China… but if they are this good, we’re going to keep buying them’. -Open Book, BBC Radio 4

Her second novel, ostensibly a love story, The Magpie Bridge, takes its name from a Chinese ghost story. Jiao Mei, living in London, is confronted by the ghost of her grandmother, come to remind her of the China she has left behind, now pregnant with an Englishman’s baby and far from home.

“Structurally, the story began in the spring and ends the following spring, covering a whole gardening cycle, going parallel with this, was the gestation, conception, pregnancy and birth of Jiao Mei’s child. The whole book was divided into 24 chapters, using the names of the 24 mini festivals in traditional Chinese calendar as chapter headings. These were the dates when the peasants used to guide their ploughing and planting, which seemed appropriate in the gardening context. This fusion of past and present, traditional and Western as also part of the effect I was trying to achieve”. - Liu Hong

Liu Hong’s third novel, The Touch, was published by Headline Review in hardback at the end of 2005.  Lin Ju has come to England to work as an acupuncturist, leaving her young daughter in China with her estranged husband. This new life stirs up old memories, of the heady confusion of the Cultural Revolution, and her relationship with her grandfather who defied tradition to teach her his craft.

Like Amy Tan, Liu Hong understands what it is like to have a foot in two cultures. Her heroines move between China and England, PR Chinese, yet speaking English and immersed in English culture. 

Liu Hong is in a unique position as a writer in that she is Chinese but writes in English.

“I enjoy the sense of creativity that writing in English gives me. Chinese was the language of my past, of tradition, which nourished and kept me going, providing a rich source and a solid base. But in English I learnt to grow and eventually to fly, to be myself. I chose to learn English partly because, initially, I liked the sound of it, so exotic and musical, partly because of the encouragement from a family friend, he was chief engineer at my dad’s factory and had been educated in America. He lent me ‘Snow White to read. I kept a diary in English even when I was not so fluent –as an adolescent I wanted to keep a lot of things secret from my parents and writing in English was one way to make sure they didn’t know what I was writing about”. - Liu Hong

She writes children particularly well:

“The most accurate point of view for me is from the child’s point of view. And I think that from that angle it is poignant. That innocence and fun for a child may be a great tragedy for an adult. It’s about growing up and realizing the world isn’t a perfect place”. (interview with Work Magazine)

Her heroines explore some of the subtleties of what it must be like for a whole generation of people who grew up under the bizarre circumstances of the cultural revolution, how that has impacted on the rest of their lives.

“You can’t see at the time, but you think back and go, ‘Oh my God, I lived through that’ and you realize how much your family had to put up with, to protect their loved ones.”

Her fourth epic novel will follow the fortunes of two families as they grow up, showing how life in China revolves around the factory. She is also putting together a collection of Chinese Ghost Stories.