Pai Hsienyung

Pai Hsien-yung (白先勇) — known as Bai Xianyong in pinyin — is one of the great masters of Taiwanese fiction. Taipei People, his landmark story collection, captures the displaced Mainlanders who fled to Taiwan after 1949: generals without armies, socialites without society, people living in the afterglow of a world that no longer exists. Each story is a perfectly crafted portrait of exile, nostalgia, and the slow erosion of identity.

The son of a prominent Nationalist general, Pai drew on the world he grew up in — the grand old families of the Republic of China — to create fiction that is at once deeply personal and historically sweeping. He later became an acclaimed promoter of Kunqu opera. Taipei People remains one of the essential works of Chinese-language fiction — a book that transforms private loss into universal art.