Miss Sophie's Diary and Other Stories
Translated by W.J.F. Jenner
About
Beijing, 1928. Sophie is twenty, tubercular, and burning with desires she cannot name and her society will not permit. In her diary — raw, contradictory, startlingly modern — she chronicles her obsession with a handsome, shallow man, her self-loathing, and her furious refusal to be the quiet, suffering woman that Chinese literary tradition expected. Ding Ling published this story at twenty-three and caused a sensation: it was one of the first works of modern Chinese literature to give voice to female sexual desire without apology or punishment. This collection spans the following two decades of her extraordinary, turbulent career — including “When I Was in Xia Village,” about a girl forced into sexual slavery by Japanese soldiers and condemned by her own people when she returns. Ding Ling was championed by Lu Xun, kidnapped by the Kuomintang, and later purged by the Communists. Her writing survived all of it.
