Shen Congwen

Shen Congwen (28 December 1902 – 10 May 1988), formerly romanized as Shen Ts'ung-wen, was a Chinese writer who is considered one of the greatest modern Chinese writers, on par with Lu Xun.

Regional culture and identity plays a much bigger role in his writing than that of other major early modern Chinese writers.

He was known for combining the vernacular style with classical Chinese writing techniques.

Shen is the most important of the "native soil" writers in modern Chinese literature.

Shen Congwen published many excellent compositions in his life, the most famous of which is the novella Border Town.

This story is about the old ferryman and his granddaughter Cuicui's love story.

He was born Shen Yuehuan on 28 December 1902 in the town of Fenghuang (then known as Zhen'gan) in west Hunan Province.

In late adolescence he chose the name Shen Congwen.

He was the fourth of nine children born to Shen Zongsi, a Han-Miao, and Huang Suying, a Tujia.

His grandfather, Shen Hongfu, was a local hero who became a decorated general before being named acting commander-in-chief of Guizhou province at the age of 25.

Due in large part to his grandfather's fame and fortune, Shen Congwen was born into a relatively well-off household.

Following the founding of the Republic of China in 1912, his father hoped to become elected to the provincial assembly, but was instead forced to go into hiding in Inner Mongolia after joining a failed plot to assassinate President Yuan Shikai.

In 1915, he began attending the Fenghuang town primary school, from which he graduated in 1917.

As a child he disliked school.

In his autobiography, he describes frequently cutting class.

According to Shen, this educational experience formed the foundation of his later professional and emotional life, "Having learned to use my eyes to take in everything in this world, to live amid all life, I found school unspeakably boring."

This school-of-life brand of personal education is central to the image of Shen Congwen.

Most of their land was sold off, and in 1917, after graduating from primary school, Shen Congwen was made to leave home.

He joined a local reserve militia before joining the regiment in Yuanling (then known as Chenzhou) working as a clerk.

Many early modern writers in China were well-educated, and some studied abroad, often in Japan.

Shen Congwen, however, received a modest formal education.

As a child he received private tutoring at home followed by a private family school.

These private tutorials were conducted in an outdated, classical scholarly style which Shen criticized as neither useful nor interesting.

In 1923, after serving five years in the militia in Hunan, Shen left for Beijing to pursue higher education.

Having failed the university entrance exam, he pursued independent study while auditing classes at Peking University.

On 22 December 1924, the Morning Supplement first published his essay An Unposted Letter (Chinese: 一封未曾付邮的信; pinyin: Yī fēng wèi céng fù yóu dē xìn).

He began publishing short stories and essays regularly in Fiction Monthly and Crescent Moon, two highly influential literary magazines of the New Culture Movement.

In 1925 Shen became a student of Professor Lin Zaiping, who introduced him to the famous modernist poet Xu Zhimo.

He lived with the couple for some time before the three writers moved to Shanghai together in 1927.

In Shanghai, Shen, Ding and Hu edited a newspaper literary supplement called Red and Black and later The Human World Monthly, the literary supplement for the Human World Bookstore in Shanghai.

In early 1929 the trio published the first edition of their own literary magazine called the Red and Black Monthly.

In the 1930s he gained fame with his longer works such as Border Town and The Long River.

In Beijing Shen Congwen met several influential figures of the New Culture Movement including Ding Ling and her husband Hu Yepin.

Shen Congwen and his wife Zhang Zhaohe were married in 1933, Shen Congwen and Zhang Zhaohe had two sons and one daughter after their marriage.

In 1949, he was attacked on big character posters at the Peking University campus for not heralding the Communist cause.

Suffering from depression and social ostracization, he slit his wrists and throat with a razor blade.

The fact of Shen's mother's Tujia ethnicity and his paternal grandmother's Miao ethnicity, he keep secret until the 1980s.

Owing to his father's sudden disappearance, the family fortunes gradually diminished.

He was slated to win the 1988 Nobel Prize in Literature, but died before he could be awarded the prize.

Mo Yan, in his Nobel lecture given after receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2012, compares himself to Shen, "I left school as a child, often went hungry, was constantly lonely, and had no books to read. But for those reasons, like the writer of a previous generation, Shen Congwen, I had an early start on reading the great book of life. My experience of going to the marketplace to listen to a storyteller was but one page of that book."