Can Xue

Deng Xiaohua (born May 30, 1953), better known by her pen name Can Xue (lit: lingering snow), is a Chinese avant-garde fiction writer and literary critic.

Deng Xiaohua was born in 1953, in Changsha, Hunan, China.

Her early life was marked by a series of tragic hardships which influenced the direction of her work.

She was one of six children born to a man who was once the editor-in-chief of the New Hunan Daily.

Her family was severely persecuted following her father being labeled a rightist in the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957.

Her writing, which consists mostly of short fiction, breaks with the realism of earlier modern Chinese writers.

She has also written novels, novellas, and literary criticism of Dante, Jorge Luis Borges, and Franz Kafka.

Can Xue has been described as "China’s most prominent author of experimental fiction," and most of her fiction has been translated and published in English.

Her parents, like many intellectuals at the time, were denounced as rightists in the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957, despite being Communist Party members themselves.

Her father was sent to the countryside for two years in retribution for allegedly leading an anti-Communist Party group at the paper.

Two years later, the entire family was evicted from the company housing at the newspaper and moved to a tiny hut below the Yuelu Mountain, on the rural outskirts of Changsha.

In the years that followed, the family suffered greatly under further persecution.

Her father was jailed, and her mother was sent along with her two brothers to the countryside for re-education through labor.

Deng was allowed to remain in the city because of her poor health.

After being forced to leave the small hut, she lived alone in a small, dark room under a staircase.

By the time of the Cultural Revolution, Deng was thirteen years old.

Her formal education was permanently disrupted after completing primary school.

Can Xue describes the horrors of her youth in detail in her memoirs titled "A Summer Day in the Beautiful South" which is included as the foreword to her short story collection Dialogues in Paradise.

Throughout this period, her entire family "struggled along on the verge of death".

Her grandmother, who raised her while her parents were gone, soon succumbed to hunger and fatigue, dying with severe edema, a grotesque swelling condition.

While the family was forced to scavenge food, eventually eating all of the wool clothes in the house, Can Xue contracted a severe case of tuberculosis.

Later, she was able to find work as a metalworker.

Ten years later, in 1980, after giving birth to her first son, she quit work at the factory.

She and her husband then started a small tailoring business at home after teaching themselves to sew.

She began writing in 1983, and published her first short story "Soap Bubbles in Dirty Water" (污水上的肥皂泡) in January 1985.

Two other short stories followed that year, "The Bull" (公牛) and "The Hut on the Hill", at which point she chose the pen name Can Xue.

This name can be interpreted either as the stubborn, dirty snow left at the end of winter or the remaining snow at the peak of a mountain after the rest has melted.

Publishing under a pen name allowed Can Xue to write without revealing her gender.

According to Tonglin Lu, a professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Montreal, once critics found out she was a woman, her "subversive voice within the supposedly subversive order [of avant-garde fiction]" made them uncomfortable.

Tonglin Lu called this "double subversion".

Can Xue's abstract style and unconventional narrative form attracted a lot of attention from critics in the 1990s.

A variety of interpretations of her work have been published, but political allegory has been the most popular way of understanding her early short stories.

Many of the images in her stories have been linked to the Cultural Revolution, the Anti-Rightist Movement and other turbulent political movements of the early People's Republic of China.

However, direct references to these events are uncommon.

The author herself explicitly denies most forms of political commentary others claim to have found in her work, stating once in an interview, "There is no political cause in my work."

On the contrary, Can Xue says she treats each story as a kind of life experiment in which she is the subject.

“In very deep layers,” she says, “all of my works are autobiographical.” As for those who struggle to find meaning in her stories, Can Xue says, "If a reader feels that this book is unreadable, then it's quite clear that he's not one of my readers."

Can Xue has also written part of the libretto for at least one opera.

) Not only was she writing avant-garde fiction, but she was also a woman; male writers and critics attempted to analyze her works by psychoanalysis of the author, and some even suggested she was certifiably insane. In 2002, she said, "Lots of [the critics] hate me, or at least they just keep silent, hoping I'll disappear. No one discusses my works, either because they disagree or don't understand.”

More recently, however, many critics have paid tribute to her work, drawn to the careful precision she uses to create such a strange, unsettling effect on the reader.