Geling Yan
(1958, China) was eight when the Cultural Revolution broke out. At age twelve she danced in the ballet of the People's Liberation Army and at twenty-one she was a war correspondent during the Chinese-Vietnamese war. In that time she began to write fiction. In 1989 she came to the US. In Holland Yan is known for the De laatste dochter van het geluk (Fortune's Last Daughter, 2002), set in the Chinese community of San Francisco around 1870, and Dertien meisjes van Nanjing (Thirteen Girls from Nanjing, 2012), which has the massacre of Nanjing in 1937 during the Chinese-Japanese war as a backdrop. In 2006 she wrote the English language novel The Banquet Bug (also: The Uninvited), a satire on corruption in modern China. Geling Yan adapted her stories for films by Joan Chen (Xiu Xiu, the Sent-Down Girl, 1998) and Zhang Yimou, who recently filmed her story about the massacre of Nanjing with the title The Flowers of War. Zhang Yimou is working on a new film based on her work: Return, starring Gong Li and Chen Daoming. Geling Yan lives in Berlin.
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Archive available for: Geling Yan
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Talking to the writers: Ian Buruma and Geling Yan
Join the regulars' table. Host Francis Broekhuijsen welcomes Ian Buruma and Geling Yan. We listen to their favourite music, and talk to them. Don't forget to have your books autographed. English and Dutch.
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Don't mention the War: China and Japan
China and Japan share a war past; a subject that was unmentionable for a long time. At present the traumatic events and troubled relations are increasingly dealt with in film and literature. Geling Yan's film adaptation of her novel Thirteen Girls from Nanjing is about a bloodbath in 1937 in the city of Nanjing, a very important theme in modern Chinese literature. Ian Buruma is an expert on China and Japan and wrote the historical novel The China Lover about a Japanese film heroine at the time of the Japanese occupation of China (1937-1945). How are both the roles of China en Japan in WOII reviewed? A conversation about coping with war traumas in China and Japan, with the use of film extracts. In English.
