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.
Past events
Talking to the writers: Ian Buruma and Geling Yan
Join the regulars' table. We listen to their favourite music, and talk to them. Don't forget to have your books autographed. English and Dutch.
Don't mention the War: China and Japan
How do we look back on the role of China and Japan in WO II? China and Japan expert Ian Buruma and the Chinese writer Geling Yan talk to Mathijs Deen about coping with war traumas, using film extracts. In English.
