Bingxin

Bingxin (born October 5, 1900, Minhou, Fujian province, China—died February 28, 1999, Beijing) was a Chinese writer of gentle, melancholy poems, stories, and essays that enjoyed great popularity.

Bingxin studied the Chinese classics and began writing traditional Chinese stories as a child, but her conversion to Christianity and her attendance at an American school in Beijing soon were reflected in the didactic, Western style of her writing. The short stories and poems that Bingxin published during her college years at Yanjing University in Beijing—lyrical pieces about childhood and nature, influenced by the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore—won her instant fame and a grant to study at Wellesley College in the United States, where she received an M.A. degree in 1926.

Bingxin returned to China in 1926 and published a collection of essays she had written abroad, Zhi xiaoduzhe (1926; “Letters to Young Readers”), which gained lasting popularity. Her short stories, which were often sentimental tales with young protagonists, were collected in Gugu (1932; “The Paternal Aunt”) and Donger guniang (1935; “Miss Donger”). Bing Xin shiji (“Collected Poems of Bing Xin”) was published in 1933. She continued to write throughout the 1940s and ’50s, producing works such as Guanyu nuren (1943; “About Women”) and Shisui xiaocha (1964; “Miscellaneous Essays”).

Bingxin wrote little after the early 1960s, but she became very active in cultural affairs under the communist government, especially in children’s literature. After the mid-1980s, however, she was officially criticized when she voiced her support for political reform in the famous liberal announcement “Open Letter of 33 Signers.” A selection of her works was published in English as The Photograph (1992).