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Yan Geling, a prominent Chinese writer, holds a book signing event in Wuxi Xinhua Bookstore on Jan 28. [Photo/WeChat account: wxxcm8] |
Yan was born in Shanghai in 1959. She began performing as a dancer at age 12. She served in the People's Liberation Army in Tibet during the Cultural Revolution, and later as a journalist in the Sino-Vietnamese War, achieving a rank equivalent to lieutenant colonel.
Yan's 13-year military experience in her youth gives her endless inspiration for literary creation. Her works have an obvious flavor of feminism, making them unique and popular.
Much of Yan's writing has been adapted for films. The Flowers of War (Chinese title Jinling shisan chai), a story about a group of escapees trying to survive during the 1937 Nanking Massacre in the Second Sino-Japanese War, was filmed by famous Chinese director Zhang Yimou in 2011.
You Touched Me has also been filmed by another famous Chinese director Feng Xiaogang as Youth, a coming-of-age film, which was released in Dec 2017 to great applause.
The novel chronicles the lives of a group of idealistic adolescents in a military art troupe in the People's Liberation Army during the Cultural Revolution. They experience love, lust, betrayal, and suffering against a background of Mao-era songs and dances. The two key characters, Feng Liu and Xiaoping He, also participate in the Sino-Vietnamese War in 1979 and become heroes for their acts of courage. After the war, they are honorably discharged from the Army but struggle to make ends meet in Reform-era China, while they eventually find love in each other.
You Touched Me is highly autobiographical. "The novel not only shows my real experience, but is also a kind of repenting and critical reflection on my life," said Yan on Jan 28, "It was a natural creation where I expressed myself honestly."
