Life and Work
Jiang Gui was born in mainland China. As a young man, he was influenced by the May Fourth Movement (1919) and joined the Kuomintang at age 18 in Guangzhou. He married at age 29, and attended college in Beijing. In 1937 he joined the Chinese army as an officer, and served for eight years in the war against Japan in the Northern campaign (Hebei, Henan, Anhui). His mother and adopted mother were both killed by the Communists in 1945. He moved to Taiwan with the Kuomintang in 1948.
Jiang wrote novels from the early 1950s to the late 1970s. His first and second novels are his best known works: The Whirlwind (written 1952, published 1959) and Rival Suns (1961). Both are anti-communist; the first portrays Chinese communism in a rural setting, and the second within a city (Wuhan).
His third major novel was The Green Sea and the Blue Sky: A Nocturne (1964). It received little comment. A number of novels followed. Jiang lived in great poverty, and these books were mainly written for the money.
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Famous quotes containing the words life and, life and/or work:
“Thus when I come to shape here at this table between my hands the story of my life and set it before you as a complete thing, I have to recall things gone far, gone deep, sunk into this life or that and become part of it; dreams, too, things surrounding me, and the inmates, those old half-articulate ghosts who keep up their hauntings by day and night ... shadows of people one might have been; unborn selves.”
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