Shen Congwen (born December 28, 1902 – died May 10, 1988) was a famous Chinese writer. Many people think he was one of the greatest modern Chinese writers, similar to Lu Xun. His stories often featured the culture and people from his home region.

Shen Congwen was known for mixing everyday language with older, classical Chinese writing styles. He is seen as a very important "native soil" writer in modern Chinese literature. This means he wrote a lot about the lives of ordinary people in rural China.

He wrote many great stories. His most famous work is a short novel called Border Town. This story is about an old ferryman and his granddaughter, Cuicui, and her journey of love. Shen Congwen and his wife, Zhang Zhaohe, married in 1933. They had two sons and one daughter.

Shen Congwen was expected to win the 1988 Nobel Prize in Literature. Sadly, he passed away before the prize could be given to him.

Life Story
His Works
- Translations
Images for kids
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Life Story

Early Years

Shen Congwen was born Shen Yuehuan on December 28, 1902. He was born in a town called Fenghuang in western Hunan Province. Later, when he was a teenager, he chose the name Shen Congwen.

He was the fourth of nine children. His family was quite well-off because his grandfather, Shen Hongfu, was a respected general. After China became a republic in 1912, his father had to go into hiding. Because of this, his family lost much of their money and land. In 1917, after finishing primary school, Shen Congwen had to leave home. He joined a local army group and worked as a clerk.

His Education

Many writers in China at that time went to good schools, some even studied abroad. But Shen Congwen had a simpler education. He had private teachers at home and went to a private family school. He felt these lessons were boring and not very helpful. In 1915, he started attending the Fenghuang town primary school and finished in 1917.

As a child, he didn't like school much. He wrote in his autobiography that he often skipped classes. He felt that learning from the world around him was more interesting than school. He said, "Having learned to use my eyes to take in everything in this world, to live amid all life, I found school unspeakably boring." This idea of learning from life itself was very important to Shen Congwen.

Another famous writer, Mo Yan, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2012, compared himself to Shen. Mo Yan said he also left school early and learned from "the great book of life."

In 1922, after five years in the army, Shen went to Beijing. He wanted to go to college but didn't pass the entrance exam. So, he studied on his own and attended some classes at Peking University without officially enrolling.

Later, around 1949, he faced criticism at Peking University. This was because he didn't openly support the Communist cause.

Writing Career

Shen Congwen started his writing career in 1924. His first essay, An Unposted Letter, was published in a newspaper. He soon began publishing short stories and essays regularly in popular literary magazines like Fiction Monthly.

In 1925, he met famous poet Xu Zhimo. In the 1930s, Shen became well-known for longer stories like Border Town and The Long River. In Beijing, he met other important writers, including Ding Ling. He even lived with Ding Ling and her husband for a while. In 1927, the three writers moved to Shanghai.

In Shanghai, Shen and his friends worked on literary magazines. At this time, there was a big debate among writers. Some believed literature should be a tool for political change. Others, like Shen Congwen, believed art should be separate from politics. Shen felt his ideas fit best with the Crescent Moon Society, a group that was against politics in literature.

By 1929, Shen's publications were not doing well. The political situation in Shanghai was also becoming difficult for writers who didn't fully support the government. Shen Congwen then got a job teaching Chinese Literature in Shanghai. The president of the school, Hu Shih, offered him the job even though Shen didn't have a college degree. Hu Shih recognized Shen's talent.

In 1930, Shen taught at Wuhan University. After his father died, he returned to Hunan. In 1933, Shen moved to Beijing with his wife, Zhang Zhaohe. There, he started writing his most famous work, Border Town. He also became an editor for a very important magazine called Da Gong Bao.

When the Second Sino-Japanese War started in 1937, Shen wrote less fiction. He fled Beijing and eventually settled in Kunming, where he taught at National Southwestern Associated University.

After the war ended in 1945, Shen returned to Beijing. He taught at Peking University until 1949. At that time, he was removed from his job because of political changes.

Shen Congwen was a writer who tried to stay out of politics. In the early years of the People's Republic of China, his choice not to mix art with politics led to public criticism. This caused him to have a mental breakdown. He never published another work of fiction after that. He found it impossible to write stories that fit the new government's political rules.

In 1950, he started working at the National Museum of China. He labeled old items and gave tours. He became a researcher of cultural relics, especially ancient Chinese costumes. During the Cultural Revolution, his job changed to cleaning. He was forced to scrub toilets.

Shen Congwen was finally recognized again in 1978. He left the museum to work at the Institute of History. In this later part of his life, after 1950, he wrote many academic books about Chinese art history.

In 1980-81, Shen traveled to the United States to give lectures. He mostly avoided talking about politics during his trip.

In 1983, Shen Congwen became ill with a stroke, which paralyzed his left side. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature by a Swedish expert named Göran Malmqvist.

Shen Congwen was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature twice. He was on the list of finalists in 1988. Sadly, he passed away later that year before he could receive the award. He would have been the first Chinese writer to win it.

His Family

Shen Congwen and his wife, Zhang Zhaohe, got married in 1933. Shen met Zhang when he was teaching in Shanghai in 1929. She was his student. Shen was very persistent in writing her love letters, which eventually won her and her family over.

After they married, they sometimes had disagreements and lived apart for long periods. Shen Congwen faced many difficulties during the political changes in the 1950s and 1960s. His choice to stay out of politics led to him being treated badly. This made him very sad, and he moved to a nursing home. He and Zhang Zhaohe still wrote letters to each other.

Shen Congwen passed away in 1988. When Zhang Zhaohe was going through his writings later, she realized how much he had suffered and how much she had not fully understood him.

Shen Congwen and Zhang Zhaohe had two sons, Shen Longzhu and Shen Huchu, and one daughter, Shen Chaohui.

His Death

Shen Congwen's grave in Fenghuang County

Shen Congwen died from a heart attack on May 10, 1988, in Beijing. He was 85 years old. Even though he had been recognized again a few years earlier, the news of his death was very quiet in China. A short obituary was published four days later, calling him a "famous Chinese writer." It did not mention his past political troubles or how important his work was. However, The New York Times published a detailed obituary. It described him as a "novelist, short-story writer, lyricist and passionate champion of literary and intellectual independence."

His Works

Outside of China, Shen Congwen's works are not very well known. But inside China, they are considered extremely important. His stories about specific regions, which use local traditions and characters, have been compared to the works of William Faulkner.

He was a very productive writer. Between 1933 and 1937, he wrote more than 20 books of prose and fiction. He published over 200 short stories and ten novels, among other writings. His total written work is over five million characters long! It is so varied in style that one scholar called it a "Chaos of creativity."

His early works included poems, plays, essays, and short stories. He used a mix of local language, everyday speech, classical Chinese styles, and Western writing influences. Later, he wrote several novels and novellas. After 1949, when he stopped writing fiction, he wrote many scholarly books. These books were about calligraphy, art history, museum preservation, and other topics related to Chinese art and culture.

Two main themes in his early writing were:

Problems with the military, which he saw firsthand.
The emptiness of city life, which he contrasted with the strength of common people.

His short story My Education, written in 1929, is a good example. It describes the harsh and boring life he saw while stationed with an army company in 1919.

Shen Congwen's writing style was often romantic. He wanted his novels to have a poetic feel, mixing realism with symbolism. His language was simple and had a strong local flavor. This highlighted the special charm of rural people. His rural novels often showed the difference between country life and modern city life. They also looked at how rural people lived and what happened to them as their world changed.

His stories set in western Hunan have received the most attention. In these works, he focused on the Miao people. They lived a traditional life in a frontier area, different from the main Han culture and the modern world. Shen based these stories on his imagination, his own experiences, and Miao legends told to him by his nursemaid and relatives. His novels often included many details of western Hunan folk culture, using proverbs and folk songs.

His 1929 short story Xiaoxiao is about a child bride in rural western Hunan. It was made into a film in the 1950s. A more popular film version was released in 1986. This film, called A Girl from Hunan in the U.S., was one of the first mainland Chinese films shown commercially there. It was also shown at the Cannes film festival in 1987.

Long River, written during the Second Sino-Japanese War, is considered one of his best long novels. Lamp of Spring and Black Phoenix are his most important collections of short stories.

Border Town, published in 1934, is a short novel. It tells the story of a young country girl named Cuicui growing up and finding love. She lives in a mountain village in western Hunan. The story is about a love triangle involving Cuicui and two brothers, Tianbao and Tangsong. Both brothers love Cuicui. Cuicui only loves Tangsong. Her grandfather doesn't fully understand her feelings. The brothers try to win Cuicui's heart, but one of them has an accident. This leads to misunderstandings. Tangsong leaves the village, and Cuicui's grandfather dies of sadness. Cuicui is left waiting for Tangsong to return. A film based on the book was released in 1984. It won awards for Best Director and a special mention at the Montréal World Film Festival.

Some of Shen's works also touch on religion. For example, his 1941 novel The Candle Extinguished explores finding God in life.

Shen Congwen's work as a scholarly writer, which began after 1949, has not received as much attention. However, his writings from this period are still important. His rural literature is unique. It is different from the "Enlightenment literature" of writers like Lu Xun and the "revolutionary rural literature." Shen Congwen's style is known for its beautiful and peaceful portrayal of Xiangxi (western Hunan). Five out of the thirty-two volumes of The Complete Works of Shen Congwen are dedicated to his later scholarly work.

His books were once banned in Taiwan and even burned in China. But by the 1990s, his works began to be re-released, and his importance was recognized again. In 1995, his wife, Zhang Zhaohe, published Family Letters of Congwen. This book was a collection of 170 personal letters he sent between 1930 and 1983.

Translations

By 2010, Shen Congwen's works had been translated into ten languages. Seventy English translations have been made from 44 of his stories. Several collections of his work and one book about him have been published in English.

The Chinese Earth – Stories by Shen Ts'ung-wen, translated by Jin Di, 1947
The Border Town and Other Stories, edited by Gladys Yang, 1981
Recollections of West Hunan, translated by Gladys Yang, 1982
Imperfect Paradise, translated and edited by Jeffrey Kinkley, 1995
Selected Stories by Shen Congwen, edited by Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang, 1999
Selected Short Stories of Shen Congwen, translated and edited by Jeffrey Kinkley, 2004
Border Town, translated by Jeffrey Kinkley, 2009

Images for kids

Shen Congwen (far right) with Gu Chuan (far left) and Zhou Youguang (middle) in 1946
Shen Congwen's grave in Fenghuang County

Shen Congwen facts for kids

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