Ting-Xing Ye facts for kids

Ting-Xing Ye (born 1952) is a Chinese-Canadian author of young adult novels, as well as Leaf In A Bitter Wind, a best-selling autobiographical account of her life in Maoist China.

Biography

Ye was born in Shanghai, China, in 1952, the fourth of five children. Her parents were a factory owner and his wife. Ye's parents died when she was a small child, leaving Ye and her four siblings in the care of her Great-Aunt. During the Cultural Revolution, Ye and her family were condemned as having "bad blood" and persecuted by the Communist regime, because their father had been a boss in a factory. At sixteen, like millions of other young Chinese men and women, Ye was exiled to a prison farm to "learn from the peasants" and be "reformed" by hard labor. On the farm, Ye was persecuted and suffered torture at the hands of her leaders.

Ye spent six years laboring on the prison farm, before being admitted to Beijing University. She took a degree in English Literature, then began a seven-year career as English interpreter for the national government in Shanghai. During that time she met her future husband, Canadian writer and educator William E. Bell who taught English at the Foreign Affairs College in Beijing. Ye came to Canada in 1987. She published her autobiography, detailing her life in Mao's China, in 1997. She published her first picture book in 1998. Ye also writes Young Adult fiction and non-fiction.

Selected works

• Leaf In A Bitter Wind, autobiographical memoir, 1997
• Three Monks, No Water, illustrated by Harvey Chan, 1997
• Weighing The Elephant, illustrated by Suzanne Langlois, 1998
• Share The Sky, illustrated by Suzanne Langlois, 1999
• White Lily, a chapter book, 2000
• Throwaway Daughter, a Young Adult novel, 2003
• My Name is Number Four, Young Adult non-fiction, 2007
• Mountain Girl, River Girl, a Young Adult novel, 2008

See also

• Scar literature
• Cultural Revolution
• Jung Chang