Pa Chin (Ba Jin) was the pen name of the Chinese author Li Fei-kan (born 1904). An idealist of humanitarian passion and revolutionary fervor, he was one of China's most prolific and beloved novelists of the 1930s and 1940s. Born into a large,...

(b. 1904), popular Chinese writer. Ba Jin (Li Feigan), who has written numerous works in a variety of genres, is one of the most popular Chinese writers of the twentieth century. From the early 1950s until the 1980s, he suffered sometimes vicious...

Li Yaotang (traditional Chinese: 李堯棠; simplified Chinese: 李尧棠; pinyin: Lǐ Yáotáng; Wade-Giles: Li Yaot'ang, November 25 1904 – October 17 2005), courtesy name Feigan (芾甘), is considered to be one of the most important and...

Ba Jin, 100, one of China's most revered Communist-era writers who attacked the evils of the prerevolutionary era in novels, short stories and essays, died Oct. 17 in Shanghai. He had cancer. Best known for his 1931 novel "Family," the story of a...

At long last, hip-hop deigns to recognize Asian America JIN The Rest Is Histoiy Virgin/Ruff Ryders Y'ALL WANNA BE CHINESE When Wyclef Jean and 22-year-old Chinese American rapper Jin tha MC chose "Learn Chinese" as their first joint from...

With little idea of what a novel should be, but himself full of grievances, Pa Chin sought [in his first novel Destruction] to picture an unjust society and preach its destruction. Clumsily, he presents his vision of a corrupt society…. (p. 43) The novel has many flaws. Pa Chin did not plan it as a coherent whole; instead he worked piecemeal, stringing together memories of his past and ideas obtained from what he had heard from friends. The effect, not surprisingly, is that in almost every chapter th...

More than any other modern Chinese writer, Pa Chin throughout his career has been the spokesman for youth. He wrote for youth and about youth, mainly about the young intellectuals. Pa Chin's works present a composite portrait of the young men of China in a transitional period, a counterpart of the portrait of Western young men in nineteenth-century European literature. When describing his young contemporaries, Pa Chin portrays a variety of types, including those who live according to the traditional ...

[The great change in my writing] dates back to the movement launched by all our people to resist U.S. aggression and aid Korea at the end of 1950…. (p. 85) Life is not an affair of make-believe…. Nor can you counterfeit emotion. The struggles on the Korean front were so fierce that people felt strongly and knew exactly what they loved and hated. Living among new men of this kind, I could not fail to be influenced and inspired by them. That is why even today, eleven years later, I still remembe...