Gao Xinjiang
(b. 1940), Chinese writer and Nobel Laureate. Gao Xinjiang, the first Chineselanguage writer awarded the Nobel Prize in literature, in 2000, was born in 1940 in Ganzhou, Jiangxi Province, China, and grew up in a family that encouraged his interest in art, literature, and music. He studied French literature at the Beijing Foreign Language Institute from 1957 to 1962 and worked after graduation as a French translator for a bookstore.
During the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), along with numerous other intellectuals in China, he had to destroy all his writing and go to the countryside for "rehabilitation." After the Cultural Revolution, however, he emerged on the literary scene as an important writer for his short fiction, plays, novels, and literary criticism. His essay entitled "Preliminary Exploration into the Techniques of Modern Fiction" contributed to the demolishing of "socialist realism," the then-regnant method of literary representation under Mao Zedong (1893–1976). But on the whole, Gao's voice was heard in China not so much for his fiction or literary criticism as for his works in such experimental plays as Bus Stop, a work highly reminiscent of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot.
After he left China to settle in Paris in 1987, Gao supported himself mainly by painting. Meanwhile, he continued to write his novels and plays, which gradually gained recognition in France and Australia, though remaining less studied in Britain and the United States. His winning the Nobel Prize "for an oeuvre of universal validity, bitter insights and linguistic ingenuity," as the Swedish Academy stated, and his claim in his Nobel speech that literature is an apolitical enterprise, were not received without a sense of irony, since his selection and his award of the prize are felt by many to be unavoidably a political statement.
Further Reading
Gao Xingjian. (1999) The Other Shore: Plays by Gao Xingjian. Trans. by Gilbert C. F. Fong. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press.
——. (2000) Soul Mountain. Trans. by Mabel Lee. New York: HarperCollins.
Tam Kwok-kan, ed. (2001) Soul of Chaos: Critical Perspec-tives on Gao Xingjian. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press.
Zhao, Henry Y. H. (2000) Towards a Modern Zen Theatre: Gao Xingjian and Chinese Theatre Experimentalism. London: School of Oriental and African Studies.
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