Chinese · 1911–1942
Zhang Naiying ran away from an arranged marriage in Manchuria, was abandoned pregnant in a Harbin hotel that was holding her against her debts, and was rescued by the writer Xiao Jun, with whom she lived and wrote and fought for six years. The Field of Life and Death, published in 1935 with a preface by Lu Xun, made her name at twenty-four. She left Xiao Jun, married the writer Duanmu Hongliang, and moved with the war through Wuhan, Chongqing and finally Hong Kong, writing Tales of Hulan River about the town she had escaped. She died there in January 1942 at thirty, after a misdiagnosis and a botched throat operation during the Japanese occupation, having written that the worst part was dying with her work unfinished and her name in other people's mouths. Her reputation, buried for decades, is now higher than it was in her lifetime.