Sang Ye

Background

Sang Ye was born in 1955 in the People's Republic of China.

Education

Sang Ye was at secondary school in 1966 when the Cultural Revolution broke out. He missed university entry in 1977, the first intake after the Cultural Revolution, but got into a short-term mathematics course at Beijing Normal University in 1978.

Career

In 1971 Sang Ye went to work as an apprentice at an electrical engineering plant in the region outside Peking, near the thirteen Ming tombs, where heavy industry is concentrated: a chemical weapons plant, a nuclear power plant, a steel mill. Designed in the Soviet Union with thick walls suitable for Siberia, the plant-inspired his first story, 'The Fourteenth Tomb'. He immigrated to Hong Kong, and eventually, the United States. By 1980, his journalism had developed and he was doing regular features for the Hong Kong and overseas Chinese press. There was research work for the newly established Madame Sun Yat Sen Museum and on some Peking local history projects. Prepared to live by freelance writing, Sang Ye was able to cut himself free from many of the formal structures of Chinese society.

In 1983 the Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign was launched, attacking, among other things, liberal, westernizing and humanistic tendencies in literature. The novelist Zhang Xinxin, whose fiction had been criticized, was looking for a way of writing that would engage with the realities of contemporary Chinese life and be publishable at the same time. Influenced by Studs Terkel's works of oral history, she and Sang Ye decided to collaborate on a series of a hundred or more interviews, which started appearing in December 1984 and was published in book form in Chinese, to great acclaim, in 1986. Beijingren (published in English as Chinese Lives: An Oral History of Contemporary China, 1987) sets out to explore who and what the Chinese are today.

In 1987 he traveled all over Australia, by pushbike from Adeleine to Darwin, by coach from Brisbane to Cooktown, talking to many Australians - from Gough Whitlam, Chairman of the Australia-China Council, to an eighty-eight-year-old Australian-born Chinese who had gone to Shanghai to work for the British-run Customs and later returned to live in Queensland. In Canberra he met his wife Sue, a sixth-generation Australian, who has some Chinese in her ancestry too. The contrasts between traveling with no official escort through Australia and travel in China - especially the journey along the Yellow River - set Sang Ye thinking again about who and what the Chinese are. By the time he got back to Peking in 1988, joined by Sue and living in his mother's flat, he had become obsessed with collecting Cultural Revolution materials.

Achievements

• Sang Ye is best known for his book Chinese Lives: An Oral History of Contemporary China. This work received high praise from critics and readers.

Works

More photos

• book

  • China Candid: The People on the People's Republic

    (Leading Chinese journalist Sang Ye follows his successful...)

    2006
  • Chinese Lives: An Oral History of Contemporary China

    (Interviews with more than sixty people - from booksellers...)

    1987
  • The Finish Line: A Long March Through China and Australia 1994
  • The Year the Dragon Came 1996
  • La Danza Dei Vestiti 2007

Connections

Sang Ye is married and has a daughter.

colleague:

Zhang Xinxin

References

• Contemporary Authors
  1998
• Chinese Whispers: Cultural Essays This is a literary journey of an Australian writer's encounter with the culture and people of China, particularly its young writers and artists, and of the evolving influence of China on the writer's own work and life.
  1995