An Interview with Zhu Hong

Abstract

THIS ISSUE contains a story by mainland Chinese writer Li Guowen, a man writing about women's issues with a sensibility that appealed to the translator. Below we offer an interview with that translator, Zhu Hong, whose experiences as a Chinese intellectual under both old and new systems have taken her from a convent school to a pig farm, and from Beijing to Britain to Harvard Square. The interview was conducted on December 27, 1993, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, by Judy Polumbaum. Zhu Hong had turned sixty in November, but looked scarcely over forty, and was living like a college student in an efficiency apartment not far from Harvard Yard. Zhu Hong divides her mind and her time among several worlds? 19th-century England, China under Communism, and academia in present day America. She is probably mainland China's foremost expert on Victorian literature, and at an age when most scholars contemplate retire ment, she is emerging as an imaginative critic and gifted translator of contemporary Chinese literature, especially writing by and about Chinese women. A succession of fellowship opportunities brought her to the United States, and she now teaches courses on contemporary Chinese literature at Boston University. She could have continued to teach year-round, but planned to return to China in the summer of 1994, and henceforth divide her time between China and the U.S.