Song Youmei was a Beijing novelist of the late Qing and early Republican period. Public information about him is limited, and many details of his life remain unverifiable. He wrote the novel Xiao E in the Beijing vernacular, which gives this work a distinctive place among Beijing colloquial novels of the period. By using the spoken language of Beijing, Song Youmei depicted everyday urban life and human relations, lending the work a strong local color and a vivid sense of lived experience. Xiao E takes the lower strata of city life as its subject; its language is plain and lively, and its characters speak with convincing individuality. The novel reflects the cityscape and social manners of Beijing at the time, and shows the author's self-conscious use of vernacular narrative and dialect writing. At a time when classical Chinese still held orthodox status while vernacular fiction was gradually flourishing, such writing helped preserve and demonstrate the literary expressive capacity of the Beijing dialect. Because sources are limited, his birth and death dates, native place, associates, and the full range of his writing still await further research; at present the main basis for study is the single work Xiao E.
