Pai Hsien-yung

Pai Hsien-yung was born in Guilin, Guangxi, in 1937. He is of Hui ethnicity and the son of the Kuomintang general Bai Chongxi. After graduating from the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature at National Taiwan University, he went to the United States and received an MFA in creative writing from the University of Iowa. He taught for many years at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and retired in 1994. His fiction and essays, notably Taipei People, Crystal Boys, and The Lost Youth, often draw on individual fates amid historical change and on the lives of marginalized groups. His style is delicate and restrained, combining a sense of era with human depth. Beyond fiction, he has long devoted himself to promoting and explaining Dream of the Red Chamber and to the young-lovers' edition of The Peony Pavilion. The collection includes thirteen of his works, spanning social fiction, literary appreciation, essays, and biography, showing a writing life that crosses fiction and commentary and remains concerned with cultural inheritance and human destiny.