The Rose Gate

The Rose Gate is Tie Ning's first novel. Completed in 1988 and first published by Writers Publishing House in 1989, it is regarded as the work in which she turned from fresh, pure writing toward a deeper, weightier style. Centering on the lives and fates of three generations of women in the Zhuang family, the novel focuses on the oldest and the youngest: Si Yiweng and her granddaughter Su Mei. Si Yiweng longs all her life to be accepted—first seeking acceptance in a traditional family, later seeking acceptance from society and her era—and pays a heavy price for it, even turning those close to her into props for her accommodation to the times; yet her hard, unyielding personal traits leave her out of place in every situation. Told through a girl's bewildered passage through the gates of life in a noisy, chaotic era, the novel unfolds more than half a century of changing female fate and touches on female consciousness, the relationship between female subjectivity and social development, and women's roles in family and society. With a large cast, an expansive structure, and sharp language, it is an important work of contemporary literature that reflects on history and confronts human nature, and many scholars regard it as a landmark of Chinese women's writing. This entry follows the 2020 People's Literature Publishing House edition: paperback; in common printings, 572 pages and about 364,000 Chinese characters.