Wen Shaoxian

Biography

Wen was born in Hong Kong in an intellectual family. His father was a schoolmaster all his life. When Hong Kong was occupied by the Japanese invaders in 1941, his family had to flee Hong Kong and go back to their ancestral home in Qingyuan County, Guangdong Province, where his mother died of typhoid fever some time later. In the several years that followed, the family led a poor and unstable life there. After the war, Wen and his elder brother came back to Hong Kong to live with their grandmother who was the chief cook of an English taipan family. In 1954, he was admitted to Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China, majoring in English language and literature. Upon his graduation in 1958, he was assigned to do odd jobs in a remote mountainous area in Guangxi Province, as he was suspected as a spy sent by the US and Taiwan espionage agency from Hong Kong. He was transferred to the Department of Foreign Languages of Guangxi University in 1961. He had successively held the posts of assistant, lecturer and deputy director of the English teaching and researching section there. During the Cultural Revolution, he was sent to some very poor and backward mountainous areas to do punitive labor five times, each time half a year. His health was thus seriously ruined. In the latter half of 1977 he was proved innocent of espionage, and consequently he was allowed to come back to Hong Kong in 1978.

After he returned to Hong Kong, Wen had served successively as translator, translation copy editor and chief editor in a number of established translation or publishing companies. The number of books he translated and copy-edited amounted to over one hundred. He has been engaged in the study of Chinese-English contrastive grammar and translation for more than three decades. So far he has published nine academic books and a number of theses in this connection. Besides, he has held the post of honorary professor at Sias International University affiliated to Zhengzhou University in Henan Province, China since 2001.

Wen has been engaged in literary work for more than half a century. His literary works include ten novels, three collections of short stories and two biographies. His short stories, characterized by their "unexpected ending," were well received by the readers both in Hong Kong and in mainland China. His New Immigrants, a collection of short stories published in Beijing in 1987, was a best seller in the mainland. Wen's novel Fragrant Port trilogy was published in Beijing in 2000 by the Writers Publishing House, one of the two top literary publishing institutions in China. The Literary Gazette, a very famous literary critical publication in Beijing, regarded it as "a masterpiece faithfully reflecting the vicissitudes of fortune Hong Kong had experienced over the past one hundred years." Of his ten novels, nine have been translated into English,of which the author translated eight and copied-edited the other one. They were published in e-book edition by Everflow Publications in Hong Kong in March and May 2011 respectively and are distributed and sold by Amazon Digital Services, USA.

Wen had spent fifteen years in writing his Fruitless Flowers, a novel series. It consists of five books which were published in Hong Kong in 1987 and 1992 successively. It brings to light for the first time in the form of literature the complete process of all the major political movements waged by Mao Zedong during his 27-year rule over China, along with one tragic story after another taking place during that period. Professor Yuan Liangjun, research fellow with the Institute of Literature under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, wrote in his work 《香港小說流派史》(History of Different Schools of Fiction in Hong Kong), "Fruitless Flowers is the only novel series so far portraying the ultra-Left errors in China during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. With its grand boldness of vision and very true-to-life settings, the novel series profoundly reflects the tragic history of that period." Tung Rui, a well-known writer in Hong Kong and overseas, said in his article 《溫紹賢系列長篇的成功》 (Wen Shaoxian's Novel Series Is a Success)(published in Literary Free Talk, a very well-known literary review magazine in China, in its issue 2, 1992): "Fruitless Flowers novel series by Wen Shaoxian, has a great and inestimable significance... Fruitless Flowers novel series is a literary work with an epical structure. It serves as a telling witness to the part of tragic history in China. Its value of existence allows of no doubt no matter what its gain or loss would be… Its literary value is sure to coexist with history." Under the new title of Red Memories pentalogy, its one volume revised edition was published in Hong Kong in 2008. Soon it was permanently collected as a rare book by the National Museum of Modern Chinese Literature in Beijing, the most authoritative modern Chinese literature institution in China.