Xiao Hong

Born Zhang Naiying to a landowning family in Heilongjiang, she fled an arranged marriage as a young woman and lived for years in poverty, at one point trapped and pregnant in a besieged hotel room before the writer Xiao Jun helped her escape. The two became partners and, briefly, a literary pair in Shanghai's leftist circles.

The Field of Life and Death, her 1935 novel of birth, toil, and death in a Manchurian village under Japanese occupation, appeared with a preface by Lu Xun, who championed her as one of the era's most original talents; she later wrote the autobiographical Tales of Hulan River, recalling her own childhood in luminous, fragmented vignettes.

Ill health, wartime dislocation, and a botched hospital operation compounded by the Japanese assault on Hong Kong killed her there in 1942, not yet thirty-one.