Bai Wei (白薇) was the pen name of Huang Zhang (黄彰), born in 1894 in Zixing (资兴), in the south-east of Hunan.
[1] In a revolutionary context that was turned towards national defense and patriotic discourses and writings, Bai Wei’s literary works deal with feminist themes such as the struggle for independence or sexual freedom.
Bai Wei's most outstanding plays include Lin Li (1926) and Breaking Out of the Ghost’s Tower (Da chu you ling ta (打出幽灵塔), 1928).
[2] Bai Wei was born in Zixing in a family of supporter of the late Qing Dynasty reform movement.
[4] For this reason Bai Wei did not wait her graduation to flee from the school’ guarded campus by crawling through an old sewer line.
[4] She eventually obtained a scholarship to study at Tokyo’s Women Higher Normal University where she majored in biology.
[4] Tian Han started helping Bai Wei to learn English and also introduced her to the work of Henrik Ibsen.
The play’s plot deals with a young woman who breaks free from a pre-arranged marriage and later faces the revenge of the man to whom she was engaged.
In 1926, Bai Wei gave up a scholarship that would have enabled her to continue her studies and returned to China to join the Northern Expedition led by the Kuomintang.
[3] After the failure of the revolution in 1927, Bai Wei went back to Shanghai and married the poet yang sao (杨; 骚).
[4] Compared to her previous publications, the play is testament to an effort to represent society in a realistic way even though the romantic style is still prevalent.
[5] The novel, edited by Luxun and Yu Dafu, and published in Torrents, explores the parallelism between women’s oppression and the national crises.
[5] Along with Lu xun, Yu Dafu, and Tian Han she signed the declaration of the League of the Freedom Movement in china.
Bai Wei documented her personal romance and disillusionment of ten years relationship with Yang Sao in her 900 pages novel A Tragic Life (Beiju shengya).
In the novel, through a fictional character yet very self- reflective on her life, Bai Wei narrates her own struggle with the venereal disease she contracted and her self-destructive relationship.
[2] Although Bai Wei refused the idea of women’s subordination and the notion of self sacrifice according to Confucian values, she found herself entrapped and helpless in her relationship.
The politicization of private domestic life that Bai Wei suggests through her novel goes against the writings of national defense in the context of war, which consequently evinced the female condition theme in literature.
The readers were so touched that an open letter asking for donations to help Bai Wei pay her hospital costs was thereafter released.
[2] Following the Japanese occupation in Beijing, Bai Wei moved to Wuhan in 1938 and became active in the National Resistance Association of literary and art workers.
Some of her plays in the 1920s, including Linli and Dachu Youlingta were highly appreciated which allowed her to be regarded as one of the most influential modern Chinese women playwrights by a number of critics.
David Wang Der-Wei in a review wrote : “with contrived plot, hysterical characterization and convoluted rhetoric, Bai Wei’s style has often been regarded as a failed attempt to grasp the real.“[4] Her plays were criticized for their lengthy monologues and their abstract stage directions, making the play unadapted to stage.
[4] A statue of Bai Wei was raised over her grave and book-shaped culture engraved with quotations of her writing decorates her sepulcher.