Lie Loan Lian Nio

Little is known about Lie Loan Lian Nio, including her birthplace, birth date or educational background.

[1] She was most likely a Peranakan (assimilated, Malay-speaking Chinese) woman born at around the start of the twentieth century.

[2] At that time women in the Dutch East Indies had published poetry and translations of novels but there were not yet any original novels published by women; some of her translator contemporaries include Nyonya The Tiang Ek, Chen Hiang Niang, Nona Phoa Gin Hian and Tan Poen Bhik Sio Tjia, as well as male translators of Chinese novels such as Lie Sim Djwe.

[3][4] These translators wrote for the booming Malay-language literary market aimed at Peranakan Chinese who had been born in the Indies but still had ties to China; the topic of the works were historical dramas, morality tales, detective stories, cloak-and-dagger or Wuxia.

This first known translation by Lie Loan Lian Nio was of a Chinese novel "The Girl who Picks the Mulberry Leaves" by Wei Shi, a story about ill-fated lovers who end up dying by suicide; the work was popular and controversial in China and was adapted into a film in 1924.