Because of the political unrest of the time, her family moved frequently, finally settling in Chongqing.
[1] She then worked as a translator at a radio station but was released in 1963 due to illness.
[4] Shen began writing in the 1970s, producing the novel The Eternal Spring (Yongyuan shi chuntian).
Her story At Middle Age (Ren dao zhongnian) (1980)[4] won a literary award and was made into a movie, catapulting her into the spotlight.
[1] In 1983, she wrote the essay Novels strangled in the cradle: My Senseless Literary Battles, which described her difficulties as a writer living through radical shifts in her society's ideology.