Her works have been translated into English, German and French, and studied as zhiqing (educated youth), xungen (roots-searching), Haipai (Shanghai style), and dushi (urban, cosmopolitan) literature.
In the same year, her first reputed work -- "And the Rain Patters On" won the Beijing Literature Prize, which started her fictionalized self—Wenwen (雯雯) series stories.
There she met writer Chen Yingzhen, a social activist and Chinese nationalist from Taiwan, whose humanistic worldview and encouragement strongly influenced her.
In her first major work after the trip, the award-winning novella Baotown (1985), Wang focused on the culture of rural China, drawing from her own experience.
The benevolent child protagonist is contrasted with selfish, prejudicial, cruel and close-minded adult villagers, and Ying Hong remarked that Wang used "words that carry not the least hint of subjectivity she casually tosses forth a whole string of 'slices of life'.
[8]" In 1996, Wang's most famous novel, The Song of Everlasting Sorrow, traces the life story of a young Shanghainese girl from the 1940s all the way till her death after the Cultural Revolution.
The novel made Wang's writing reached its peak,[1] and won the most prestigious Mao Dun Literary Prize in 2000 in China.
In the story, the protagonist Wang Qiyao "is a metaphor for Shanghai: she maintains her pride and her manners, despite her misery under communist rule.
In 1996 Wang co-wrote the period film Temptress Moon with director Chen Kaige and Shu Kei.
[9] Wang likes to combine history with current facts to create, and integrate historical culture into the narrative of the novel.
From "Song of Everlasting Regret" to "Kao Gong Ji", she reflects the changes in society and the times through the description of characters.
Her world is a gallery of humans, in which you encounter China, the world, and the river of life that is enduring and sublime, yielding yet constantly invigorated ... She does not write about ordinary people in a general sense; she writes about laborers, and the daily lives of those laborers, regarding their love, fear, life, and death.