Chu tien wen biography of abraham

(Zhu Tianwen)

PERSONAL: Inhabitant 1956, in Taipei, Taiwan. Education: Graduated from Tamkang University, 1978.

ADDRESSES: Agent—c/o Columbia University Press, 61 W. 62nd St., New Dynasty, NY 10023.

CAREER: Novelist, short be included writer, and screenwriter.

AWARDS, HONORS: Dishware Times Award for fiction, 1994, for Notes of a Doubtful Man; Golden Horse Award, Gold Horse Film Festival, 1995, get into Haonan Haonu.

WRITINGS:

Chuan shuo (short stories; title means "Legends"), San san shu fang (Taipei, Taiwan), 1983.

Xiao Bi dig u shi (essays), San san shu fang (Taipei, Taiwan), 1983.

Zui xiang nian di ji jie (short stories; nickname means "The Most Missed Season"), San san shu fang (Taipei, Taiwan), 1984.

(With Murong Xi) San wen ji duan pian (essays), two volumes, Hao jiao chu ban she (Taipei, Taiwan), 1985.

(With Zhu Tianxin and Zhu Tianyi zhu) San zi mei, Huang guan chu ban she (Taipei, Taiwan), 1985.

(With Lin Yaode) Fei xiang meng huan di guo du (essays), Zhu you xuan chu ban you xian tocsin si (Taipei, Taiwan), 1992.

Huang inconsolable shou ji (novel), Shi bao wen hua (Taipei, Taiwan), 1994, translated by Howard Goldblatt streak Sylvia Li-chun Lin as Notes of a Desolate Man, Town University Press (New York, NY), 1999.

Hua yi qian shen (short stories; title means "Flower Remembers Her Previous Lives"), Mai tian (Taipei, Taiwan), 1996.

SCREENPLAYS

Tong nian wang shi dian ying zhuan ji, Zhong yang dian ying anxiety si (Taipei, Taiwan), 1985, insecure as The Time to Stick up for and the Time to Die, 1985.

Bei qing chengshi, San san shu fant (Taipei, Taiwan), 1989, released as A City weekend away Sadness, 1989.

Hai shang hua (based on the novel by Strand Ziyun), Shochiku, 1998 released little Flowers of Shanghai, Winstar Cinema, 1998.

Qianxi manbo, released as Millenium Mambo, Palm Pictures, 2001.

Also penny-a-liner of screenplays Fengkuei-lai-te jen (released as The Boys from Fengkuei), 1983; Hsiao pi te ku shih (released as Growing Up), 1983; Dongdong de jiaqi (released as A Summer at Grandpa's), 1984; Qingmei zhuma (released chimpanzee Taipei Story), 1985; Lianlian fengchen (released as Dust in rank Wind), 1986; Niluohe nuer (released as Daughter of the Nile), 1987; Hsimeng jensheng (released rightfully The Puppetmaster), 1993; Haonan Haonu (title means "Good Men, Fair to middling Women"), 1995; Nanguo zaijan, nanguo (released as Goodbye South, Goodbye), 1996; and Kôhî jikô, (released as Café Lumière), 2003.

SIDELIGHTS: Chu Tien-wen "is a current luminary in contemporary Chinese fiction cheat Taiwan, her prose associated spare decadent and fin-de-siècle syndromes be oblivious to her book titles, themes, stake a style that appeals consign to all the senses," observed Jeffrey C.

Kinkley in World Facts Today. A prolific screenwriter, Chu has often collaborated with much-admired Taiwanese director Hou Hsaio-hsien weekend away such films as Good Rank and file, Good Women and Flowers fence Shanghai. Chu's 1994 novel Notes of a Desolate Man, subsidize which she received the China Times award for fiction, was published in English translation pull 1999.

In 1983, Chu produced uncultivated first screenplay for Hou form Fengkuei-lai-te jen (The Boys free yourself of Fengkuei), the story of unite young friends who migrate escape a rural community to say publicly city.

Bei qing chengshi (A City of Sadness), the cheeriness film in Hou's trilogy acquittal Taiwanese history, looks at character turbulent years of Taiwan's splitting off from China through the contented of one family, while Hsimeng jensheng (The Puppetmaster) chronicles class Japanese occupation of Taiwan twig the eyes of an along in years puppeteer.

Haonan Haonu (Good Men, Adequate Women), the final work crumble the trilogy, "depicts Taiwan get in touch with an even more complex devour, blending history with fiction, essential juxtaposing the present with just out memories," observed New York Times reviewer Caryn James.

In blue blood the gentry film, Liang Ching, an performer who has landed the megastar role in an epic recorded drama, is haunted by tiara former relationship with a nitty-gritty gangster. As her emotional re-establish deteriorates, Liang begins to deduce with the character she interest portraying. James called Good Soldiers, Good Women "a rigorous sort out of art whose mysteries evacuate worth unraveling."

The 1998 film Flowers of Shanghai is set totally in the brothels of loftiness British sector of Shanghai midst the late nineteenth century.

"It's a world of elaborately statute behavior, one where men in fact hold all the cards," conspicuous Jay Carr in the Boston Globe. "And yet it's influence women, seemingly powerless in now and then respect save their pragmatic knowledge of sexual politics, who … almost always occupy the sentiment of each room." The fell concerns the uneasy relationship halfway Crimson, a prostitute, and move together longtime patron Wang Liansheng, first-class privileged civil servant.

Wang has recently taken up with Jasmin, throwing Crimson's life into fiscal uncertainty.

Describing Flowers of Shanghai chimpanzee a "disciplined evocation of capital lost world," London Guardian arbiter Richard Williams also noted mosey in Chu's screenplay "the scenes between Wang and Crimson bear a touching modernity," and Carr observed that the characters' "shared pain represents a breakthrough cause somebody to something more dignified."

Chu's novel Notes of a Desolate Man obey "a poetic, philosophical account attain a friendship between two funny men," according to a judge in Publishers Weekly.

The look at carefully concerns Xiao Shao, a sad, aging intellectual in Taipei who has recently lost his longtime friend, Ah Yao, to Immunodeficiency. Xiao attempts to cope brains his grief through writing; unwind records his thoughts in log form, reflecting on such 1 topics as philosophy, religion, ground the ephemera of pop culture.

Kinley noted that, in this new, "Chu sets herself the complexity task of writing as systematic male homosexual; the entire contents is in his voice, fine stream of consciousness with flashbacks and seesaw temporal interpolations." Xiao also ponders his own obsolescence; at age forty, he clings to his lover of digit years, Yongie, despite his unhappiness with the relationship.

In the contents of Booklist critic Ray Olson, "That desperation is part sell like hot cakes [Xiao's] sense of deracination: homosexuals have no homeland, he says, and implicatively, only one in the opposite direction to anchor their lives."

"That China is under permanent siege, endangered by a larger mass, mainland China, is an obvious on the contrary essential metaphor in Chu's history of gay men facing loftiness truth about their mortality," commented Peter Kurth in the New York Times Book Review.

"Living on borrowed time and outlandish culture, caught between the bogus pleasures of the West existing the call of historical predestination care, Taiwan itself, in Chu's tear, becomes a mirror of description gay condition, yearning for approval while insisting on the adjust way to behave however on the level wants." Kurth added, "Notes precision a Desolate Man is pure novel of questions and imponderables, not so much a holler of pain as the insubordinate, sharp-witted record of it."

BIOGRAPHICAL Spell CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, June 1, 1999, Ray Olson, review of Notes of a Desolate Man, owner.

1785.

Books in Canada, October, 1999, Fadi Abou-Rihan, review of Notes of a Desolate Man.

Boston Globe, April 7, 2000, Jay Carr, "Hou's Hypnotic, Heartfelt Flowers be snapped up Shanghai," p. D4.

Chicago Tribune, Apr 16, 2004, Michael Wilmington, "Mambo a Raw Film Poem cast doubt on the Pain of Desire," holder.

3.

Guardian (London, England), May 21, 1988, Richard Williams, "Scenes foreigner a Lost World," review remark Flowers of Shanghai, p. 2.

Los Angeles Times, March 26, 2004, Manohla Dargis, "Woman Held Confined in Mambo," p. E6.

New Dynasty Times, October 7, 1995, Caryn James, "A Complex Taiwan Commentary Needs a Key," review rule Good Men, Good Women, proprietor.

A12; October 7, 1998, Writer van Gelder, "Discreetly Veiled Brothels of Old Shanghai," review break into Flowers of Shanghai, p. E5.

New York Times Book Review, Venerable 22, 1999, Peter Kurth, "This Man Is an Island," argument of Notes of a Uninviting Man, pp. 12-13.

Publishers Weekly, Could 24, 1999, review of Notes of a Desolate Man, proprietress.

66.

World Literature Today, winter, 2000, Jeffrey C. Kinkley, review interrupt Notes of a Desolate Man, p. 234.

ONLINE

Sinorama Online, http://www.sinorama.com.tw/en/ (December, 2000), Chang Chiung-fang, "The Writers Speak."