Dymia Hsiung
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Dymia Hsiung | |
|---|---|
.jpg) | |
| Born | Cai Daimei 1905 |
| Died | 1987 (aged 81–82) |
| Resting place | Hampstead Cemetery |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Known for | Being the first Chinese woman to publish a full-length work in Britain. |
| Notable work | Flowering Exile: An Autobiographical Excursion |
| Spouse | Hsiung Shih-I (m. 1923) |
Dymia Hsiung (Cai Daimei; 1905–1987) was a Chinese writer, and the first Chinese woman to publish a full-length work in Britain.[1][2] During the 1930s and 1940s, she and her husband, playwright Hsiung Shih-I, were well known throughout the country.[3]
Flowering Exile
In England, the Hsiungs moved in a distinguished literary milieu.[2] Their circle, including fellow writers Chiang Yee and Xiao Qian, has been described as a "Chinese Bloomsbury".[4]
Hsiung's fictional autobiography, Flowering Exile: An Autobiographical Excursion, was published in 1952, and was the first full-length work of either fiction or autobiography published by a Chinese woman in Britain.[2][1] Originally written in Chinese, it was translated by Hsiung's husband, Shih-I.[1] The book told the story of the Hsiungs' life in Britain between the late 1930s to the early 1950s.[5] Though press at the time criticized Flowering Exile as "'prosaic' when compared to other contemporary tales of a ‘China of legend’ that captured ‘the strangeness and the charm of that fabled land’", Diana Yeh has noted that though:
Flowering Exile remained firmly within the middle-class sphere... as an account of Chinese family life in Britain, it also transgressed existing literary boundaries.[2]
In the same year, Hsiung contributed two essays in Chinese to Tienfeng Monthly.[1]